Inclusiveness: A Harmful Ideology

by James Kalb

We hear a lot about inclusiveness, but the topic is never discussed analytically. The idea seems to be that it’s warm and fuzzy and what Jesus would do, so it’s obviously a good thing. The result is that our world is being remade for the sake of a goal that hasn’t been thought through. With that in mind, it seems sensible to ask what it is, what it does, and where it comes from.

The nature of inclusiveness is fairly simple: it’s the egalitarian welfare state applied to the social environment. It tells us that every one of us has the right to experience his social environment as equally accepting and affirming, so everyone is required to make sure things turn out that way.

With that in mind, inclusiveness demands changes that go to the heart of how people deal with each other. For example, it doesn’t like the idea that particular kinds of people can be more or less suitable for particular positions. More and less suitable means discrimination, and training and job redesign are supposed to take care of whatever issues there are. So if you’re running the Navy you’re expected to put women not only on submarines but in the SEALs. If there seem to be issues, it’s your job to find a way around them.

Nor does inclusiveness want people to rely on complementary qualities when they form functional relationships. Some people don’t have those qualities, and that leaves them out. So specific understandings of marriage and family have to go. Love and connectedness take many forms, and none can be preferred to any other. If you think the natural and traditional view of marriage is better that means you hate people who like something else. Nor does inclusiveness like old boy networks and so on. The idea seems to be that people who live and work together should build relationships based exclusively on common humanity, impersonal qualifications like academic degrees, and common devotion to fairness, diversity, and organizational mission statements.

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James Kalb is a lawyer, independent scholar, and Catholic convert who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command (ISI Books, 2008), and, most recently, Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It (Angelico Press, 2013).