How to Be Inclusive

The way our culture tends to think about inclusivity leads to intolerance. We need a better alternative.

Inclusivity is a central value in contemporary culture. It is part of the curriculum in schools and a proclaimed priority for every major corporation. All college websites have a section about it and government agencies train their staff in its implementation. The U.S. Army even has its own Equity and Inclusion Agency, complete with insignia.

That the concept of inclusion should have wide appeal isn’t surprising. We’re a hospitable people and desire to welcome others into our communities — as we should.

What is strange, however, is that the recent embrace of inclusion seems to have coincided with a marked rise in its opposite — exclusion and intolerance. 

The news in recent years is filled with stories of individuals being fired, mobbed on social media, shouted down on campus, and otherwise ejected from polite society for the most minor of infractions.

Take a recent example. Journalist

David Josef Volodzko

was fired from his job at The Seattle Times after angry readers on social media accused him of defending Hitler. He didn’t do anything of the kind. 

Yet the crowd detected, or imagined it did, the slightest whiff of thinking that strayed outside the lines of present orthodoxy, and his head was demanded. And this was in Seattle, a place where inclusion and tolerance are especially prized.  

What’s going on here? Why is embracing inclusion making us more intolerant of each other? 

The problem isn’t inclusivity as such, but the way we have come to understand it. There is a better way, which we desperately need to recover. 

Narrow Inclusion

How does the contemporary version of inclusion work? Our efforts to be inclusive are particularly focused on groups identified as most at risk of being excluded, including certain racial and ethnic groups, women, and sexual minorities. So let’s look at the example of transgender individuals as an illustration.

The question to ask is this: what does it mean for a community to be inclusive of a transgendered person? In practice, it is often treated as meaning that the members of this community affirm the transgendered person in his or her identity and, ideally, celebrate this as a positive good. 

In other words, the basis for inclusion has to do with what we believe about each other. I include the transgendered person and maintain my place within the community when I endorse that person’s self-understanding and embrace the philosophical framework about gender and identity within which it makes sense. I will call this narrow inclusion, for reasons that will be clear later. 

Treating our beliefs as the basis for inclusion, however, leads to problems.

For one thing, if thinking a certain way is the grounds for being part of a community, then thinking in other ways is likewise grounds for being excluded from it.

Someone who believes, for instance, that the transgendered person is suffering from a mental illness and needs therapy is deemed non-inclusive, intolerant, and usually “hateful.” People who believe such things, and articulate them out loud, will quickly find themselves excluded from communities that embrace narrow inclusivity.

I can imagine someone responding, “Well, good riddance. Our communities are better off without such backward-thinking people in them.”

The problem is that we’re talking about a lot of people here. Orthodox Christians, for one, will tend to demur from affirming a transgender identity. So will most Muslims. So will a certain strand of feminists along with plenty of regular people who are skeptical about the whole framework of contemporary gender ideology. In fact, about 60% of the population is hesitant to embrace currently fashionable thinking on this topic.  

If these individuals were to express what they really think in public, they are at risk in many places of being labeled as bigots and ostracized. Narrow inclusivity ends up excluding a lot of people.

This leads to the second problem with narrow inclusion. In practice, most of the people noted above keep their mouths shut. They go through the motions at work or at school and sit quietly through the various trainings in which they are taught that their views are regressive and that others should be celebrated for who they are. They may disagree, but are very reluctant to speak up.

Communities animated by the inclusivity of belief, however, tend to develop ways that prevent individuals from keeping their own views private. Take the practice of including preferred pronouns alongside one’s name, which is becoming standard practice in many contexts. 

If you find yourself in such a community you have two choices: to include your pronouns, thus signaling your acceptance of the idealogy within which this practice makes sense, or to omit them, signaling your rejection of this ideology. There is no way to keep your opinion to yourself. 

This creates a dilemma. Those who dissent from current orthodoxy are presented with a choice between maintaining intellectual integrity and thereby supposedly excluding others or pretending to agree with the party line for the sake of being inclusive. 

So most will go along and make the gestures required to remain in the group, whatever they may think privately. This is partly because most people truly do want to be inclusive and hospitable to others. It is also a result of the understandable desire not to be called out and excluded by the group for departing from accepted ways of thinking, especially because this can mean losing one’s friends, reputation, and livelihood. 

So narrow inclusivity potentially excludes large swaths of people from the community and pressures them to abandon intellectual integrity for the sake of staying in the group and being inclusive towards others. 

Yet even for those who embrace the most progressive views about gender, narrow inclusivity will eventually lead to trouble. If including someone else requires us to endorse that person’s self understanding, then inclusion means the complete abdication of our own judgment. Even if someone says he’s a cat, we have to go along. 

Fortunately, inclusion doesn’t actually require any of this.

A Different Model

If a narrow conception of inclusivity bases inclusion on holding certain beliefs, a broader alternative grounds inclusion in shared norms and shared projects. 

Take sports as a simple example. When a group gathers on the court to play basketball, all that is necessary for the thing to work is that the players agree upon the rules, strive to keep them, and see themselves as engaged in a shared project — enjoying a game of basketball. What they believe about each other or anything else for that matter isn’t relevant or necessary to inquire into. 

This same kind of inclusivity can function also in the contexts currently dominated by narrow inclusion.

Consider academia. Traditionally, to be included as a student or professor in a college setting means being respected as a partner in the shared project of pursuing the truth. 

There are important norms that provide the context within which this can fruitfully be done. For instance, it is expected that members of the community engage in reasoned arguments rather than emotion-driven fights. Any idea is fair game to be debated and discussed. And so on. 

Inclusion in such a community is extended to those willing to play by the rules and interested in pursuing the common project. It does not require agreeing with each other’s ideas or endorsing the self-conceptions of others. 

In practice, this actually works quite well. I recall when, as a graduate student, I had my initial meeting with the professor who would become my dissertation chair. The project I proposed was shaped, in part, by my Christian perspective. He told me I should be aware that he thought my Christian faith was totally false and misguided. I assured him I was aware of this fact. 

For the narrow version of inclusivity, this would have made working together impossible. My faith is central to my identity — easily the most central thing. Instead of affirming or celebrating it, this professor told me to my face that he thought I had made a falsehood the cornerstone of my identity. In the modern view, he would be excluding me. 

Except he wasn’t. He was happy to work together, as was I, on the shared endeavor of carefully exploring important ideas, proceeding on the basis of a shared commitment to rigorous research and argument. I counted him both a colleague and a friend.

Returning to our original example, what would it mean, then, to include the transgender person in an academic community according to this broader conception of inclusivity? It would mean precisely the same thing as including anyone else: respecting such a person as a partner in the pursuit of knowledge, living within a shared set of norms.

In order to be in community together, we need not demand from each other endorsement or celebration of our ideas, sense of identity, or beliefs. It is enough that we agree to treat each other in accordance with the shared norms of that community as we pursue our common project.

The advantages of this form of inclusivity are significant. 

For one thing, broad inclusivity is much more inclusive. It creates a community open to those with diverse beliefs, even about controversial topics, provided they agree to adopt the community’s norms of behavior.

Broad inclusivity also encourages, rather than threatens, intellectual integrity. If my inclusion doesn’t rest upon beliefs then neither is my exclusion threatened because of them. In such a community, there is freedom to think what one likes without fear of the mob. Significantly, there is also freedom not to disclose my beliefs to the group if I would prefer not to. 

Broad inclusivity respects the individual’s judgment. I do not demand that you endorse my understanding of reality or accuse you of bigotry when you do not. 

A Place for Narrow Inclusion?

I do not wish to suggest here that the narrower conception of inclusion is never appropriate. There are communities for which shared beliefs about certain matters are essential. Religious communities, for instance, are like this. Shared belief is the whole point. A nonprofit dedicated to a particular social cause might be another example.

But the places today within which the narrow form of inclusion is generating strife are generally not such communities. 

Certainly universities ought not to be construed as communities of shared belief. Historically, the strength of such institutions is precisely their willingness to tolerate and even encourage a wide plurality of beliefs in the conviction that rigorous, reasoned debate between competing views is one of the best ways to advance knowledge. 

Neither is our society as a whole a community of shared belief. The genius of our political tradition is the idea that a nation could be held together not on the basis of a shared religious commitment — which has almost always been the case historically — but on a shared set of norms, including the freedom of individuals to come to and express their own views.

In contrast, totalitarian societies always insist upon shared belief. Shared norms are not enough. In these societies, as a result, we see the dynamics I described above writ large: those who think wrongly are excluded (usually violently), many who disagree with the official positions go along with them anyway to avoid trouble, and in the end the individual surrenders his judgment entirely to the dictates of the state.  

Many argue our society is moving in the direction of totalitarianism. Rod Dreher explains that he was prompted to write his recent book Live Not by Lies when he began to hear more and more often from people who grew up under under totalitarianism and were seeing ominous signs of its encroachment in Western countries. 

I doubt very much whether many of us want to continue in that direction, but we will to the extent that a narrow form of inclusion comes to dominate our shared institutions. 

But we have a choice. Inclusion of others whatever their personal beliefs, characteristics, and backgrounds is a noble ideal that is a valuable part of our political and cultural heritage. It does not, however, have to be founded upon holding the same beliefs or endorsing each other’s self-conceptions. 

Instead, we need to recover a broader inclusiveness born from embracing shared norms of civility that allow us to respectfully live together and cooperate in community, even with those whose most cherished beliefs we think are false.