E pluribus pablum

I've been thinking about diversity.

No, really.

And not quite like that, either.

That is, I'm not questioning that diversity is good for a society; I merely want to opine that it makes them a drag to visit.

Let me try again.

Imagine a society is a string of Christmas lights. Imagine further that each different color of light on that string does not correspond with skin color (oh glib, facile reader), but with whatever measure of social heterogeneity you desire. Doesn't matter. Whatever way you want to slice it, the U.S. is a fairly multicolored string of lights (which, again, is a good thing, though my argument for regionalism is sold separately and is available in the comments section).

Now imagine that you travel to exotic destination X. You spend the first day marveling that the very bulbs of the Christmas tree lights look different -- which they do -- but when that novelty (quickly) wears off, you're left thinking: huh. Multicolor string o'lights. Whoopee.

Say you go instead to Thailand or Japan. Bulbs look different. And, geez: the whole string of lights is blue. The dazzling sociological implications can keep your brain humming along for the duration of the entire vacation. Better and more pompously: the social dislocation problematizes all your social relationships, allowing you to actually see yourself for the first time. It's as if all that homogeneity -- which is orthogonal to you -- turns the normal colorful background screen of your life, with which you have heretofore effortlessly blended, into a green screen. You are suddenly and unavoidably foreground.

Am I saying that I would like some societies to remain homogeneous purely for my convenience as a tool of navel-gazing self-discovery?

Yeah, sorta.

In my defense, it isn't just my self-discovery. I mean, I submit that any outsider has the means to similar epiphanies, and, surely, on a large enough scale, the suggestion becomes less horrible.

Second, this is really about the subjectivity of some types of diversity. When a part of Arlington county, Virginia, becomes colonized by Banana Republics and Apple stores, has it becomes more appealingly diverse? Yes, if the subject lives in that part of the county and the development replaces bland housing tracts dotted by Starbucki. No, if the subject shuttles among Bananacized neighborhoods in other cities and states and the comparatively idiosyncratic blandness of that part of Arlington -- its resistance to Bananacization -- was its individuality.

Third, doesn't it sound better if I complete the train of thought in the above point and liken the homogeneous society to an independent bookstore among the Borderses and Barneses and Noble?

It seems as though when one travels these days, barring to a Thailand or Japan, the best one can hope for is a different ratio of colors on the string. And, frankly, we're pretty dismal at detecting subtle differences in ratios.

I, for one, bemoan the loss of cleanly-delineated naturally-occurring social experiments.

I love that we still, for the moment, have national cultures with discernible differences on validated psychological instruments like degree of authoritarianism or egalitarianism or individualism, but, frankly, all this heterogeneity is introducing a lot of noise into the experimental paradigm and really mucking things up. On second thought, never mind the Christmas tree lights: imagine a glass full of sand in different colors, poured so that there are beautiful, brightly-colored swirls of red, green, blue, etc. Beautifully diverse. Unless your subjectivity is located at a particular point in the glass, and then it's simply red as far as the eye can see. Shake the cup vigorously, and life from within that glass is diverse once more: red grains! blue grains! green grains! And from the outside? Gray.

I wouldn't have actually predicted that the information age would've ushered in the gray glass of sand. I'd hoped it'd have gone in the opposite direction, towards open self-sorting: Are you an authoritarian wrongly born in Jamaica? Come to Vienna! Norway becomes (more of a) feminist paradise; Saudi Arabia is populated exclusively by angry men and Ann Coulter. Everybody wins. I would've wanted those colored sand swirls to have shone more vividly and starkly: homogeneity within; diversity between. A globe of two-hundred-odd would-be utopias, in friendly competition for like-minded residents; a planet where everyone could self-select their environment without judgment.

Entropy, of course, argues against the plan, as does nationalism -- two things I've never really understood very well. I mean, I get, in principle, that non-authoritarian Austrians would be loath to move for personality reasons because of intangibles like opera and edelweiss, but this seems short-sighted to me.

Perhaps it's my own peripatetic life, but what I end up missing -- sometimes with disturbing intensity -- are the bits of uniqueness from different cultures and nations that can't, unfortunately, be assembled into a coherent whole. It's like that fabulous visual gag from the thoroughly under-rated Babe: Pig in the City.

People say you can't go home again, which is utterly true. I feel as though my emotional home, though, much like Babe's Metropolis, rather curiously both never existed and is in danger of disappearing.