We are so used to living with meaningless expressions that we hardly notice when new absurdities are foisted upon us. “Multicultural” is supposed to suggest openness to different cultures. But since each culture, to the extent that it is distinctive, is unique, to be properly “multicultural,” would be the intellectual equivalent of being in a dozen places at the same time. The real object of all multicultural education is to deprive its American and European victims of every last shred and tatter of their own cultural background and render them members of an “acultural” proletariat.

“Diversity” is even more absurd. In a society that encouraged diversity, the government would simply leave everyone alone to pursue his own tastes according to the culture in which he was born and bred. But the proponents of diversity are not at all interested in such a laissez-faire approach. The cult of “diversity” has only one objective: to replace Christendom with a uniform “world” culture, which (like “world music”) borrows a few rags and tatters of conflicting cultural traditions and stitches them, as brightly colored patches, into the gigantic plastic tarp that will cover the globe and smother every cultural tradition “from China to Peru.”

The true meaning of “diversity” (“the condition of being unlike,” as the OED defines it) is revealed by the word itself, which is derived from Latin diversus (opposed, different), the participle of diverto (to turn against or away from something). The closely related “perversity” (from Latin perverto, to turn away from what is right) would do as well, if it did not suggest there are standards of right and wrong. Those who want to turn away from their own culture and who spend their lives opposing its fundamental assumptions have found the perfect word to sum up their cultural self-hatred.

For over 20 years, diversity has been a code word for the intolerant toleration that sailed, for a time, under the flag of “political correctness.” René Dubos, the ecological globalist who gave us the pernicious phrase “think globally, act locally” (translation: think globally and work to subordinate your hometown to the global culture), summed up the totalitarian essence of diversity: “Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.” While there are people whose manners (such practices as cannibalism, incest, drug use, rape, human sacrifice) offend those of us who have been brought up in the Western tradition, it is up to the West to hold its nose and refuse to pass judgment. What Dubos meant, of course, was that the West could remain Western only up to the point that it implied no value-judgment against anything non-Western, which is to be not Western at all.