Valuing Diversity: Buddhist Reflection on Realizing a More Equitable Global Future

Introduction

1 Introduction D iversity matters. Whether it is in the context of talking about ecosystems , educational institutions, corporations, the media, or politics, diversity is now widely recognized as something positive and worthy of being both preserved and actively pursued. This has not always been the case. Indeed, it is only quite recently that “diversity” came to connote, not just factually manifest differences, but also the valuable presence of difference. The first usage in this sense was in connection with the scientific correlation of species diversity with ecosystem vitality and resilience. Roughly a half century ago, this positive conception of diversity began being generalized through a confluence of social, philosophical, and political movements insisting on the productive salience of difference: the women’s, anticolonial, and civil rights movements; deconstructionism and postmodernism; and the advent of identity politics and multiculturalism. Over the intervening decades,however,although“diversity”has become an increasingly important part of the critical lexicon, it has remained relatively undertheorized as a synonym for variety. In the contexts of education and politics, for example, diversity has continued to be seen as an essentially quantitative measure of inclusion for those who differ from the majority by reasons of race, culture, religion, age, or gender. In the contexts of biology and ecology, it has likewise remained a basically numerical index of species density. In both cases, while more diversity has come to be affirmed as better than less, the predominant, fundamentally quantitative conception of diversity itself gives no clues as to why this should be so. Notwithstanding the positive aura it has acquired, “diversity” continues to refer simply to the coexistence of many different kinds of things in a given setting. This book develops a more theoretically robust conception of diversity. At its heart is the recognition that differences are ultimately always processes 2 Valuing Diversity of differentiation, and that significant critical advantages follow if we distinguish between diversification and variation as distinct modes of differentiation , with diversity understood as an emergent quality and direction of relational dynamics. More broadly, it is a book that attempts to weave a multilayered historical and philosophical narrative that shows why difference came to be such an important issue and concern in the mid-to-late-twentieth century; why difference can no longer be viewed as just the conceptually vacuous opposite of sameness; and why a richly qualitative conception of diversity affords crucial resources for evaluating and practically engaging our increasing social, economic, cultural, and political interdependence. The dramatic origins of this narrative, however, are not purely theoretical . They are rooted in deeply troubling questions about the meaningof and means-to greater equity in a world that is characterized by both fabulous wealth generation and the no less fabulous widening of wealth, income, resource, and opportunity gaps, making our era at once the most developmentally advanced and uneven in human history. The claim that will be advanced here is that diversity is not just valuable. It is a value crucial to working out from within the global dynamics of the twenty-first century to change the way things are changing in a shared commitment to improvising and sustaining ever more equitable modalities of human-withplanetary flourishing. Among the key features of contemporary global dynamics are their nonlinearity and complexity: their tendency to be recursively structured and prone to significant discontinuities. Accounts of how to work out from within these dynamics in pursuit of more equitable futures cannot be expected to take the form of clearly specified plans based on a “blueprint ” of the grand architecture of global interdependence. Instead, they are likely also to be complex and nonlinear, more akin to performance notes for a piece of situationally responsive improvised music than a utopian engineer’s urban master plan. That, at least, is true of the narrative that follows, in which key distinctions and themes appear and reappear as interactive parts of an emergent, recursively structured whole. Given this, it is perhaps useful here to call attention to some of these distinctions and themes and the global contexts for composing them. I. CONTEXTS Getting Things Right and yet Going Ever More Globally Wrong From a certain point of view, it could be said that humanity is mostly getting things right. Globally, we can produce more than enough food to adequately feed everyone on the planet. We have created living conditions Introduction 3 that, along with new medical practices, enable the world’s people collectively...