I just bumped into the idea of "demographic diversity" versus "moral diversity" [1].
Demographic diversity speaks to the differences in sex, race, sexual orientation, etc. A nation of immigrants, for example.
Moral diversity speaks to the differences in culture, the rules a society follows. Erosion of those rules is what leads to a low trust society.
I thought this was a really interesting distinction to make.
It seems that the U.S. is not as high trust as it was 75+ years ago. The book I read used the example of neighbors disciplining children, which was more common in U.S. culture 75+ years ago. Today you'd worry about a parent calling the police for that. In general the idea of character has replaced with personality. Moral diversity. Live and let live.
But on the other hand 75+ years ago women and minorities were more limited. We now have more demographic diversity. Which is a good thing.
I would like to think that demographic diversity and a high trust society aren't mutually exclusive. Conflating the two doesn't help.
[1] The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt, Chapter 8, The Felicity of Virtue
Haidt et al decompose moral foundations into several factors to explain how progressives and conservatives view morality differently by virtue of prioritizing different factors; cf. Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundationshttps://fbaum.unc.edu/teaching/articles/JPSP-2009-Moral-Foun...
I'll disagree with that on a few points. Britain was inarguably the most diverse, with almost no attempt at creating cultural homogenity (and it really wasn't that great for anyone not Scottish or English.) Rome attempted it to some degree, with attempts to have a unified culture largely decreasing as time went on, being replaced with a Christian identity. China is extremely complicated in this matter and goes to extreme lengths to ensure cultural homogeneity. Minorities exist and the nature of the han ethnicity is also very obtuse, but it's highly rooted in an indivisible homogeneity that you discount. Hanhua is a very basic concept.
You also ignore the flagrant existence of powers that were not diverse. The Phoenicians interacted with a lot of cultures and influenced them very deeply, but Canaanite society was highly insular. Viet Nam was a powerful society that expanded continually, but it engaged in aggressive replacement colonialism of peoples it conquered.
Diversity in a real sense requires a collection of disparate, conflicting identities. There are no great societies that have any kind of lifespan with widespread diversity in this sense. Almost all of them move towards assimilation, and the ones that don't never last long.
> You also ignore the flagrant existence of powers that were not diverse. The Phoenicians interacted with a lot of cultures and influenced them very deeply, but Canaanite society was highly insular. Viet Nam was a powerful society that expanded continually, but it engaged in aggressive replacement colonialism of peoples it conquered
These societies hit scaling limits precisely because they failed to diversify.
> Diversity in a real sense requires a collection of disparate, conflicting identities
Not necessarily. One can deprioritize the points of difference, or redelineate on the go. Americans incorporated Italians and Irish into whiteness; Romans Italians and later provincials into their citizenry.
> These societies hit scaling limits precisely because they failed to diversify.
Neither of them hit 'scaling limits'. The Phoenicians made a strategic mistake at the outset of the Punic wars, and Viet Nam took the Mekong delta just 150 years ago, almost entirely wiping out the Khmer Krom. Shortly afterwards, international politics had changed so much that aggressive territorial expansion stopped being profitable.
> One can deprioritize the points of difference
Which is assimilation. Think about what deprioritization actually entails. Prioritization of language for example. Deprioritization means that you cannot have a person who speaks Sicilian fluently, and English at an A2 level. As a natural consequence, Sicilian as a language dies in that family after 3-4 generations have passed as a natural effect of no longer being the higher priority language. This happens across all cultural axes. Speaking as someone whose descended almost entirely from early Syrian immigrants to America. Deprioritizing identity means giving up that identity to every degree that matters.
> Romans Italians and later provincials into their citizenry.
Roman power was established at a time when their diversity meant gangpressing non-Latins into conscription and not giving them citizenry afterwards. While they eventually began extending citizenry to conquered people, and later even equated Romanness with citizenry, much of their diverse populations like the Germanics, the Celts, the Levantines, the Maghrebis, never cared about Rome or Romanness. The Germanics even destroyed Rome, and none of the rest cared when it all went up in flames. It was just an annoying exploiter, one in a long line of many. I think the scaling limit point is interesting because Rome explicitly did hit a scaling limit at the peak of their diversity and shortly afterwards collapsed into hell on earth. Cherry on top of Anatolians and Germanics running away with their identity because it had become completely meaningless.
> Phoenicians made a strategic mistake at the outset of the Punic wars
Out of curiosity, what would that be? I'd argue Rome's ability to sustain martial force well beyond what others would have considered reasonable was decisive in their advantage. Their culture, meanwhile, in assimilating and appropriating from outsiders meant Scipio was able to learn from Hannibal, and the Senate was willing to support his novel ideas. (Granted, Carthage is a bad example since they were a diversified maritime empire. They just got conquered.)
> Out of curiosity, what would that be? I'd argue Rome's ability to sustain martial force well beyond what others would have considered reasonable was decisive in their advantage.
To look at it in another light, it was actually perfectly reasonable. The Carthaginians simply took the Romans to be tribal upstarts at the beginning, rather than a budding empire. When the Elder Council realized Rome was another Assyria, they dumped out the war chests. If they did that from the beginning in 264, they would have rolled over Rome. It was too late for that when the war was taken to the sea.
America's diversity has not changed commensurately with the drop in trust, but economic factors have, and the charts I linked to back that correlation in other countries.
