Changing mood and diversity

I've yet to finish Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, but there's a great anecdote on diversity from the book (below) that clearly shows shifting social mood. When I review the book I will go deeper into the issue of diversity, which was considered a good thing during rising social mood, but which already has a growing amount of social science research exposing it as a negative factor, i.e. more diverse societies and organizations are weaker because of their diversity.

This is what is interesting about diversity and why it may be an important area to watch as social mood declines. There is a mood driven shift in attitudes towards diversity, but diversity is also a bad policy that will be exposed as a major problem for diverse societies. Consider these pairs of characteristics, the first is a positive mood characteristic and the second negative mood: togetherness – separatism, inclusion – exclusion. Diversity is about separatism and exclusion because it is about maintaining group identity within a larger group. Diversity was viewed positively because the general social mood was extremely positive and therefore feelings of togetherness and inclusion overwhelmed the separatism and exclusion that are characteristics of diversity. Now that social mood is declining, diversity will not only be viewed negatively, but its negative traits will be revealed just like massive debt loads have been revealed as a major economic problem.

From page 301, Buchanan notes that when the French soccer team won the 1998 World Cup, the diverse team was celebrated as a "symbol of a new diverse France." The 2010 team was denounced as scum, troublemakers, "guys with chickpeas in their heads instead of brains." Buchanan sources the quotes from Racial Tinge Stains World Cup Exit in France, but I went looking for some other articles and came across these stories from earlier this year.

France football heads mired in race row over alleged quotas for ethnic players

The issue hit a raw nerve in France in 1998, where their World Cup victory by a multicultural team led by Zinedine Zidane was hailed as "black, blanc, beur", and was said to symbolise a new beginning for a mixed nation, but it mainly gave way to great unease and bickering over the racial profile of "Les Bleus". Not only did the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen complain of too many black people in the team, a leading Socialist regional head, the late Georges Frêche, was expelled from his party in 2007 for making the same observation.

Crucially, the French team's mutiny at the World Cup last summer was privately blamed by some on black or Muslim players, including the French convert to Islam, Franck Ribéry. Speculation was that the team had fragmented over the lack of the football team's "national identity".

French football 'approved quotas on number of black players’

In February, shortly after his appointment, Mr Blaquart spoke of the necessity to “prioritise intelligence in the game with respect to the technical and, above all, athletic aspect.”

Mr Blanc is reported to have approved a selection process favouring young talent sharing “our culture, our history”.

The site’s sources added that Mr Blanc cited the current would football champions Spain, reportedly saying: “The Spanish, they say 'we don’t have a problem. We have no blacks’”.