Observations on Diversity from the Harvard Whirlwind.
Three scenes from Harvard Square. Then we get serious.
Soccer Team. On the street at Harvard Square, immediately across the street from the red brick dorm, Wigglesworth, where I spent Freshman year, I bumped into a chattering group of young women, busy talking with one another, cell phones in their pockets. They were walking toward me, a group of a dozen or so young women, high school juniors or seniors I would guess, talking excitedly, with each other. Tight. There was a bit of huddling together, innocents in a strange place, a bit like ducklings crowded next to each other led by a woman in her late 20s, the mama duck.
They had a lot in common. All about 17. All female. All fresh faced and healthy looking. They stopped to peer into an old-style tobacco store, so I had a chance to photograph them, mostly from the rear, and ask one of them if they were a team. Yes, a girl told me. They were part of a soccer team from Virginia, up for a game.
They were multi-racial, as is obvious from the photo, but otherwise very alike: same home, same age, same interests, same common purpose, up to Boston to win a game or tournament.
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| Soccer Team from Virginia |
Street Scene: Meanwhile, up the street, another scene: a man singing songs from his youth and mine, the 1960s. I listened to The Loving Spoonfuls and the Beatles and watched the multi-ethnic crowd wander by. The young people didn't tip him but people my age did, and the grandchildren of people my age did, passing along the dollar bills slipped them by their elders.
Another impression I gained from the scene was the ethnic mix of people strolling by. Asian, Middle East, White, Black from West Africa, Black from East Africa, Jewish, Hispanic. The people weren't interacting, but they were sharing space.
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| "We get by with a little help from our friends." |
Church Welcome. Just up the street one of several churches, this one Baptist. All the churches in this area have welcome signs out, greeting new students. This one has a series of signs on the front lawn, welcoming people who might feel excluded elsewhere. The small signs in front read, "We stand with our Muslim and Jewish neighbors", and "Remember those who feel forgotten" and "Violence against women must end now." There are other signs inviting the gay, lesbian, transgender community.
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| "A Faith Communty of Peace Rooted in Justice" |
These images and impressions are typical of the Harvard and Harvard Square scene. But inside the classes and seminars I am attending there is a different story, one of a losing struggle to pull America together. We are two countries. Or three. There are media silos. Each team has its facts. There is Mainstream and there is Fox. There are the experts and there are the willfully ignorant.
Speakers in various departments note there is a rising tide of nationalist and ethnic populism in America and around the world. In Europe, it shows up in Britain's exit from the EU, spurred in large part by British voters feeling overwhelmed by immigrants--not immigrants from Muslim countries but rather from white, Christian Poland.
Does European Populism Exist, asks the title of a seminar I attended. It sure does, the speaker said, and most of it is socially conservative ethno nationalism. People are pushing back against the elites, fueled by a desire to reaffirm their own language, ethnicity, religion, and identity.
The election of Donald Trump did not take place in a vacuum of sentiment. Trump reflects a conservative revolt against elites whose policies of global economic unity have marginalized a great many people. These people have established an identity politics of their own: the forgotten American (or Brit, Pole, Austrian, etc.)
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| Harvard Law School |
Department after department are considering the issue. Yesterday, while Melissa Francis of Fox News was discussing tribalism at the Kennedy School another lecture was taking place a five minute walk away at the Law School.
I am observing directly that the topic of diversity elicits and unusual level of comments and reader participation, both in the comment section of recent blog posts, and in communication directly to me at my email address (peter.w.sage@gmail.com.)
Muslim cultural practices and Muslim religion spark pushback against inclusion. The burden of their comments: We do not increase social cohesion and bring social justice when include and welcome things that are wrong. And some things are right and some things are wrong.
An occasional Guest Post commenter here, Robert Guyer, a Florida lawyer and self-identified Christian commented:
"Inclusiveness w/o regard to beliefs sows social confusion and cultural self-annihilation. Cultures, religions, and political systems are not equals; some are good and some are bad; some tolerable, some anathema. Equivalency of belief systems, "I'm ok, you're ok", and in the end "we're all the same" are being challenged for reasons including cultural survival. Dryden's "noble savage's" innate human goodness remains a myth, however repackaged by those so much smarter than the rest of us."
There is a secular version of this same debate happening at this very moment regarding the appointment of Sean Spicer and Corey Lewandowski to be a Visiting Fellow at Harvard. My Harvard classmates, class of 1971 (i.e. baby boomers, age about 68) are chiming in, signing a letter protesting the inclusion of Spicer and Lewendowski are beyond inclusion. They should not be part of the "Harvard team". Classmates allowed as how they might be allowed to visit, but not to be given the name "Harvard" as a "Fellow." It isn't a question of whether these two people--or Chelsea Manning--might have lessons to teach. It is about who is in and who is out.
The question of who is in and who is out is one of the great themes underlying American politics. Both Democrats and Republicans thought they might profit from identity politics. Speaker after speaker at Harvard is attempting to untangle the ramifications of that. Meanwhile, students from the various freshman dormitories have been given tee-shirts of affiliation: Wigglesworth, Thayer, Holworthy. The upperclass dormitories have names, teams, logos, flags, and tee shirts. The college wants young people to feel like they belong to something.
Harvard was founded because Protestant believers in Britain thought they simply could not stay in Britain and remain true to God. Some were "Separatists" and went to Plymouth. They thought being "outside", now and forever, was essential. Boston and Cambridge was settled by people who thought they would be "outside" only temporarily and they would serve to reform the evil doctrines by serving as a good example from the outside.
Within the churches it was all about who was in and who was out. The "in" were the elect of God. They were the admitted members of the church, and those on the inside of the Cambridge and Boston churches decided who was worthy to come in and be members. A great many people attended the churches by compulsion but were excluded from membership. They were good, but not good enough.
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| Click Here. The moral foundations of liberals and conservatives |
Sweet.
Psychologist Jonathan Haight describes in books and here, in a TED talk, that one of the deeply imbedded moral foundations of humans is loyalty to an in group. It feels good. It feels right.
There is enormous feeling of righteousness and power in being one to decide who is in and who is out.
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