Brad DeLong discussing why we like diversity and identitity notes that in addition to prefering to discuss diversity because it is easier than tackling the hard problem of a lack of equality in opportunity, we like identity and diversity because they are inherently a good thing:
Now normally–in my usual mind–I am an enthusiastic supporter of what I take to be Walter Benn Michaels’s central point: that we have collectively gotten ourselves off balance because we are responding to the fact that celebrating diversity is easy and doing something about upward mobility and the intergenerational reproduction of economic and social inequality is hard.
When I am in my usual mind I grumble that the $400,000 a year that we at Berkeley are about to start spending on an Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity would be better spent hiring ten full-time outreach coordinators and on-campus tutors to make the idea of equality of opportunity less of a joke, and to make the population that does attend Berkeley a little bit more like the population that could benefit from attending Berkeley–if only things had broken right for them before they reached college age.
But I must be outside my usual mind. Because my reaction right now is that we love identity not just because we don’t like to think about economic and social class, but because loving identity is a genuinely good thing in a diverse world, especially for America and Americans if we are to become who we are.
I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but I think that it’s also important to note that we like diversity and identity because we’ve evolved as a tribal species. Before we developed civilization, we lived in family bands. We then developed from families to tribes to cities to states to nations. In a modern society, we have to work with people from a variety of nations, backgrounds, cultures, etc. However, not too deep down, just under the veneer of civilization, we are still very tribal. We still prefer to interact with people that are “like us.†I suspect that this is why we like to discuss identity and diversity.