Does diversity + proximity lead to war? Probably not, as far as the US is concerned

The news cycle is pretty moribund as of late. Things are gonna remain slow probably until the next round of 2020 election. Although this blog does a lot of predicting, I have no idea who out of the five or so major candidates will be the nominee. Some say it is Warren. Maybe. Maybe not.

A common saying I hear is “Diversity plus proximity always results in conflict”

This is one of those things Vox Day repeats over and over as if it’s true, but the empirical evidence shows otherwise. The data by Pinker shows that violence, in the US but also around the world, has been falling for decade in spite of increasing diversity. In spite of the occasional racially-motivated shooting (such as the August 4th shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, which claimed 20 lives), there is less civil unrest than ever in the US in spite of more diversity than ever. Look at the Civil War: ethnically and racially both sides were identical. This narrative that if enough non whites that whites will rise up or that sometime will break and the system will flail, seems like wishful thinking.

Also, would the elite knowingly support something that could lead to their destruction. If anything, increased ethnic diversity may have a stabilizing effect, by making any sort of cohesion or shared interest that is necessary for an uprising or destabilization to occur, nearly impossible.

I disagree with these narratives that America will collapse due to diversity or by spreading itself too thin, because such narratives are unsupported by empirical evidence. If you keep saying over and over that diversity and foreign intervention will lead to the undoing or death of America, yet America is doing better than ever (and better than more homogeneous and or isolationist countries such as Russia, Spain, Italy, Brazil and Turkey) in terms of a wide range of social and economic metrics, but also global influence and might, then that either means the narrative is wrong or you’re early. The first possibility cannot be discounted.

Using history to try to predict the future is difficult because there are subtle differences between the past and the present that can result in hugely diverging outcomes.

Vox Day is not alone in this regard. Peter Turchin, who in my opinion is an overrated researcher, has also been predicting crisis for years. From the post Peter Turchin is (probably) wrong about crisis, again:

One can argue that they only need to be right once, but given that these are the so-called experts and they have all the knowledge and degrees, shouldn’t their forecasts not have so many false positives? If someone predicts crisis for 30 years in a row and is only right on the 31st attempt, is that demonstrative of any actual ability or skill at forecasting? I would say not. Other times, the arguments brought forth for why, when, or how there will be crisis, are weak because of gaping logical or factual holes, or because there is simply not enough data to draw a meaningful conclusion (as stated above) with a sufficiently high degree of certainty. Vox Day has long argued that proximity + diversity = war. However, most revolutions are over economic and class reasons rather than race , and in spite of 200+ years of increasing ethnic and racial diversity in America, there is less unrest than ever before. That’s not to say support such diversity, but to proclaim that it will lead to war is unsupported by reality. Even the Civil War was not a race war, but rather a war fought for economic reasons between white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the North versus white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the South.

From the post America the outlier:

America, since its inception, has been moving in the direction of increasing diversity yet crime and unrest, in spite of all the talk of supposed unrest due to Trump, is at multi-generational lows, and much lower than that of Western and Southern Europe and South America, which have less ethnic diversity and more unrest. This not an endorsement of diversity, but rather and obvious counterpoint to Vox’s argument that should be addressed. One could argue that elites promote diversity because it mitigates the possibly of there being unrest that threatens their power.

Of course, one can site many conflicts arising from diversity and proximity, such as the Turks vs. Kurds, the Rwandan genocide, the Syrian civil war, Pakistan vs. India, Israel vs. Palestine, but America’s diversity situation is different in that the each group is relatively assimilated. Civic nationalism more or less seems to be a success in this regard. Even if you don’t like civic nationalism, it seems to be effective at unifying everyone under this American ‘ideal’, or at least attenuating possible unrest. Individual propensity for violence is low, because economic conditions are nice in America, which is why so many people want to move here, as opposed to the aforementioned examples where the diversity is imposed due to geography or invasion rather than choice.