Equity, diversity, and inclusion: Is EDI unquestionable?

In 2020, the American EDI movement exploded into Canada. EDI is the latest fad every modern organization must reflect. At a glance, EDI seems unquestionably true. It simply stands against unfairness, groupthink, and hatred of outsiders. But it is not so simple. Humanities professors have written about EDI for 50 years. Articles grew out of the 1960s American civil rights movement and created a new area of expertise. Today, high-priced consultants retrain bureaucracies by expunging bad thinking and replacing it with new ideas. According to EDI, an ideal board of directors should look like a middle-aged Benetton ad. Equity means equality of outcome. The consultants will say this is wrong and far too simple, but they will love the ad. Read: Equity and diversity cannot be left to chance The Ontario Medical Association and Canadian Medical Association take great pains to prove they are on the cutting edge of EDI. No one need question their passion. IS EDI NEW? Unquestioned truth—especially when it fuels a social movement—should give pause. EDI has rebranded ideas as old as Plato. However, EDI experts insist all thought prior to their own enlightenment suffers from unconscious bias (unless they say otherwise). EDI is truly new under the sun. Equity is just the same old equality agenda. “Equality” risks someone saying everyone should get an equal chance to try out for the team. That is not good enough for equalitarians. Everyone should be on the team. In The Republic, Plato presents a utopian society built on equality. Read: Perspective on CMA’s 2021 proposed pathway to equity and diversity Children should be taken from their parents and put into a state home. Kids need an equal start, equal training, equal nutrition, and equal exercise. Parents should also participate in their own group exercise classes, in the nude. Some assume Plato was joking. Others disagree—he simply offered a solution that takes the problem of equality with proper seriousness. The pursuit of equal outcomes is an ancient idea. ROUSSEAU: THE FIRST RADICAL EDI also repackages Rousseau’s work from the 18th century. Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains. Rousseau said social institutions condemn people to suffer lives of unfair treatment. Today, for example, boards choose people using systems that lead to unfair (unequal) outcomes. Rousseau fuelled the French Revolution and inspired Marx, which led to dozens of versions of Marxism. Modern progressivism also draws heavily on Rousseau’s thinking. We must reform society. Remove barriers that keep people poor, sick, and oppressed. Today is a painful transition from a benighted past to an enlightened future. Read: How embracing Equity, Diversity and Inclusion changed my practice SING-ALONG POLITICS John Lennon modernized Rousseau and riffed on Marx. Around the birth of the EDI research program, Lennon wrote the Beatles’ hits Revolution, 1968, then Working Class Hero, 1970, and finally Imagine, 1971. Lennon fumed that people loved his song but missed his message. Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace… Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world If we join the dreamers, the “world will live as one.” CAN WE EVER GET ENOUGH EQUALITY? Let’s assume EDI is an unvarnished good. It should be safe to ask: Does equality (or equity) have limits? If so, what are they? How do we find them? Who determines those limits? Can EDI cause harm? If so, what kinds of harm and to whom? Should we use any means to attain such a lofty goal as EDI? Can we ever have enough EDI? WHO DARES TO SPEAK? Read: Doctors of BC releases report on inclusion and diversity Equality is self-evidently good and impossibly vague. Robert Nisbet, the late American sociologist, tackled equality as social policy in 1975. Nisbet was a communitarian—a label shared with Hilary Clinton and President Barak Obama, but of a different flavour. This 400-word quote dares to question the equality-of-outcome agenda (bold added). “Equality has a built-in revolutionary force lacking in such ideas as justice or liberty. For once the ideal of equality becomes uppermost it can become insatiable in its demands. It is possible to conceive of human beings conceding that they have enough freedom or justice in a social order; it is not possible to imagine them ever declaring they have enough equality— once, that is, equality becomes a cornerstone of national policy. In this respect it resembles some of the religious ideals or passions which offer, just by virtue of the impossibility of ever giving them adequate representation in the actual world, almost unlimited potentialities for continuous onslaught against institutions. Affluence is a fertile ground for the spread of equalitarian philosophy. . . . the pains of affluence manifestly include in our age the pain of guilt over the existence of any and all inequalities. It is not enough, as we have been discovering, to create equality before the law—at least to the degree that this is ever possible—and to seek to create equality of opportunity. Vast systems labelled Affirmative Action or Open Admissions must be instituted. And then, predictably, it is discovered that even these are not enough. The reason for this is plain enough. Equality feeds on itself as no other single social value does. It is not long before it becomes more than a value. It takes on, as I have suggested, all the overtones of redemptiveness and becomes a religious rather than a secular idea. Like other historic religious ideas, and also ideas of political character, equality has an inherent drive that carries it well beyond national boundaries. The proper abode of equality, like any other redemptive idea, is all mankind, not simply this or that parochial community. We are already in the presence of this universalizing state of mind in discussions of equality. It is not enough that classes and groups in the United States, or in the West, should become equal. The entire world, especially the Third World, must be brought in. . . . But it is the nature of providential ideas like equality that they are stayed by neither fact nor logic. They acquire a momentum of their own, and I can think of a few things more probable than the spread of equalitarianism in the West—not despite but because of its manifest irrationality as the sovereign objective of national and world policy.”—Nisbet, Twilight of Authority, 1975, p 184-5 TALKIN’ BOUT A REVOLUTION Some say we are in the midst of a progressive cultural revolution. Old ideas are suspect: potentially biased and therefore bad. Tyranny rarely starts with a call to embrace obviously tyrannical thought. It starts as a pursuit of good intentions. Then it justifies any means to achieve its own ends. ASK QUESTIONS Good things welcome critique without threat of reprisal. Truth improves with testing. Beauty shines when seen beside lesser things. Has any senior leader dared to question EDI, other than asking how to expand it even further? Questioning accepted opinion is rarely safe, always risky. Questions often make things better—science rests on this assumption. Until people have courage to ask simple questions, the equalitarian agenda runs unopposed and unimproved. Boards that look like Benetton ads are just the beginning. Dr. Shawn Whatley is a family and emergency physician who practises in Mount Albert, Ont. He is the author of When Politics Comes Before Patients: Why and How Canadian Medicare is Failing and his website is shawnwhatley.com. The opinions expressed here are his own.

Equity, diversity, and inclusion: Is EDI unquestionable?

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