Rather than dismiss “diversity” out of hand, let’s just accept that we have no idea what it means. It’s like a shibboleth, some kind of idol or false god that our society worships. It’s extraordinarily hard to pin down—in fact, the Stanford administrators tasked with defining “multiculturalism” in the 1990s did so in the vaguest terms imaginable, as if protecting cult mysteries. What is clear is that we are encamped at the altar of diversity, venerating and honoring it as the highest thing.

So the question we should ask is this: in worshiping diversity, in making it the highest value, what is it that we are missing? Is this an exercise in attention redirection, a kind of magic show in which you’re watching the magician and don’t notice the gorilla jumping up and down in back of the stage?

There’s a latent premise in this line of questioning. When you observe, as we did, that what’s going on is both very evil and very silly, it sounds almost self-contradictory. How can something be both very silly and very evil at the same time? The answer is that what’s going on is very silly, but the silliness is distracting us from very important things.