The ideology with no name

A few days ago Quillette published a particularly interesting article by Darel E. Paul, Professor of Political Science at Williams College. It begins with diversity.

Diversity is the reigning social and political ideal of our age. It is the public ideology of the country’s most powerful state and business institutions. To many it is the essence of American national identity and, in one of the favorite phrases of President Barack Obama, ‘who we are’ as a country.

Rather than simply a recognition of difference, diversity is a cultural, economic, and political project to both generate difference and to manage it.

To my mind a key point in Professor Paul's piece is contained in this last sentence - diversity is a cultural, economic, and political project to both generate difference and to manage it. This in turn points to a wider aspect of Professor Paul's argument about diversity - the global spread of managerialism as a social and political philosophy.

Unlike capitalism or socialism, managerialism is not a household word. Yet it should be thought of alongside these more famous -isms. Capitalism places the business entrepreneur at the center of society and emphasizes her role in social development. Socialism elevates the worker to this status and places labor at the foundation of society. Managerialism, too, is a coherent and complex account of society with a program for creating social order. Not surprisingly, it places the manager at the center of that order and assigns her the key role in producing it.

It's an interesting article, worth reading all the way through. It might be said that managerialism obviously has a name, but that is not the point. As a social and political ideology it operates under numerous aliases from diversity to social justice to feminism, anti-racism and even climate change and recycling.

Ultimately it is an ideology where all human activity must be managed. Under the guise of promoting an egalitarian ethos it ensures the survival of elites. It offers them an almost unassailable ethical and social status as managers of that same egalitarian ethos.  

As one commenter observes -

Something this excellent piece hints at is how the ideology of diversity is in fact a barely-veiled manifestation (conscious or otherwise) of the old principle “divide et impera”.