By Itto and Mekiya Outini
Though routinely marketed and sold together, diversity and equity cannot coexist. Diversity is a failsafe mechanism against rapidly shifting environmental contexts, observable in every sexually reproducing species and especially pronounced in those capable of low-cost cultural evolution via memetic exchange. Equity is diversity’s antithesis: a mechanism for obscuring or even erasing the gains of diversity and increasing the fragility of the species. We must stop speaking of the two as if they are compatible. They are anything but.
Let us begin with this question: why would a primordial organism, ruled by the incentives of its genes and capable of reproducing itself from whole cloth, give up half its genetic material with each replication? This queen’s sacrifice, initiated circa two billion years ago, could only make sense if the fifty percent of the genes preserved through replication were more than two hundred percent more likely to survive into subsequent generations thanks to the new capacities derived from their allegiance with foreign genetic material. The so-called Social Darwinists, whose advocacy for eugenics and ethno-states make them odd bedfellows with he who wrote of “endless forms most beautiful,” would do well to note the prevalence of sexual reproduction and ask themselves to what this testifies, if not to the practical efficacy of diversification?
But we are not here to argue with the Social Darwinists. They lost the last round in the world-historical power struggle, and for all the damage they may do along the way, they will likely lose the next one. We are here to argue with the other ideological faction that emerged from the wreckage of the European Enlightenment, the faction whose pat claims to universality make them, if anything, more insidious than the Social Darwinists. We’re here to challenge the claim that equity, now broadly understood to mean “equality of outcome,” should ever be achieved.
For the moment, let’s set aside the familiar assertion that equity is impractical, that it would require a monumental aggregation of power to achieve, and that anyone granted even a fraction of that power would sooner show a tyrannical face than prove their benevolence by effecting a fairer distribution of resources. Let’s set aside, too, the objection to such redistribution on the grounds that it would amount, not to fairness, but to rewarding the lazy and incompetent at the expense of the most diligent and productive members of society. Let’s imagine, for the moment, that equity has somehow been achieved at zero up-front cost, and that everyone, including the former billionaires, is more or less content with the new arrangement.
Is that a world that you’d want to live in?
Probably not—but the point isn’t just that you wouldn’t want to live in that world, where you’d soon start feeling bored, and caged, and like Harrison Bergeron, ready to break from prison, tear off your handicaps, and declare yourself emperor. The point, also, is that even if you did want to live in that world, you wouldn’t be able to do so for very long. Such a world, after all, would not be built to last.
Diversification does more than raise the likelihood that any given package of genetic material will survive. In species like humans, who learn from each other, it also increases the likelihood that everyone will survive. If an individual or group develops a survival strategy that’s highly effective in a certain context, other parties will have opportunities to learn from their example before getting snuffed out. If the context changes, as contexts are wont to do, and the first two parties fall behind, they may cast about for a third, whose formerly ineffective strategies turn out to be well suited to the new occasion. To achieve equity would mean to eliminate, in one fell swoop, both the multiplicity of models available for comparison and the metrics enabling us to test their comparative efficacy. That may be all well and good as long as the world remains absolutely static, but the first new variable to emerge will promptly undercut the champions of equity, sacrificing them at the same altar where they recently sacrificed their own capacity to compare, contrast, and learn.
Those champions, in our timeline still alive and kicking, may pause on their way up the steps of the pyramid, cast back a contemptuous glance, and declare that additional factors are at work in the equation: not only unequal distributions of natural resources and chance events that impact certain parties more than others, but also the competitive monopolies that successful parties form. This compounding of happenstance by malevolent conspiracy necessitates system-wide remedies, in the form of equitable redistribution, to compensate competitors wrongfully robbed of their prizes and left to suffer and starve in the cold.
We do not deny the existence of such malevolent conspiracies. We should like to point out, though, that biodiversity is significantly higher in the tropics and decreases substantially as one makes one’s way toward the poles. At first glance, this might seem unsurprising, given that the tropics offer a relatively stable climate, an abundance of access to solar energy, and more opportunities for various forms of life to thrive, but more biodiversity also means more competition. If the costs of competition were greater than or even equal to the costs imposed by the harsher environments and less predictable weather patterns closer to the poles, one would expect a natural redistribution of biodiversity across the earth’s surface. Instead, most species cluster close to the equator. Why? Presumably, it’s simply easier to deal with other living organisms, whose incentives are knowable and whose behaviors are fundamentally predictable, than with the inanimate environment’s vicissitudes.
The choice that advocates of equity would have us make, between inter-group competition on the one hand and formation of a single meta-group whose members harmoniously share resources on the other, is a false one. Consolidating all of humanity within a single, unified group might reduce the cost of competition, but it would also mean limiting the entire species to no more than one survival strategy at any given time. A short-term utopia may well be viable as long as its particular survival strategy is working, but as soon as emergent phenomena in the environment render it maladaptive, the entire species will come face to face with nature, red in tooth and claw, and will have no recourse, no rivals with whom to seek refuge, no models of success from whom to learn.
Diversity is not and never can be made compatible with equity. Advocates of the new trinity—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—must choose one or the other to include. We come down squarely on the side of diversity. It’s worked for the last two billion years. Perhaps it will serve for a few billion more.
