How diversity breeds conformity

Promoting ‘diversity’ is one of the primary goals of the modern mainstream media. Quotas for race, sexuality and gender are supposed to ensure that every group is ‘represented’. Yet diversity of opinion, let alone of class background or life experience, never seems to get a look in. For media elites today, diversity has been achieved when more airtime is given to transwomen, and none is granted to women who believe in biological sex. It means listening to ethnic-minority voices, except when those voices reject the woke consensus.

Josh Szeps, former ABC broadcaster and host of the Uncomfortable Conversations podcast, saw firsthand how, in mainstream TV and radio, the pursuit of diversity led inexorably to conformity. Josh was the latest guest on The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Are public broadcasters like the BBC and the ABC becoming ever-more estranged from the public?

Josh Szeps: Something has happened in the past 10 years that is specific to our time, and which I think public broadcasters could recover from. The problem is, we’ve had difficulty understanding what ‘diversity’ means. There has been a laudable attempt to make public broadcasters less stuffy, middle-aged, white and male by hiring more young women of colour. I think that’s a good thing. But I don’t think you should be able to use that to smuggle in the idea that everybody’s own ‘lived experience’ is a valid form of journalism, and that their ethnic background, gender or sexuality should be informing their reporting. That is what has happened and it’s contributing to the detachment between public broadcasters and the public.

It’s also hewing to quite a dogmatic interpretation of diversity. We would have spreadsheets on my radio show to track so-called diversity metrics – things like ethnicity, language or sexuality. We didn’t have a column for political affiliation, class, whether you went to a private or public school, or whether you came from a regional town or a city. Those things matter in reflecting a country to itself and creating a big, rambunctious town square. You might have a panel with one Sikh woman, one Muslim woman and one indigenous woman, but they’re all saying the same thing.

I had a recent conversation with the American sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, who has just written an interesting book on this point. He argues that the elites have self-selected a category of upper-middle-class people of colour to be spokespeople. In reality, these people have a lot more in common with white elites than they do with people from their own communities. And when people from genuinely disadvantaged communities express points of view at the ballot box that differ from what the elites say they should think, we disregard them. We treat them as if they have some kind of false consciousness. Almost half of Latinos in America voted for Donald Trump because they want a border wall? Elites assume that they must be mistaken, because the ‘Latinx’ correspondent at the New York Times says that Trump is a racist and hates Hispanics.

O’Neill: What does social-justice politics mean for the kind of campaigns, like women’s liberation and gay liberation, which used to be central to the left?

Szeps: It points to a larger question about universalism vs identitarianism. Initially, the left had universalist values. It believed we all deserved equal protection and deserved the same opportunities to prove what we could do.

I’m married to a man, so I think I have solid bona fides on this matter. I made a lot of enemies last year by writing an opinion piece that was critical of Pride. I asked if there was ever going to come a point when it would be more conducive to the sexual flourishing of a teenager to turn the volume down on sexual difference, rather than constantly exaggerating it. There’s no more legal discrimination against gay men and women that you can really point to. If you’re in Sydney, London or New York, what exactly are we doing at Pride parades? And does it risk actually impeding the individual flourishing of young people to insist that every urge or romantic motivation they might have towards someone of the same sex means they have to reevaluate their entire identity? Why should it mean they need to join a club that has a very certain way of speaking and thinking? And you can only become a member of that club if you’ve worn arseless chaps and straddled a giant inflatable penis up and down the street in a fabulous parade. It’s becoming cartoonish, the way we have to pledge our fealty towards particular identities.

Initially, the gay-rights movement was the most successful civil-rights movement of all time, in its speed and ferocity of success. When I was born, being gay was illegal in many places. Everywhere it was treated as deviancy or a perversion. The idea that it would be seen as legitimate, let alone legal, to marry a member of the same sex was inconceivable, even among progressive circles in Western countries.

What gay-rights activists did in the late 1960s, all the way through the 1980s and 1990s, was to universalise the gay experience. They didn’t ask your grandma to envisage what gay males do in the bedroom. They didn’t march with signs that said ‘I believe in anal sex’. They said they wanted the same rights that other people had – to rent an apartment and to get a loan without being discriminated against. To be able to visit your life partner in hospital when they’re on their deathbed, without being treated like a stranger. Eventually, they wanted the credibility that marriage provides.

Contrast that with the strategy of the most extreme trans activists. This has not been a conversation about being left alone and having the same legal rights. They demand that we morally and linguistically endorse everything about the way that they see the world. They demand that we adopt their definition of sex and gender, and to change the way we think. And if you can’t change, then you need to at least mouth Stalinist platitudes that show the trans activists have won, and spout tautologies like ‘transwomen are women’.

That’s what we’re talking about in a microcosm. The left has become far too concerned with purity tests, condescension and cancel culture, and not nearly obsessed enough with what actually achieves social and cultural change – which is winning hearts and minds, finding common ground and being bullshit-free.

Josh Szeps was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: