Diversity, peace, prosperity, equality, and justice

Reading a biography of James Madison in these turbulent times led me to think about the relationship among these concepts. Is there a positive correlation among these five noble values or conditions? Are there any causal relationships among these concepts? Or is this all just a lame exercise in personal rhetoric?

For example

• Are diverse societies more peaceful or prosperous?

• Does prosperity lead to -- cause -- diversity, or does diversity lead to prosperity?

• Can equality and diversity (peacefully) co-exist?

• Does equality describe a form of justice?

• Will people sacrifice prosperity for equality, or equality for prosperity?

• Can -- or must -- all five of these conditions co-exist to achieve positive peace (see third paragraph, below)?

• Can equality be achieved without tyranny?

This last question reflects another important human right and that is liberty or freedom. And by freedom we need to consider both political and economic freedom. America's core value of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is inconsistent with the aspirations of the French Revolution, "liberte, egalite, fraternite," or roughly translated as "liberty, equality, brotherhood." Which takes us back to the last bullet point: Will people surrender their personal liberty to create greater social and economic equality?

My longstanding analysis and assertion is the equality of opportunity and treatment before the law, while important if not essential measures of justice, they will not produce equality of outcomes, including equality of incomes, wealth, status or power.

When protesters shout, "No justice, no peace!" we need to examine the measures of justice as well as the direct and indirect costs to achieve peace. Hank Hilton, my friend and former Jesuit, speaks of the difference between negative and positive peace, which I understand as the former describes a situation where tyranny imposes social peace by force rather than by personal relationships, whereas positive peace describes a society with shared ideas of peace enforced only by social forces, not by laws or edicts.

Perhaps there is a certain economic element to these primarily social constructs, namely that they are scarce resources, that trade offs are needed, and that equilibrium across the five can never be achieved. A possible solution might be to better and more carefully define these terms, moving them from rhetoric to operational procedures for implementing policy.

As a business professor, our faculty assembly once entertained a professor attempting to promote a course in 'rhetoric'' to business students -- her own course, of course. My response was that rhetoric mattered much less than data-based, analytical, logical, critical thinking that could be put to words on paper. Using 'figures of speech' to persuade is hardly a noble or objective form of communication and it is especially worthless in creating a clear counterargument. As the old line goes, "You are entitled you your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts." This quip not only conveys the shortcomings of rhetoric, it is indicative of the types of arguments used in promoting climate science, white privilege, institutional racism and social justice. Absent a clear, operational definition and data, there is no common ground, either for describing the current state of affairs or in articulating the preferred or future state of affairs. There is only rhetoric.