[The sixth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

A common leftist claim is that established social and moral principles serve the interests of the ruling classes. The claim isn't applied to principles of which the left approves. In particular, it's not applied to inclusiveness. That's unfortunate, because it's obvious that inclusiveness serves governing elites by eliminating competitors and justifying an elaborate system of irresponsible control by those at the top.

In particular, inclusiveness makes money, bureaucracy, certified expertise, and therapy the sole permissible principles of social order, while treating other more traditional and natural principles as ignorant, irrational, and hateful. The rhetoric is familiar. Religious authority is bigoted and oppressive. Family authority is narrow, sexist, agist, heterosexist, ethnocentric, and intertwined with patriarchal religion. And authority based on history and tradition is exclusionary and racist.

[The fifth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

Inclusiveness and diversity help dissolve particular connections in favor of universal formal institutions like world markets and transnational bureaucracies. The effort is part of the general advanced liberal project, and its intent is to recreate human connections on a basis that is more rational and fosters freedom, diversity, and individual identity.

That may be the intent, but the effect is to destroy the normal ways in which people connect to each other and turn them into a mass of essentially unconnected individuals with interests that are assumed to be basically at odds with each other. More specific consequences include disorder, conflict, regimentation, mindlessness, and the breakdown of the understandings and arrangements that enable people to know who they are and run their own lives.

An account of such effects is therefore in order. The reader can gauge for himself how much those effects match trends in social life today.

I recently took part in a "males only" workshop at a local private high school. It was an unlikely opportunity for an advocate of traditional masculine ideals, especially given the fact that the workshop was part of this fairly liberal school's yearly "Diversity Conference." I was thankful for the chance to get across some countering viewpoints. I shared the floor with a veteran leader of men's groups, and I knew we had different aims from the get-go, but I had the first hour.

To begin, I played the guys my favorite scene from The Outlaw Josey Wales -- the part where Wales rides up to the Comanche chief Ten Bears and bargains for peace.

There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see. And so, there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men.

There is iron in your words of death.

This is how civilization happened.

Agreements between men, backed by the threat of violence.

This is how men made this world.

[The fourth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

The demand for inclusiveness is often attributed to emotion, but something so systematic and persistent can only be based on principle.

No one explains very clearly what the principle is, so it's evidently something taken for granted. The peremptory nature of antidiscrimination, together with the irrelevance of practical considerations, confirms that its basic principle must be quite fundamental.

As I will argue in what follows, the basic principle that leads to inclusiveness is the view of reason that critics refer to as scientism or scientific fundamentalism. That view has been with us since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and has slowly been transforming social understandings and relationships in its own image ever since.

The process through which it has been doing so, sometimes called modernization or rationalization, is still going on. The abolition of traditional and natural patterns of human life in the name of diversity and inclusiveness is a current manifestation of that process.

[The third in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

As I showed in my last piece in this series, prejudice and discrimination are natural, normal, and beneficial in the same way other basic principles that order human life--like private property and government--are natural, normal, and beneficial.

Here are some examples of prejudice and discrimination:

• Expecting different things of men and women, and sometimes treating them differently.
• Believing that the differences are complementary, and adapted to enduring unions that are basic to everyday life, social order, and the continuation of the species.
• Giving specific legal recognition and other support to such unions.
• Believing that different peoples--Westerners, South Asians, Jews, Irishmen, Fukienese peasants--have different qualities and ways of doing things.
• Feeling more or less attracted to one group or another, feeling most at home with one's own, and feeling at times that there are groups one would rather avoid.
• Taking religious, ethnic, and other communal ties into account in choosing basic affiliations like who to marry and where to live and work.

Such things are obviously not wicked simply as such. To the contrary, they've always--until very recently--counted as normal good sense, so much so that they hardly ever surfaced as issues. And now that they've come under attack, they still seem obviously basic to normal social functioning.

[The second in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

Liberals claim to oppose discrimination, but feel free to make the distinctions they think make sense. Financial, bureaucratic, and institutional criteria are OK, or so they believe, but natural and traditional criteria are not. You can choose a Yale man over a Harvard man--the schools are a bit different, so their products must differ--but not a Yale man over a Yale woman.

People seem to think the rules are just obvious, so there's never much explanation for them. So far as I can tell, though, the basic idea is that distinctions such as sex, family, kinship, culture, and religion are bad and must be deprived of effect. The reason, it appears, is that the natural and traditional ways of doing things those distinctions make possible don't make sense. Instead, we should do everything through commercial and bureaucratic arrangements, which are considered uniquely rational and fair. If other relationships have an effect--if class and ethnicity affect success or young mothers are passed over for demanding positions--that's an injustice that needs work.

[The first of a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

Liberals believe that the benefits of society should be equally available to all. They have recently come to hold that it is a basic responsibility of government and indeed all institutions to make them so. Failure to do so is support for oppression through participation in a system of inequality.

The demands of the resulting campaign for equality have broadened with time. They now include inclusiveness, which can be understood as an attempt to achieve comprehensive political, economic, and social equality among groups by integrating each of them into all social activities at all levels.

Specifically, inclusiveness requires that persons of every race, ethnicity, religious background, sex, disability status, and sexual orientation participate equally in all major social activities, with roughly equal representation and success the measure of equal opportunity to do so.

Whatever you want to say about Ann Coulter, I like her -- partly because she's funny but mostly because I've always sensed that she's more "one of us" than just about any other mainstream political commentator out there besides Pat Buchanan. I guess I agree with her campus detractors in that way.

Well, Ann was invited by some students at the University of Ottawa to speak on their campus and, as reported by Canada.com, before she embarked on her journey to the Great North, she received an email from the University vice-president and provost, Francois Houle, "warning her that freedom of speech is defined differently in Canada than in the U.S. and that she should take care not to step over the line." When she arrived, Leftist protestors made sure she never got the opportunity to violate any speech codes by protesting wildly and getting her appearance cancelled by the campus police.

Inclusiveness is radically inconsistent with free thought and speech. The problem is quite fundamental. To question the principle of equal inclusion is to put some people's standing in question and ipso facto to exclude them from full equality with those whose standing is not in question. A regime of inclusiveness must therefore suppress questioning of its principles if it is to exist at all.

More generally, every system needs standards and restrictions, and doing away with some makes others more important. For that reason, expanding some aspects of diversity means limiting others. In particular, making ethnic and sexual diversity a supreme value means limiting permissible opinion quite radically. If it is unshakable dogma that group differences never cause problems, and they obviously cause problems, there are going to be severe limits on thought and discussion so the problems can't come up.