## Metadata - Author: [[Russell Jacoby]] - Full Title: On Diversity - Category: #books ## Highlights - The diversity idea—or rhetoric or jargon—presents the same issues. It celebrates variety in a world that undermines it. Globalization knits the world together into one vast market. We become more alike—and simultaneously we proclaim our differences. Can both be true? ([Location 45](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07SCQQM49&location=45)) - Every year a new group pops up demanding representation in the name of diversity. One problem with the diversity jargon emerges: Diversity loses all meaning as it balloons. The term becomes so lax that everything and anything signifies diversity. ([Location 81](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07SCQQM49&location=81)) - The world is not becoming more but less diverse. The eclipse of diversity and its consequences are the subjects of this book. The religion of diversity is a response to its decline; it is the new opiate of the people—or at least of the people’s representatives. In a handleless world, it gives people a handle or an identity. ([Location 84](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07SCQQM49&location=84)) - as people become less culturally different, they fetishize their differences. ([Location 92](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07SCQQM49&location=92)) - To abridge thinking in the name of the emergencies ([Location 147](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07SCQQM49&location=147)) - The notion that the current crises require a popular front in which liberals cannot criticize liberalism or leftists cannot criticize leftism partakes of a suspect tradition. ([Location 148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07SCQQM49&location=148)) - the experiential platform of diversity is childhood. How we play and imagine informs our ability to experience the world as adults. What if the unplanned elements of childhood diminish? What if the activities of our children become more and more alike? ([Location 184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07SCQQM49&location=184)) - Several scholars connect play and democracy. When children play with each other they learn to resolve conflicts, if only to keep the activity going. “I quit!” ends the game. To mollify and accept opponents may be a vital lesson for a civil society. ([Location 242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07SCQQM49&location=242)) - In accord with many 19th-century thinkers, Tocqueville distinguished individuality and individualism, which he viewed as opposites. He had no truck with individualism. For Tocqueville and his cohort, individualism connoted a corrosive ideology, sometimes associated with the French Revolution, sometimes with the modern economy; it signified abandoning larger society for narrow self-interest, which had previously been called egoism.31 But Tocqueville and others did not surrender the idea of the individual. On the contrary. They held fast to the individual as something more than an isolated monad; they offered an idea of an individual embedded in wider networks. But what is this creature, the individual, or, more precisely, what should this fuller individual look like? Tocqueville never spelled it out. ([Location 278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07SCQQM49&location=278))