While I was away from blogging and writing these past few weeks (on a secret project, if you must know), somebody put to me that diversity is a bane.
Sure, all the big corporations are trying to look good these days by hiring based on “diversity” or running workshops in the office on “diversity”. But just look around you — everybody is fighting everybody else. The Russians are fighting the Ukrainians, the Buddhists are fighting the Rohingyas, the Hindus are fighting the Muslims, the Han are fighting the Uyghurs, and the Sunnis are fighting the Shias (although to be fair, the Sunnis are also fighting the Sunnis).
If everybody came from the same background — or if you only lived alongside people who look like you, pray like you, speak like you and think like you — wouldn’t war just be all that much less likely?
It’s a compelling thought. There’s an obscure notion in political science (although most people are not brave enough to air it publicly) that the secret to Scandinavia’s success is that they’re all tiny countries of 5 million people each — all as homogeneous as they come. Whatever diversity there was, was split across different countries, but on the face of it, there is very little that would make the Danes culturally antagonistic to the Norwegians (although I must point out that for several years, the Danes actually ruled the Norwegians, until the latter revolted and won independence).
Compare that to the raucous cacophony of wars that rage around the world today. Religious sects and ethnicities in particular are very easy to mobilise into war, because they almost viscerally — and oftentimes, historically — hate each other. Even in peaceful old Scandinavia, for instance, the unprecedented rise of the neo-Nazi far-right was preceded — not coincidentally — by the arrival of supposedly “large numbers” of Muslim and Chinese refugees and immigrants.
Hell, many Europeans have literally spelt out that they are more willing to help the Ukrainians than the Syrians or Yemenis because they are “European people with blue eyes and blond hair.” (Although, before you call them “racist”, you should ask yourselves whether you feel an inexplicable affinity for people of your own “kind” — your race, nationality, religion or whatever else.)
There is a flip side to this tribalistic affinity, though: humans have an impressive capacity to divide themselves, no matter how similar they are.
In Somalia, for instance, a civil war has raged on and off for decades between people who are largely homogeneous — belong to the same race, speak the same language, and follow the same religion. But it seems that when resources are scarce and economic opportunities non-existent, people will find innovative ways to organise themselves and increase their bargaining power — even if that means something as trivial as simply lining up behind rival businessmen.
In fact, insofar as getting rid of tribalism (and thereby reducing the scope for war) is concerned, diversity weirdly seems like the way to go.
One of my favourite examples is, unsurprisingly, Singapore. Back in the 1960s, before that city-state became the paragon of economic excellence, it was born out of a race riot between the Chinese and the Malay which seemed straight out of the India-Pakistan playbook.
Then, Lee Kuan Yew did something astoundingly crazy: He said that if you wanted to live in public housing in Singapore, your neighbour had to necessarily be from a different ethnic background.
Strangely, the gambit worked. Today, the overwhelming majority of Singaporeans live in government-mandated public housing estates under the ethnic quota system. And it’s been almost 60 years now since a major war broke out between the Chinese, Indians and the Malays.
Now, you might think that the policy only worked because Singapore is an economically progressive city-state, and that when people live next door to each other and have to do business together, they automatically become more sensitised to each other’s cultures and background. All that is true. But the thing about Lee Kuan Yew’s insane housing policy is that it makes sense even from a more cynical perspective — it makes war less likely because no single group is able to practically organise and mobilise its troops for war. That is because, quite simply, everybody is spread out and intermixed, and therefore, you are in fact more likely to interact with people from a different ethnicity than with your “own kind”.
The funny thing is that these dynamics are so sensible that they even work in the Mecca of civil war: Africa. In his brilliant book, Why We Fight (which I would strongly recommend), political economist Chris Blattman shares a few examples to show how.
In war-torn Uganda, the Ankole people and the Acholi people have been at each other’s throats for generations. Within themselves, people from the two groups share common ethnicities, languages, religions and livelihoods, thereby making the two tribes fairly homogeneous. But across identity lines, an Ankole person and an Acholi person have almost nothing in common.
Worse, they are geographically separated: the Acholi are largely located in northern Uganda, while the Ankole are found in the southwest. And since they have evolved distinct identities with little overlap, the Acholi and the Ankole also vote for different parties, prefer their own candidates, and frequently fight with each other for political control.
In southern Mali, by contrast, overlapping identities have rendered politics less polarised. The story behind this, Blattman says, goes back some 800 years to an ambitious Malian emperor — Sundiata Keita — who evidently came from the same bizarre school of social policy as Lee Kuan Yew: In order to make his different warring groups get together, Keita simply paired up people with different surnames and declared that they would henceforth be “cousins”. (A Keita, for instance, would be the “cousin” of a Coulibaly, and the two would share their own set of inside jokes.)
It seems counter-intuitive, but people actually seem more likely to fight if they were all homogeneous. Life is tough, resources are scarce and competition plenty. The very idea of forming groups is to increase bargaining power over one’s rivals — and if the pie is small enough, there will always be an incentive to form ever narrower groups based on any identity. By contrast, if you split the groups up and spread them across the land — forcing them to live enmeshed with their own rivals — the potential for war decreases significantly.
It is, of course, a different matter altogether that more diverse teams are also more productive and therefore create bigger pies for everybody to share. But that’s for another day.
I'm reminded of the old Tom Lehrer song National Brotherhood Week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vm-8eXFgqA