Is Facebook More Like a Newspaper or a Video Game?

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Over the weekend I listened to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (as narrated by Nick Offerman.) It’s an enjoyable book, though something of a polemic, and easier to understand if you know that Twain hated Sir Walter Scott (among other things he blamed him for the Civil War). As you may or may not know, Scott was a well-known novelist of the time who romanticized the entire medieval period, and, when you read Twain’s novel, it’s apparent that it was born out Twain’s dislike of Scott specifically and of the idealization of the medieval period more generally.

One of Twain’s major goals was to show how backward everything was during the medieval period, and how awful things were for the great majority of people. Consequently one of the major themes of the book is the importance and wonder of progress, and on that front I may revisit it in more depth, but for now I just want to pluck one fact out of the book to set the stage for this post’s subject.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story, an engineer is sent backward through time to the era of Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and Camelot. Where, in the course of various adventures, the engineer attempts to modernize ancient Britain by implementing such things as the telegraph (and telephone), a new monetary system, and the abolition of slavery. All of it spiced up with the liberal application of dynamite. But of all the things this engineer considers important, Twain lays particular emphasis on the creation of a newspaper. As I recall it’s one of the first, if not the first thing the engineer turns his mind too once he has a free hand.

The importance of newspapers specifically and the free press more generally, was not only important to Twain, of course, it has been a major feature of American ideology going all the way back to the founding. And it has generally been seen as something which by itself counterbalances all manner of possible abuses. For example, this quote from Jefferson sums up the role of “papers” nicely:

The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.

This was written while Jefferson was ambassador to France, and if you’re familiar with his later long running battle with Hamilton (which occurred mostly in the newspapers of the time) it’s possible he may have eventually moderated this absolute support. But I’ll have more to say about that later.

To our examples of Twain and Jefferson we could add the First Amendment, of course, and also dozens of other historical quotes all supporting the freedom of the press. Though, as I said in the past, despite all this historic support, there have been some people who have recently started to question unlimited freedom of the press. Still this mostly comes up with reference to hate speech. When you’re talking about being informed about politics, almost everyone from Jefferson, down to the present day has felt that absolute freedom to discuss politics is central to the American ideology and particularly central to the workings of democracy. At least... everyone thought this... until Russia came along... and started buying ads on Facebook…

Okay, I might be exaggerating the impact, but the alarm over the issue is interesting. Particularly the question of where Facebook fits, when we’re talking about freedom of the press and newspapers and all the things which have been so important back to the very beginning of the republic.

When speaking of where social media fits, if nothing else, it’s definitely clear that the rules of the game have been dramatically changed. To illustrate this I’d like to start with looking at the money spent by the Russians. Lots of people go on and on about the Russians tampering with the election, but how much money and influence were they really throwing around? For me this appears to be the part of the story getting the least critical attention, but the part which is potentially the most fascinating. To keep things simple let’s look just at what was spent on Facebook.

From what I can tell there are two numbers floating around, $100,000 and $46,000. I think one number is earlier in the year, and one number is right on the eve of the election, but I’m happy to add the two of them together to get a grand total of $146k being spent by the Russians on Facebook. In fact let’s be even more conservative and assume that some spending hasn’t yet been uncovered and double it, and then round the whole thing up to $300k.

Having come up with a total, the first question I want to ask is, how does that compare to what the candidates themselves spent on Facebook? Well the number there, as far as I can tell, is $81 million for both candidates, which means the two candidates outspent the Russians (even using our very conservative figure) by 270x (or 3/10ths of a percent.) And, as I said this is a conservative estimate, TechCrunch, a site, which as far as I know, doesn’t have any conservative leanings, looks at the more narrow pre-election spending and concludes the Russians were outspent by 1,760x (or 6/100ths of a percent.)

But wait? You may be saying. I heard that the Russians reached 126 million people, isn’t that 40% of the country? Surely that has to represent more money than the $146k or even the $300k we’re talking about? Perhaps. As far as I can tell Facebook will sell you impressions (a fancy way of counting every time your ad gets loaded whether or not the person even notices it) for a half a cent. At that rate 126 million impressions would have cost them $630k, so still very much within the realm of numbers I’m talking about and it only takes our worst case scenario from 270x, to 129x (still less than a percent) as much spending. But also, Facebook gives you a break if your content is particularly viral, meaning that maybe they got the impressions for less than that. Also, I assume that Facebook, at the point where they have to appear before congress and explain themselves, would make sure they reconciled the amount spent with the number of people reached, but maybe not. Either way I don’t think it changes the fact that the Russians spent a relatively tiny amount. This comparison becomes more extreme when you look beyond the candidate’s Facebook spending to the total campaign spending, which clocks in well north of a billion dollars. (This site gives the total money raised by both candidates at $2.35 billion.) Of course then you’d want to look at total spending by the Russians across all platforms, but you still get a situation where the money spent by the candidates is hundreds of times greater than that spent by the Russians.

All of this leaves us with two possible conclusions: Either, the Russian money was a drop in the bucket, and it had no effect on the outcome of the election. (And everyone should get over things.) Or, social media spending, particularly of the kind the Russians did, is disproportionately effective, and that for a measly 150k (or 300k, or 600k) they were able to buy the presidential election for Trump, when it otherwise would have gone to Clinton.  Now, to be fair, this was a close election, and in close elections you have the benefit of being able to point to any single factor and credibly claim that it could have swung the election (2000 is great for that sort of thing). And thus, I suppose, it’s even possible that there’s a third option. That each dollar the Russian groups spent on Facebook was about as effective as a dollar spent on TV ads, or canvassing, or what have you, but that the race was close enough that it still made the difference in who won.

If it’s the first, that the Russian spending made no difference, then there’s not much of a story, just the typical Monday morning quarterbacking that’s going to happen after any close election. Democrats can’t accept that they lost “fairly” and so they focus on nefarious outside influences to explain the election. It wasn’t that Clinton should have campaigned more in Michigan (or at a minimum kept her TV ads there running in October), it was the evil Russians (cue Boris and Natasha.)

This is certainly a possible explanation, and perhaps even the most likely, but it’s not very interesting, so for the rest of the post I’m going to assume that social media did have a disproportionate impact on the race, and to be fair there is more evidence than just the Russian angle. When even the Economist is running a cover story titled Social media’s threat to democracy you have to figure that I’m not the only one who thinks that social media spending might have been disproportionately effective. For example, if we look beyond the Russian angle, many people think that it was Trump’s (technically Jared Kushner’s) mastery of Facebook that explains why he won. This section from The Economist is particularly interesting:

The Leave campaign...experiment[ed] with different versions [of Facebook ads]... dropping ineffective ones. The Trump campaign in 2016 did much the same, but on a much larger scale: on an average day it fed Facebook between 50,000 and 60,000 different versions of its advertisements...Some were aimed at just a few dozen voters in a particular district.

As I said in the beginning, there’s a strong bias in American towards considering the press, and particularly the newspapers, to be the good guys and going out of our way to give them as wide a latitude as possible, particularly in reporting political matters. If that’s correct and the press are the good guys, what changed with Facebook? Why is it different than a newspaper? Why is its effect malevolent where previously, on the balance, the press was considered to have a benevolent effect? (There is an argument that it doesn’t, but for the purposes of this post we’re going to assume that Twain and Jefferson were correct.)

I think that quote about the 50,000 ads a day gives us a pretty good idea of the difference.

The first place where most people are inclined to place blame is the hyper-partisan character of the ads Trump and the Russians (and to a lesser extent the Democrats) were showing on Facebook. And I agree this is tempting target, but remember how I said that we would return to a discussion of Jefferson? Well, when Jefferson, who, remember, was a strong supporter of freedom of the press, was waging his titanic battle against Hamilton. That battle mostly took place in the newspapers of the time, and the partisanship and venom of those newspapers makes our own disagreements seem pretty mild. And these weren’t obscure newspapers, these were the major papers of the time. Thus I don’t think hyper-partisanship is a very good candidate for the difference between newspapers at the founding of the country and social media today.

The next place people look, and a place I’ve gone to myself, is the idea that Facebook is just too big. Senator Al Franken (yeah the guy who used to be on SNL) just recently gave a speech about this issue. Wired titled it the Speech that Big Tech has Been Dreading, and in it Franken not only called out Facebook, but also Google and Amazon, saying the following:

Everyone is rightfully focused on Russian manipulation of social media, but as lawmakers it is incumbent on us to ask the broader questions: How did big tech come to control so many aspects of our lives?

Now whether Facebook has too much control or whether they’re big enough to be a true monopoly is certainly up for debate, but you can see where a large number of people get a significant amount of their information from this one source. In other words, there are a lot of people who spend 4 hours a day on Facebook, but don’t spend five minutes reading something like New York Times. Now if Facebook ended up showing these people a broad selection of news from all over the political spectrum this dominance might not be a problem, but as we all know, Facebook targets you with ads they know you will like. And beyond that they provided Trump and the Russians with the ability to target ads down to the level of the individual. As the Economist pointed out, in addition to those 50,000 ads, they were also running ads which were aimed at just a few dozen voters in a particular district. All of which brings me to my next point.

When you read the front page of the New York Times, or even of the local paper you know you’re reading exactly the same front page as everyone else. This has largely carried over to the web. When I go to cnn.com I see the same thing my wife sees when she goes to cnn.com. But this is not what happens at all with Facebook, as the example of targeting a few dozen individuals indicates. But people don’t realize this. People see something on Facebook and they naturally assume that this is more or less what everyone is seeing. Consequently they are far less likely to question whether it’s true or not. And even if they do question it, or ignore it, or if it’s ineffective in any way, then the Trump team still has 49,999 tries, each DAY, to get it right.  All of which is to say that Facebook (and most social media) is targeted and responsive in a way that makes it a completely different animal from traditional media. The Economist describes it thusly:

The algorithms that Facebook, YouTube and others use to maximise “engagement” ensure users are more likely to see information that they are liable to interact with. This tends to lead them into clusters of like-minded people sharing like-minded things, and can turn moderate views into more extreme ones. “It’s like you start a vegetarian and end up a vegan,” says Zeynep Tufecki of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, describing her experience following the recommendations on YouTube. These effects are part of what is increasing America’s political polarization, she argues.

Even taking into account this increase in polarization, if that’s all there was to it, we’d probably be okay. But on top of everything else, not only do Facebook and similar sites, disseminate hyper-partisan information, act as a near monopoly, convince isolated people that they’re part of a community, and increase polarization, they are also are doing their very best to make all of this as addictive as possible.

This is usually the point where someone comes along and accuses me of being just another old guy who thinks the world is going to hell in a handbasket and just wants the damn kids to get off his lawn. And maybe that is exactly what’s going on. Here’s what the article from The Economist had to say about this possibility:

Social media are hardly the first communication revolution to first threaten, then rewire the body politic. The printing press did it (see our essay on Luther). So did television and radio, allowing conformity to be imposed in authoritarian countries at the same time as, in more open ones, promoting the norms of discourse which enabled the first mass democracies.

Several things are worth pointing out from that quote. First, there at the end, we have another example of past media serving to improve democracy. Second if you boil down the question to whether social media represents a communication revolution, and separate it from the effect it may or may not have had in the most recent election, I think most people would not hesitate to declare it revolution. If that’s the case, perhaps we should move away from considering the narrow question of what the Russians did or didn’t do, since we may be too close to the issue, and examine other examples of communication revolution. The quote mentions two, the more recent TV and radio revolution and the revolution in printing at the time of Martin Luther.

For those who aren’t up on their history. The reason they had an essay on Luther is that we just hit the 500th anniversary of the nailing of the 95 Theses to the Wittenberg church door (if that in fact happened). And as they allude to, one of the big reasons the Protestant reformation happened when it did was the invention of the printing press. Luther himself was a master of the medium and in the 1520s, he was responsible for more than a fifth of the empire’s entire output of pamphlets. At the time one churchman said, “Every day it rains Luther books. Nothing else sells.”

As you also may or may not recall the Protestant Reformation resulted in one of the bloodier periods of European history (the 30 Years War, the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, etc.) So that’s one of the revolutions. On the other hand, the TV and Radio revolution was almost entirely peaceful and we can always hope that even if social media does represent a revolution it will be more similar to the revolution brought on by TV and Radio than the one brought on by the printing press. Though, I fear that when you look at ease of control, social media is a lot closer to the decentralized revolution of the printing press, then the centralization of TV and radio.

The only question left, assuming you agree with me thus far, is what we should do about it? The Economist asks the same question and comes up with this response:

What is to be done? People will adapt, as they always do. A survey this week found that only 37% of Americans trust what they get from social media, half the share that trust printed newspapers and magazines. Yet in the time it takes to adapt, bad governments with bad politics could do a lot of harm.

I agree. People will adapt. But remember that Facebook and the other sites can also adapt. The Russians can adapt. And we already read about the 50,000 adaptations the Trump campaign was making every day. I have no doubt we will eventually adapt, but in the meantime we’re trying to hit a moving target, and a lot can happen while we’re working it out.

Finally, given the evident success of this tactic, how much more money and how much bigger is this problem going to be in 2020?

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The Difficulties of Mormon Diversity

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At the end of every blog post I try to add something clever about donating. The “try” part isn’t about adding the sentence, it’s about being clever, and I fear that I fail more often than not. But asking for money is always something of a grubby business, with lots of questions attached. For example, just the other day, one of my donors, who I know personally, asked me what I did with the money. Well there are hosting expenses for the podcast, and I use some of it for my vague attempts at marketing. Of course, the dream is to make a living at it, but I am a LONG way from doing that.

Among the questions, you might be wondering about, is whether I, myself, donate to any blogs or podcasts. I do, to several. One of the blogs/podcasts I donate to is LeadingLDS, and if you happen to be LDS I urge you to give it a listen. It’s fantastic. And of course once you do listen to it, and realize how great it is, you should donate to it as well. It’s run by my good friend Kurt Francom, and in fact if you could only donate to one of us, you should definitely donate to him. He is trying to make a living at it.

You may be thinking that all of this is a prelude to some sort of fundraising drive, that pledge week has come to the blog, but actually all of this is just my way of introducing the subject. Recently LeadingLDS published an article, by Ryan Gottfredson, about the orthodox-progressive divide in Mormonism. It was a great and thought-provoking article and it prompted me to want to discuss the same issue. There are several reasons for this: First, I want to offer some comments on the original article. Second, I want to offer more extreme examples of what he’s describing, though still within the context of the Mormon Church. And finally, I want to look at how this applies to the world at large, because, obviously, a similar split is happening everywhere, not just within the LDS Church.

As I said, let’s begin with my thoughts and comments on the original article. Right off the bat, I should make clear, that I thoroughly enjoyed it. Not only did it cover a topic that needs as much attention as possible, but it did it in a way that was straightforward and useful. Accordingly here, in no particular order are some things I liked:

1. His emphasis on not avoiding conflict but managing it, was particularly timely, and something I think that everyone should be reminded of, but particularly religious leaders, since there is often an incorrect assumption that if religion is working properly that there will be no conflict.
2. Furthermore pointing out that conflict, if handled well, can be beneficial. (A point I’ll definitely be returning to when it comes time to discuss the world at large.)
3. Specifically identifying the orthodox-progressive divide, naming it, and relating it to other religions in a way that was easy to understand. In particular, I think most Mormons would be alarmed to have a split in Mormonism as great as the split in beliefs between Orthodox and Reform Judaism.
4. I thoroughly enjoyed his examples, particularly given that I have encountered three of the four things he gave examples of personally, so it was nice to know it wasn’t just me. (Full disclosure: I have a beard. This will be important later.)
5. As our understanding of psychology grows it’s becoming more apparent that fundamentally some people have a more “liberal” or progressive disposition while other people have a more conservative disposition. He specifically brings in the OCEAN standard, which I won’t get into, but if you’re curious you should check out the original article.

My final point is a bigger one, and unlike the other five, it’s a criticism. But you should not take this to mean that I didn’t like the article or that I wouldn’t recommend it. As I already said it’s great. This is only an indication that it takes more words to expand on why a certain part might be a little weak, than it takes to say, “Preach on Brother!” a bunch of times. So what is this criticism? I feel that his examples, and his orthodox-progressive continuum are both drawn too narrowly.

Let’s look at his actual examples, as I said above, I liked them, but I also think that if we closely examine the problems he discusses, that while they are real, are not the kinds of things that keep people up at night. At least the stuff he talks about is not what’s currently vexing me. I’ll start by relating his examples and then offering up a different example, in a similar vein, but vastly more severe. I’ll be doing this from the perspective of a hypothetical Stake President. For those who aren’t LDS, the Stake President, is the highest authority most people would actually know and interact with. In other words for most issues, he’s where the buck stops.

Gottfredson’s first example of conflict between the orthodox and progressive wing of the Church concerned a meeting about ministering to people on the fringe. And the problems which arose when someone brought up people struggling with same sex attraction as one of the groups on the fringe. From the article:

More orthodox members… were not very happy that same-gender attraction was brought up in the meeting, and several went to the Stake President to complain.

As I said I have experienced situations very similar to this. And yes you will have people who feel that even mentioning same sex attraction (SSA) is the first step on a slippery slope that leads to gay marriage in LDS temples. But when even the LDS apostles are talking about reaching out to individuals struggling with SSA, and when the Church is putting up a website about the issue. I don’t think this example is really going to be that difficult for our hypothetical Stake President.

Now, to turn to a more extreme version of this. My wife has several close family members who are gay and in the past she actually marched in the gay pride parade, as you might imagine she is not the only LDS person to have done so. In particular I’m thinking of Mormons Building Bridges, who have a webpage devoted exclusively to pride parades. On that page they mention an interview with one of the apostles, Elder Todd Christofferson where he seems to be saying it’s okay to march in a pride parade. Despite this, imagine a situation where a member’s gay son, and the son’s husband want the member to march with them in the pride parade. You can see where this situation, even in light of the comments by Elder Christofferson, presents a very different, and much more difficult question, than the situation given in the example.

To reiterate, this is not to say that the initial example is not valuable, but rather to say that things won’t end there. And I’m interested in examining how to deal with conflict which increasingly appears to difficult or impossible to reconcile.

His second example is about beards, and the argument wasn’t so much about the appropriateness of beards but whether a Stake President was making a reasonable request to have certain of the leaders be clean shaven, and if so, whether it was the individual's duty to obey that request. In reality it was less a debate about beards than a debate between obedience and agency/choices.

Nearly this exact thing happened to me. I was called to a position of leadership and the Stake President asked me to shave my beard. At the time, I’d had my beard for probably 13 years (with the exception of shaving it off once on a dare, but then growing it right back.) And I admit it did seem silly. But I was prepared to shave it off, if that’s what he wanted. Fortunately the Stake Presidency was replaced before I was put in, and the new Stake President didn’t care. I bring this up to point out that, having been on the other side of this issue, that while it was a little bit annoying it wasn’t that big of a deal.

As a more extreme example, imagine this: I often talk about the Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA). Once again we turn from my actual Stake President, to our hypothetical Stake President, who may already be getting pressure we don’t even know about on beards (I have it on pretty firm authority that President Uchtdorf is very anti-facial hair.) And then you get someone from the MTA, who comes in and asks him what the Church’s position is on replacing his perfectly working hand with a cybernetic hand, or wants to know the church’s position on cryonics. With the beard you can at least look at Church Presidents previous to David O. McKay, but where do you go for the answers about cybernetic hands? You may think this is more “improbable” than “extreme”, but it will be happening sooner than you think, for example cryonics is already available.

His third example concerns a discussion of the apostasy of early members of the Church, along with offering reasons for why these people might have apostatized. This discussion alarmed people who didn’t want any focus given to potentially negative events from the early history of the Church. Once again, given the lengths that the Church itself has gone to provide illumination on these issues, including publishing the Joseph Smith Papers, the Gospel Topics Essays, and things like that, I don’t think this is going to be very tough one for our hypothetical Stake President to handle.

Once again it may seem like I’m beating up on the original article, which is not my intent. In the original example he’s talking about being in the middle of giving a lesson when the people he’s teaching start to object, I have very much been in a similar position, and I agree that it requires a great degree of tact to avoid causing offense or discomfort. Accordingly the article touches on something that’s very common and very difficult, but it’s manageable, and the original article is exactly what you should be reading to understand how to manage it. As I said, the direction I’m headed and what I want to explore is the stuff that is less manageable, not only because of my own curiosity, but because I think that’s the way things are headed.

In any event, returning to the example, we’ve discussed the original, what’s the more extreme version? Well at the last conference, apostle Dallin H. Oaks gave a talk where he revisited and re-emphasized the Church’s Proclamation on the Family, explaining how it came about, the care with which it was crafted, and the ways in which the world has changed since it was issued. In it he draws particular attention to the ways in which attitudes towards same-sex marriage (SSM) have changed and reiterates that the Church’s position has not, and is still that “marriage [is] between a man and a woman”. Lincoln Cannon, prominent member of the MTA (and yes, I’m using them again) responded to this by, as far as I can tell, acknowledging the inspiration of the Family Proclamation, but pointing out that it doesn’t specifically enjoin against same-sex marriage. And further pointing out that Church standards on marriage have changed, i.e. with respect to polygamy. All of this culminating, again, as far as I can discern, (perhaps he’ll stop by and clarify) in arguing that Elder Oaks is wrong when he claims that the church’s standard will not change even in the future.

His final example, concerns a statement released by the Church in support of the LoveLoud festival, which has a specific focus on LGBT youth. Once again the response was predictable with some people angry at the recognition while others applauded the Church for being so inclusive. In this case it’s something the Church officially did, so our hypothetical Stake President should have no problem passing the buck upward, so to speak, though to be fair it is possible for people to become disaffected and leave because they’re more conservative than the main body. Still, as I think the previous examples of SSM and SSA show, people who feel the Church is not progressive enough are far more likely to leave than those who feel we’re not conservative enough.

As the more extreme example, I turn to another episode of LeadingLDS where Francom had a roundtable interview with several members who experience SSA, gender dysphoria and family members of individuals with those issues. In this episode one of the female panelists was married to a man who strongly felt that his true gender was female. To make her husband feel comfortable the ward/bishop (and I assume the Stake President) had decided to allow this man to attend church meetings while dressed as a woman. That is, by all accounts, remarkably open-minded, and I suppose we already know what decision the Stake President made in that situation, but I don’t imagine that it was an easy decision, and I’m guessing that most Stake Presidents are hoping to not have to deal with similar situations.

Again, I am not providing the more “extreme” examples as an attempt to undermine the original article. In fact following the LDS principle of milk before meat, I think the original article represents some excellent milk, and a great entry way into understanding the issue, and dealing with the conflicts that can arise, in fact if you have somehow made it this far without reading Gottfredson’s article you should read it before continuing with this one. But, having read that article I think there’s some pretty tough meat to tackle afterwards. Whether it’s someone who wants to march in the gay pride parade, or a man who wants to wear a dress to church, and the question of where to draw the line is difficult and only going to get more difficult. It’s definitely something I’ve struggled with for a long time.

I may have mentioned a recent trip to Montreal, but I don’t think I mentioned why I went. Well, the purpose of that trip was to visit an old mission companion, who has come out as gay, left the church and now lives with his husband/partner. (Which I guess makes me one of the progressive members? Who would have thunk it.) While there, I asked my friend where I should draw the line. Obviously his response was that I should be pretty accommodating, but even he thought the story of the man attending church in a dress was stretching things.

Obviously being maximally accommodating is one possible strategy, and is, in fact, the strategy that probably the majority of people have adopted. And by doing this we do end up with maximum diversity. Which is one of Gottfredson’s recommendations. That said, diversity is an interesting word, and I don’t think I’m being very controversial to say that it’s a loaded word, so loaded that it’s lost many of the nuances of meaning it might once have had. In fact if I’m being honest I think that these days it’s become less an exhortation which leads beneficial actions and outcomes, and more a password, that lets you skip otherwise difficult questions and shows that you’re “with the program”.

I know that for the really progressive (those people featured in the extreme examples) Dallin H. Oaks is probably their least favorite apostle, but I’d like to reference a talk he gave on diversity back in 1999:

Since diversity is a condition, a method, or a short-term objective—not an ultimate goal—whenever diversity is urged it is appropriate to ask, “What kind of diversity?” or “Diversity in what circumstance or condition?” or “Diversity in furtherance of what goal?” This is especially important in our policy debates, which should be conducted not in terms of slogans but in terms of the goals we seek and the methods or shorter-term objectives that will achieve them. Diversity for its own sake is meaningless and can clearly be shown to lead to unacceptable results.

And this is where, to conclude, I’d like to shift from talking about the Church to talking about the world at large. There is a similar orthodox-progressive split, and similar conflicts, and similar calls for diversity. And I think both the examples we’ve already covered and Elder Oaks counsel about diversity being a means to an end, rather than an end itself, transfer very well to the wider society.

To being with, not only is diversity a means to an end, but there are various kinds of diversity. (This is one of the nuances which is in danger of being lost.) The two biggest categories are ideological diversity and qualitative diversity. As an example someone might have the quality of being a women, or asian, or transgendered, but none of those qualities necessarily imply anything about their ideology, which may also be different, or, more and more, exactly the same.

To Gottfredson’s credit he mostly emphasizes ideological diversity, which, if you’re looking at diversity as a means to an end, rather than an end itself, is the sort of diversity we should be encouraging. (Interestingly, religion is one place where someone might plausibly argue that you shouldn’t have a diversity of ideas.) Ideological diversity is how you get new ideas, it’s how you keep one idea from being taken to an extreme, and it’s the only way liberal societies function period. Despite this there has recently been a rejection of ideological diversity in favor of qualitative diversity.

In many respects this rejection mirrors what is happening in the Church, though at a much larger scale. And the punchline to all this is that qualitative diversity is, for all intents and purposes, diversity for its own sake, and because of that ends up being naturally opposed to ideological diversity because it is, in fact it’s own separate ideology. Qualitative diversity/diversity for its own sake, ends up being indistinguishable from ideologies like “Live and Let Live” or “Do whatever makes you feel good.”  Or more broadly the idea that no one should be able to tell anyone else what they should do. And if that’s your ideology I suppose that’s fine, but by cloaking it as true diversity, those advocating this end up entirely undermining, true, ideological diversity.

Of course you can see why Elder Oaks was worried about it, since telling other people what they should do is the essence of religion. And I understand that people are uncomfortable with this, and that it is, in fact, precisely the reason they’re not in favor of ideological diversity. Because certain ideologies may condemn whatever it is they want to be doing. But, as usual, people overstate the value of individualism and understate the value of sacrifice and community. Thus there is a natural tension between doing something for the good of the community and the inherent selfishness of diversity as many people commonly understand it. This is what makes Gottfredson’s advocacy of ideological diversity, and all advocacy of ideological diversity so important. And this is what makes allowing the constructive conflict he advocates, important as well, because ideological diversity functions best when there is a marketplace of competitive ideas.

There’s much more that I wanted to say, and I’m not entirely sure that what I’ve have said is as clear as I want it to be, but I’m out of time. So, I’ll end by emphasizing the importance of allowing ideological diversity. Of not confusing it with diversity for its own sake, and finally of recognizing that this whole subject is becoming more and more difficult. So, if your hypothetical Stake President, asks you to shave your metaphorical beard, remember the importance of ideological diversity, and try to be understanding…

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