Cat Farmer asked me if I had written anywhere about the neologism 'diversitarian' or 'diversitarianism', to which I replied.
bkMarcus
No, I haven't written about it anywhere but in email.
It's a term that (as far as I know) I made up.
But if a proponent of liberty is a libertarian, then it seems to follow that a proponent of diversity is a diversitarian.
I think the first time I wrote it down was a couple years ago, trying to label the distinction between my negative philosophy (libertarian) and my positive philosophy (diversitarian) -- or between my principled limits and my strategic preference, which is meta-strategic rather than single-solution. Diversity is also an aesthetic for me. It is both practical and beautiful.
And of course, it ties back to liberty, because liberty depends on decentralization, and centralization is the death of diversity. It is my contention, therefore, that a maximization of peaceful diversity is critically dependent on freedom from coercion. It was, if I remember properly, your own comments on STR on the central regulation of diversity that first spurred me to write to you.
I recently described the term this way:
I'd like to introduce vocabulary to make a distinction.
Let's call the practical, strategy-based position 'diversitarianism' -- the advocacy of decentralized, diverse strategies, solutions, services, cultures, etc. This is what I now understand many to mean by "the market" -- although I think the idea applies to all biological, ecological, social, organizational, negotiated exchange-based relationships, and not just what most people understand by the term 'economic'.
Now let's call the ideological, ethical, principle-based position against the initiation of force 'libertarianism' -- the advocacy of voluntary organization and the rejection of all proactive coercion, no matter what the stated intention.
-- laissez faire, bk --------------------------- http://www.BlackCrayon.com/ ---------------------------