…until it appears to impinge upon someone's sense of entitlement. Then, it's NIMBY Time.
The ahistoricity of the anti-DEI movement is rather amusing to those of us with a really, really sick sense of humor. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a substantial portion of this nation's colonial history was as a destination for those who were disadvantaged by the lack of DEI in the Old Country (not just Europe, either). If one plots the regions of origin — especially England — of major immigration in the New World against religious preferences in those regions, things begin to get rather interesting. Consider, for a moment, the virtual lionization of the Puritan immigrants to what we now call New England… separately from witchcraft trials, which are usually treated in courses and books on American History as slightly quaint exceptions to the all-around goodness of the Protestant Work Ethic, and then ignored all the way through Executive Order 9066, after which the post hoc rationalizations shifted to "we've learned and wouldn't do that ever again." That last is rather a forlorn hope, I'm afraid.
The real problem with the anti-DEI movement is apparent in something all too visible when those proponents appear as talking heads: Irrational fear that DEI programs will adversely impact those very proponents by increasing competition for perceivedly-limited benefits to which they are entitled by virtue of their ancestry.1 In this, it is parallel to NIMBYism ("Yes, we're all in favor of shelters affording treatment to drug addiction among the homeless, but not in my neighborhood"). The irony is that the most virulent NIMBYism I've directly observed is in the purportedly "liberal and therefore unAmerican" parts of Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle with the highest proportions of real-property-passed-down-through-inheritance.
Consider, too, that there's a mathematical presumption underlying the anti-DEI movement. That presumption is best illustrated not through cake-cutting but through slicing pies of varying sizes. The anti-DEI movement presumes that the proportionate share of slices must remain constant. Of course, this is inconsistent with American perceptions (especially, but not only, Manifest Destiny) because to be true, the overall size of the pie must either remain constant — therefore resulting in a measurable diminution in the amount of pie provided to those already sitting around the table — or, slightly less pessimistically, grow at a slower rate than the increase in the number of diners. One representation of the argument looks something like this:
| {quantity of each slice n=6} | ≟ | {quantity of each slice for n>6 after growth of the pie by proportion p} |
Whether the pie is "economic" or "job opportunities" or whatever, if the pie grows by 40% (p) and the number of diners grows by 33% (n), each diner gets more pie. In a Rawls-compliant universe, the greater quantity of pie on each plate (or, at least, not-diminished quantity of pie on each plate) is a satisfactory outcome… except against greed and in light of the endowment effect as applied to an entitlement to the share of the pie, rather than the quantity of pie on the plate.2
Even inside this illustration, there are several different assumptions that bear very little scrutiny, especially when considering a non-Rawls-compliant universe:
- That a "just society" requires, in at least a general sense, "fairness"
- That past performance does indeed predict future performance, meaning that we can readily predict both n and the overall size of the pie
- That entitlement to "scarce" outcomes/opportunities is valid (and sound)
And we'll just leave aside for the moment that the very worst sin that can be visited upon sons (to the third or fourth generation3) is "unfortunate/nonmajoritarian birth circumstances," ranging from economic class to race to place. Not for too long, though.
- Of course there are exceptions — but they are almost always exceptions traceable to a narrower view, and often a nonconsensus view, of not what the entitlements are but of to whom the entitlements must benefit to be valid. There's usually one "shock factor" in these exceptions that, on closer examination, operates as a distraction from other alignments.
- I am carefully ignoring later health effects of weight gain from consuming too much pie at a sitting — but only because this metaphor is already somewhat overextended. This is about letting the entitled eat pie…
- Compare, e.g., Deuteronomy 5:9 with Deuteronomy 24:16 in whatever translation you prefer. Of course I'm being subversive with those citations — and their fundamental conflict. That, however, is for some future discussion of the parts of the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–37) seldom acknowledged — such as that the entire parable makes sense if, and only if, one presumes that stereotypical views of "Samaritans," priests, and "Levites" (not to mention Jews) have been validated by consensus — are both factually correct and justified.