By The Realist • 10/1/07
A number of articles on IW have argued that the reason for the success of the “whites as cancer” myth is that our culture associates anti-Western, pro-diversity attitudes with positive traits like intelligence and courage. This “anti-ethnocentric” snobbery emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and was particularly strong among the professional classes and those who aspired to join them. Anti-ethnocentrism proved an effective ideology for legitimating professionals’ class power. It made slandering whites appear to be a courageous act of resistance to the “pre-fascist” white majority.
Anti-ethnocentrism has proved spectacularly successful. As the pundit David Brooks has demonstrated in Bobos in Paradise, the spirit of multiculturalism spread from professionals to executives, creating a wealthy elite of “Bobos,” or bohemian bourgeois, who have managed to reconcile big business with the values of the 1960s counterculture.
Today, it is a cliché that openness to diversity is associated not merely with intelligence and courage, but with a whole host of other desirable qualities. However, when you read the writings of the diversity rhapsodists, you find evidence for these claims slender to non-existent. Diversity-boosting, in fact, resembles religion more than social science. Its practitioners are perfectly willing to run roughshod over the evidence out of zeal for their idol.
A particularly striking example of this blind faith in diversity is the work of economist Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class (Rise) and The Flight of the Creative Class. His argument is that success in today’s economy depends on building and catering to a “Creative Class” through openness to diversity and high immigration levels. However, he ends up showing in spite of himself that diversity is a weakness, and diversity-boosting is the ideology of an elite.
Florida believes we live in a “Creative Economy,” in which economic success is dependent on innovation. Creativity depends on a highly educated and affluent class of knowledge workers consisting of:
people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content. Around the core, the Creative Class also includes a broader group of creative professionals in business and finance, law, health care, and related fields. These people engage in complex problem solving that involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high levels of education or human capital.
Florida estimates that 30 percent of the employed belong to the Creative Class, or 38 million people.1
The Creative Class is united by a common culture that stresses individuality, meritocracy, and “diversity and openness.”
The Creative Class people I study use the word [diversity] a lot… . Diversity is simply something they value in all its manifestations. This is spoken of so often, and so matter-of-factly, that I take it to be a fundamental marker of Creative Class values.2
Diversity here means not merely racial diversity, but also homosexuality and other forms of nonstandard behavior.
Rise gives detailed descriptions of the culture of diversity that the Creative Class has created. The class’s anti-ethnocentrism is apparent. For example:
In some Creative Class centers like Silicon Valley and Austin, the traditional office Christmas party is giving way to more secular, inclusive celebrations. The big event at many firms is now the Halloween party: just about anyone can relate to a holiday that involves dressing up in costume.3
During its leisure hours, the Creative Class tends to spurn both excessively Western institutions like the art museum, symphony, opera, and ballet, as well as traditional American entertainments like baseball and football games. Rather, the Creative Class enjoys the cosmopolitan “street life” in “multiuse urban neighborhoods” that offer ethnic restaurants, art galleries, and small theaters. Particularly prized are cosmopolitanism and eclecticism. The creative like a neighborhood where they can find German films and Senegalese music jostling against each other. They especially love hybrid art forms such as “Afro-Celt” music.4
Nostalgia for ‘60s counterculture is another Creative Class trait. Florida describes his delight at attending “Hippie Hour” at a bar in Austin, Texas, the quintessential Creative Class city. Far from being a downscale event, as its name would suggest, “Hippie Hour” attracted much of the local elite. Florida was overjoyed at the diverse crowd of “hippies, musicians, Latinos, politicians, and high-tech business types.”5
Openness to diversity is the key to America’s continued prosperity, in Florida’s view, because it is the vital element of the creative personality: “economic growth is powered by creative people, who prefer places that are diverse, tolerant and open to new ideas.”6 He bemoans the traditionalism of America under the Bush administration: “On sexual orientation, scientific research, the arts, and civil rights, the current conservative leadership is more backward-looking than ever.”7 He argues that this traditionalism is causing a “reverse brain drain,” as the Creative Class leaves for Europe and Canada, where it feels more welcome.8
Friendliness to diversity is also essential because immigration imports talent. Florida positively falls over himself lauding the accomplishments of immigrant entrepreneurs, with names like Gururaj Deshpande, Pradeep Sindhu, and Jing Jong Pan, who have started up high-tech companies.9 Stepped-up screening of immigrants since 9/11 has made it much more difficult for them to enter, and we risk losing them to other countries, Florida warns.10
Startlingly, Florida’s own work reveals that his thesis has no ground in fact. Besides paeans to the creative life, Rise also contains discussions of Florida’s empirical research on innovation, including its relationship to diversity. The scientific and descriptive sections of the book flatly contradict each other. When he correlates what he calls the “Innovation Index” of American cities, which is the number of patents granted per capita, with the “Melting Pot Index,” or the percentage of a city’s inhabitants that is foreign-born, Florida finds no relationship between the prevalence of immigrants and innovation or job growth.11
Furthermore, there is actually a negative relationship between the concentration of high-tech companies in a region and its percentage of non-whites. Florida is disappointed to find that:
The world of high-tech creativity doesn’t include many African-Americans. Several of my interviewers noted that a typical high-tech company “looks like the United Nations minus the black faces.”12
Florida saves his thesis by showing there is a relationship between innovation, sexual diversity, and lifestyle diversity: the most creative places tend to have higher percentages of homosexuals and bohemians. Nevertheless, his findings on race render his unqualified celebrations of diversity ridiculous.
Other passages in Florida’s books have the same effect. One problem that concerns him is the growing wealth gap between the Creative Class and the rest of society, and the wealth gap, of course, is in large part a gap between whites and non-whites. Florida quotes the speech of gourmet chef Anthony Bourdain during a high-society awards ceremony for cooking in New York:
“The restaurant industry would collapse without the Mexicans and Central Americans who came to this country with no skills at all.” Yet, he told the stunned audience, “you look at the audience and you’ve never seen so many white people in one place since George Wallace ran for president.”13
Florida devotes a few generic lamentations to the exclusion of blacks and Hispanics from the ranks of the creative. However, he never explores the ways in which this exclusion challenges his thesis. Clearly, the Creative Class enjoys the idea of racial diversity more than the reality. The type of diversity that it likes—Thai restaurants attended by Egyptian software engineers looking out on black street performers—is of a very artificial and carefully policed sort.
Florida, in fact, finds real diversity depressing and frightening, as most of the Creative Class no doubt would. During his discussion of wealth inequality, he tells of the time he took a wrong turn while traveling to a speaking engagement and found himself in a Hispanic neighborhood in East Palo Alto.
Here the streets were lined with shabby storefronts announcing check cashing and cerveza fria. Instead of people who looked forever young [as the Creative Class does], here were teenagers who looked old too soon.14
Yet another passage that contradicts Florida’s thesis comes at the very beginning of Rise, where he proposes this thought experiment:
Take a typical man on the street from the year 1900 and drop him into the 1950s. Then take someone from the 1950s and move him Austin-Powers style into the present day. Who would experience the greater change?
Florida performs the experiment to highlight the enormous changes in American social values since the 1950s. However, it is also a test of his theory, although Florida does not acknowledge the fact. If diversity and creativity were related, you would expect there to be far more technological innovation in the later period than the earlier, when America was more homogeneous and unfriendly to diversity.
However, the opposite is true. It is certainly, Florida says, the first man who would experience greater technological change. The period from 1900 to 1950 teemed with life-changing inventions: the automobile, the airplane, the nuclear bomb, television, antibiotics, the refrigerator, the computer, and so forth. Additionally, it was the period in which some of the major inventions of the 19th century, such as electricity, the telephone, and the radio, first received widespread use. The period saw the construction of much of America’s transportation infrastructure, such as railways, airports, roads, and bridges, as well as the first skyscrapers. The time traveler would find a world transformed almost beyond recognition.
Such would not be the case for a man transported from 1950 to the 21st century. Certainly, the personal computer and the Internet are major, transforming innovations, as all of us certainly recognize. However, there are few others:
If he took a train, it would likely be on the same line leaving from the same station. He could probably board an airplane at the same airport… . Television would have more channels, but it would still be basically the same… . In fact, with just a few exceptions, such as the PC, the Internet, CD, and DVD players, the cash machine and a wireless phone that he could carry around with him, he would be familiar with almost all current-day technology. Perhaps disappointed at the pace of progress, he might ask: “Why haven’t we conquered outer space?” or “Where are all the robots?”15
Florida’s books constantly undercut his thesis that diversity and creativity are linked. In fact, rather than proving the link, he unwittingly exposes it as a sham that rests on blind faith. His own research, as well as the tidbits of common sense that surface here and there, suggest that increasing diversity actually leads to a decline in creativity. This will come as no surprise to Realists, who recognize that the white race has usually been in the forefront of creativity ever since the time of the ancient Greeks. As Charles Murray has shown in Human Accomplishment, 97 percent of the major scientific innovators in human history have been white.
So what is the reason for the sham? There are undoubtedly many, but one of them is its usefulness in the struggle for social power. By flaunting its friendliness to diversity, the Creative Class advertises itself as a vanguard of intelligence, broad-mindedness, and compassion struggling against the backwards and repressive conservative white majority. One of our central tasks as Realists must be to expose the destructive lust for power that lies behind the rhetoric of diversity.