On Facebook today, I saw a post describing how one high school in Canada holds a dance every year where the students invite old people from low-income housing to be their partners for the evening. It's a dinner dance, and the food is also catered by the students who take cooking as a subject. You can read all about it HERE
I was more impressed by this than I can say, and not just for the obvious reason. Yes, of course it is lovely to give poor old people a fun night out, it's kind, it's generous and all-around a marvellous good deed. But I'd like to talk about the benefits to the children themselves. The ones attending the dance with their ancient partners. Because whenever we perform an act of kindness, there is nearly always a reciprocal benefit.
The first thing that occurred to me was that many of them will probably get taught some of the older, more formal couple dance styles. That's a great thing; dancing used to be considered a necessary social skill, but nowadays, well I wish I had $10 for every young man I've seen sitting at his table all night at the dance parties I go to, just because he doesn't know how to do any of the dances and lacks the confidence to ask for help. And the corollary, the young women lacking partners because let's face it, there are never enough men at these things, and I'm sure it has been like that for hundreds of years.
But then I thought, some of those kids will probably form an ongoing friendship with their partners. That's more of a benefit than it might seem at first. Why is it so, you ask. And I will tell you.
In all of the most toxic situations I've experienced in my long and occasionally useful life, the worst ones always seem to involve a relatively homogenous population. Consider the average nursing home - the entire population is usually very old, and they're not the place you'd want to be in, are they? I'd rather die, myself. Another one that springs to mind is typing pools. Where everyone is young, female and from the same socioeconomic background, toxicity flourishes like weeds in rich soil. The same thing happens in groups of soldiers and sailors. We've all read about the atrocities soldiers have committed. And I'm not going to point the finger at any country, because my own country has far from a clean record in this respect. With my own ears I have heard Australian soldiers happily boasting about murdering civilians, under the approving eye of their sergeant. And that is a culture that developed in our military back in the Vietnam days, where soldiers on active service were all male, almost all of Anglo-Celtic heritage, and nearly all of a similar age (because conscription harvested our boys at a particular age.)
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| What's the probability of seeinig some toxic behaviour in a group like this? 99%? 100%? |
On a less dreadful note, consider the average Protestant Christian church. You can look out over the pews and see what has been poetically described as 'a sea of silver'. I'm not saying that those churches are toxic; many are wonderful places. But those congregations that include some younger people, some children, some people from other lands, and so on, always have a more living, vibrant feel to them.
In anciant times, and we can still see this today in people who live a more traditional lifestyle, humans were mixed together in villages, in tribes, in extended family groupings. This charming video gives is a hint of the interconnectedness of neighbours in a Ugandan traditional village. This one makes the point even more strongly. In our own European culture, until the twentieth century got under way, with its so-called 'nuclear families', we saw much more of this interconnectedness, and we see the benefits of it even today in how successfully immigrant families establish themselves. Peoples such as our Italians, our Greeks and our Vietnamese help out their compatriots and relations, and they do better, I think, than we would do if we emigrated to their countries in similar circumstances. They have come from countries less tainted by American notions, and so their sense of family is a broader, deeper thing than it typically is to those of us with a more Anglo-Celtic heritage. You give your cousin a job, his children run errands for your sister, Nonna looks after the little ones and lives in her daughter's house. Hardly anyone gets forced into a 'home'. Everyone is useful, everyone is valued, and the interpersonal connections are as strong as steel cable. And that interconnectedness supports the diversity that sees their social gatherings populated by everyone fronm 96-year-old Nonna to the new baby, and these peoples flourish in new lands, quickly building up the cash reserves that enable the starting of businesses and general prosperity, because each new couple can fall back on the assistance of the wider family, both financial and social.
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| Italian immigrants quickly established themselves, and civilised us into the bargain. |
My own belief is that these effects of diversity are far deeper and more wide-ranging than the current view of DEI, which tends to be seen merely as a push-back against bigotry. In reality, it is the foundation of finding our way to a better, kinder, more truly human society.
