The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

Diversity is one of those words that means whatever the left wants it to mean, as long as we all assume that it doesn't exist and that things must change to achieve it. But diversity is antithetical to market economies and societal freedom.

Do we want the boardrooms of America to look like the nurses' lounges to look like the restaurant kitchens to look like the teachers to look like the tree trimmers to look like the programmers to look like....

In fact, "diversity" is nothing more than doublespeak for conformity. Or as Alana Newhouse writes in this long and rambling but worthwhile essay..."flatness."

Everything Is Broken

Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors.

Flatness broke everything.

The reigning aesthetic of the 20th century was modernism, which articulated in one word the values of the industrial revolution. Modernism and the Machine Age brought with them their own features: Anti-classicalism; anti-Victorianism; the power of science; the absence of filigree; an emphasis on the future over the past, and the valorization of machine production and engineering as the highest forms of human creativity. This new aesthetic soon began to transform all parts of cultural and material existence, from visual art and poetry to fashion and the built environment.

Starting in the second decade of the 1900s, certain Communists began seeing in modernism a potential advertisement for the values of a mass society of industrial workers laboring under the direction of a small group of engineers. In other words, this aesthetic—which whole swaths of the Western world were already in the process of quickly adopting—could also be the perfect delivery mechanism for their political ideology.

One hundred years later, we find ourselves in the middle of a similar cultural and political struggle.

Imagine a world without beauty and individuality, without a personal and private relationship with God, without any of the things that make us all unique.

Because that's exactly what they imagine for us all.

posted by CBD at 11:00 AM

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