Reply to comment

As several people have commented on, I was also very interested in how difficult it seemed to be for us to separate mental and physical diversity in our discussion.  In considering why this might be, it seems to me that to some degree more physically obvious diversities may lead to different ways of thinking, and therefore mental diversity.  We’ve talked some in class about the biopsychosocial model of behavior – clearly there must be genetic (biological) factors that play a role in determining an individual’s personality and styles of thought.  However, it also seems to be true that an individual is in part shaped by their experiences.  Diversity in terms of race, socioeconomic status, and religion (the more obviously forms of diversity that we talked about) certainly must shape the experiences that a person has and how others treat or react to them, and therefore probably helps to shape how they approach situations and solve problems.  Because of this, it would make sense to me that a group of people from varying races, socioeconomic backgrounds, etc. would also be a mentally diverse group.  

I do find it interesting how uncomfortable some people are made by the issue of confronting diversity – for example, teachers who were uncomfortable during the diversity training that we discussed.  I imagine that diversity training would involve confronting the more obvious diversity issues rather than explicitly discussing diversity of thought processes.  I think that it is really the idea that someone else sees things or thinks about things in an entirely different way that makes people nervous – people are uncomfortable with what they don’t know or understand.  I also think that people tend to assume that people who look like them or who have had similar life experiences to themselves think in the same way that they do.  Therefore, possibly more obvious differences make people nervous because they take them to be indicative of differences in mental processes.  

I personally believe that diversity is crucial for our success as a race.  It is easy for me to believe the economist’s equation relating productivity to diversity (mental diversity, specifically).  In a more general sense, it seems to me that diversity is nature’s way of securing survival.  In the past, when environmental factors have changed making it impossible for a species to continue to live as it has been, certain previously inconsequential traits may begin to be selected for, allowing the species to evolve and adapt to the new environment.  All of the  moral issues that I see with ‘engineering’ the human race aside, I think that in doing this we would potentially be eliminating certain genetic variability that may seem worthless or even negative now, but that could be crucial in the future.