How exactly diversity is strength: a 🧵. The ideology of xenophobic...

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux@BretDevereaux

49 views Aug 05, 2024 ~9 min read

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How exactly diversity is strength: a 🧵.

The ideology of xenophobic extremism in the USA is back in the discourse for terrible reasons and I want to address one part of it - the idea that diversity is weakness - from the perspective of a military historian.  1/

'Diversity is strength' it is contended, is just an empty set of buzzwords. 'You wouldn't run your family like that!' they say (sidenote: imagining the country as a supersized family is an age-old authoritarian trope; terrible way to run a country). 2/

x.com/ndrew_lawrence…

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As a military historian though, I study exactly the sort of 'strength' - the capacity to engage in coercion through violence or the threat of violence (or 'force' in @MilHist_Lee 's parlance) that these knuckleheads claim to be interested in.  3/

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And diversity can be fundamental to producing that kind of strength in three important ways, which we might classify as:
1) Avoiding Groupthink
2) Harvesting Talent
3) Big Tribes are Safe Tribes.

So let's talk about it.  4/

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(Before we go into that, I should note that while I'm working here with 'the ability to develop military force' as my definition of 'strength' I should note that I don't think that's the only kind of strength nor by any means the key measure of value for a society.)  5/

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Let's start with avoiding groupthink.

Homogeneous groups, almost by definition, tend to share many of their assumptions - assumptions about the way people or the world work embedded in cultural assumptions that all group-members share.  6/

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The term for that is 'groupthink.'

And as you might imagine, things like war (or economic competition) are terribly unkind to unquestioned assumptions about how the world works.  7/

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In Ukraine, we are watching a live demonstration of what happens when an army founded on a bunch of untested assumptions which could not be questioned - because in this case uniformity was enforced by Putin - runs into the real crucible of war.

It goes poorly.  8/

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Historically, the best-performing militaries are 'learning institutions' that are constantly evaluating and reevaluating not only their performance, but the prior assumptions that their methods were built on.  9/

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And no surprise, but the more homogeneous an organization is, the more prone it is to groupthink, the less able it is to learn, the more prone it is to defend its assumptions even when they are clearly at variance with reality. 10/

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Now military and political leadership are, by nature, homogenizing institutions, so if you want the dominant groupthink to be challenged, you need diverse inputs: both alternate centers of power in society, but also people with different ideas/backgrounds in the organization. 11/

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That can be ideological diversity, but of course people from different backgrounds are also going to bring different cultural assumptions that challenge the groupthink, which is good.

You want leadership that is united by the institution, but diverse in their thinking.  12/

By contrast, speaking historically, closed homogeneous societies tend to be militarily uncreative and unresponsive.

Sparta's catastrophic inability to adapt even a little due to their closed aristocracy is perhaps the quintessential example: acoup.blog/2019/09/27/col…

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So diversity in a society: a range if ideologies, backgrounds, life experiences, religions and cultures and thus from all of this of assumptions - if incorporated effectively (and that's important) - produce more effective and responsive military thinking, less groupthink.  14/

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Next: Talent.

It is an obvious pair of facts about talent in the world that: 1) talent is thinly spread in populations and 2) different cultures cultivate different talents to different degrees.  15/

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It is tempting to declare that only the talents that 'our' culture values are important and shun all others but again war is terribly unkind to this thinking.  When your 'all that matters is good heavy infantry' army gets to the desert, you are going to have a bad time. 16/

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Effective states and effective militaries are hungry for all sorts of skills and talents.

Some of those skills may be ones that the dominant culture in the state doesn't cultivate well, for whatever reason.  17/

For a variety of cultural and geographic reasons, Roman Italy produced really good heavy infantry, mediocre-at-best cavalry and practically no true missile troops.

Part of the Roman strength was knowing to turn to other cultures to supply the gaps: acoup.blog/2021/07/30/col… 18/

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More broadly, talent - and I'm being intentionally broad with this term (unimportant here if these talents are trained or innate) - is scarce!  Leaders, innovators, these are often people out on the 'long tail' distribution of their skill.

There aren't many of them.  19/

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As a state or military you are, to some degree, competing with every other state or military for that scarce supply of exceptional people.

A willingness to tolerate diversity means you can 'harvest' talent of other societies and get a higher proportion of exceptional people. 20/

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You can see this in the success of Philip II (of Macedon)'s use of the institution of the companions as a way to incorporate non-Macedonian (mostly Greek) expertise in his court.  21/

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Some of these fellows are absolutely crucial in the success of Alexander's invasion of Persia:
Nearchus (Greek, originally from Crete) his naval commander
Aristobulus (Greek, probably Phocian) his siege engineer
Eumenes (Greek, Cardian) his personal secretary 22/

You can see the same effect in the American economy, of course with immigrants showing elevated rates of entrepreneurship and drive (newamericaneconomy.org/issues/entrepr…).

In part, one assumes, because getting to the USA is hard and so it selects for driven, exceptional people. 23/

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Finally, the most obvious way that diversity becomes strength: the Big Tribe is the Safe Tribe.

Since at least the emergence of agriculture, if not earlier, human social organization has shown a pronounced trend towards larger units.

That's not an accident.  24/

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In any kind of competition - economic, diplomatic or military - having *more people* is a huge advantage.  Local conditions or tech may occasionally enable a 'small tribe' to win, but by and large it is better to be part of the 'big tribe' when it comes time to fight.  25/

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The thing is, homogeneous ethnic groups are by their very nature, limited in size and as a matter of state strategy, you have very little control over the size of your core ethnic group, at least on the sort of time-scale that you can work on.  26/

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Sure, if you are China and your core ethnic group is something like 1.2 billion people, that's good for you (although obviously the result of centuries of incorporation; China did not *begin* as a culturally homogeneous place nor is it fully so now, of course).  27/

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But most groups are much smaller and at a massive disadvantage in competition with big tribes.

Indeed, as the industrialization has spread from the handful of originator countries and as a result the enormous competitive advantages of the early adopters have waned... 28/

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...we've really seen how hard it is for small countries to command their own destinies.  Look at how the small and mid-sized states of Europe, for instance, band together so they can negotiate economically as a larger collective unit.  29/

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And notice how much *worse* a deal the UK got when they decided to go their own way - only to find that the world economy is no longer in a mood to humor the misapprehensions of a country of 'just' 60m people which tries to stand alone.  30/

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The same is of course true when it comes to military power: since the 1930s, we've seen progressively that modern war is a Big-Population, Big-Economy game.  Small countries struggle to compete and have to band together, often under the wings of Big Countries (e.g. NATO) 31/

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So the same today as it was with our hunter-gatherer ancestors: the Big Tribe is the Safe Tribe because the Big Tribe has more power because it has more people.

The Big Tribe is strong and safe; the small tribe is weak and vulnerable.   But how do you become the big tribe?  32/

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Some people point to pro-natal policies, but such policies have never really worked at scale.

But one way to become a Big Tribe is to - wait for it - tolerate diversity.  That lets you extend the tribe to cover more people because you can incorporate people with differences. 33/

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And this is just so obviously the success story of the United States.

In 1800, there were around 5.3m Americans and just over 10m Brits.

Today there are 67m Brits and 331m Americans.  America became a Big Tribe by taking all comers.  34/

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Now of course I need to caveat that.  Not all of those folks chose to come to America and not all of them were accepted at first and we struggle with accepting people now, in part due to xenophobic extremists (some with Fox News shows).

The USA isn't perfect. 35/

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But the United States is also so very clearly exceptional in its ability to incorporate diverse people and that has so very obviously been a major part of becoming the world's largest economy, greatest military power and third most populous country...36/

Despite the fact that the United States did not start with any large homogeneous ethnic group.

The Romans, in their own halting, ad hoc unintentional way developed their military strength the same way: acoup.blog/2021/06/25/col…

37/

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While Rome's rivals tried to keep many of the other ethnic groups in their empires at arm's length, Rome - for purely opportunistic, 'we like winning wars' reasons - successfully incorporated a far, FAR larger chunk of people into its military system... 38/

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And as a result over the course of the third and second centuries BCE utterly over-matched their adversaries again and again.  It wasn't became Rome had more ethnic Romans, but because Rome could fight with ethnic **non**-Romans.  39/

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And even a casual look at famous American fighting formations like the Harlem Hellfighters or the 442 Regimental Combat Team - recruited in WW2 from Japanese Americans, many straight out of interment camps, and also the most decorated American military unit at that size...  40/

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...demonstrates just how often the United States' own victories have come from the ability to incorporate and mobilize diverse groups of people, even given how imperfectly the USA has done this.

Diversity made America a Big Tribe, and the Big Tribe is the strong tribe.  41/

I once wrote that the USA was the 'un-nation' - an unusual form of country which rejects the ethnic unity of the nation in favor of association by citizenship.

That has also been, essentially, the United States' superpower. 42/

acoup.blog/2021/07/02/col…

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In conclusion then, it is exclusion and bigotry which weakens a society: it excludes talent, keeps the tribe small and promotes division.

But diversity with incorporation leads to all kinds of strength, including military strength. 43/

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'Diversity is strength' isn't just an empty buzz-phrase, but the very real and frankly historically obvious story of how the United States succeeded to the almost preposterous degree it has, even when out commitment to it has often been, at best, halfhearted.  44/

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Of course diversity brings all sorts of other benefits - a range of influences leads to a richer culture in all sorts of ways.

But even judged by the metric of pure strength in the least complicated sense...

Yes, diversity is strength. end/

How exactly diversity is strength: a 🧵. The ideology of xenophobic...

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