Diversity is overrated. Yeah, I said it.

The truth is: Diversity is not what makes a society great.

For all the slogans, few can explain why diversity itself is supposed to make a society good. (photo: Amy Elting/Unsplash)

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Much of modern Western society has come to worship the word “diversity.”

They chant it in universities, build bureaucracies around it in corporations, and decorate political speeches with it like a sacred charm. Diversity is treated not as one value among many, but as the supreme virtue: the moral apex of progress.

Yet, for all the slogans, few can explain why diversity itself is supposed to make a society good. Look closely, and you’ll see that most people mean something embarrassingly superficial by it: the ability to order Thai food one night, tacos the next, and sushi the night after. The Western idea of diversity has been hollowed out to mean variety of consumption, not richness of character or cohesion of community. It’s the illusion of pluralism without the substance of belonging.

The truth is: Diversity is not what makes a society great. What makes a society great is common ground — the thick web of shared assumptions, moral instincts, and social norms that bind people together. A civilization does not survive because its people are different, but because they agree on what matters. Without that shared foundation, difference becomes division and pluralism decays into chaos.

To understand how we reached this confusion, we have to look briefly at how the idea of diversity evolved. In the aftermath of World War II, the West — horrified by the crimes of unhinged nationalism and racism — sought moral redemption in openness. Diversity became a corrective to exclusion, a way to ensure that no group could dominate or oppress another.

During the civil rights era, diversity gained moral power, becoming synonymous with justice, equality, and progress. But over time, the moral necessity hardened into dogma. What began as a plea for fairness turned into a substitute for meaning. Diversity became not a method for improving society, but the entire measure of its worth. The more different we are, we were told, the better — never mind whether those differences amount to a coherent whole.

The consequences have been paradoxical. The more the West celebrates diversity, the less united it becomes. In the name of inclusion, we have erased the very idea of shared identity. Tolerance used to mean “live and let live”; now it means, “Don’t believe in anything too strongly.”

We praise inclusion, but inclusion into what? There is no longer a clear sense of “we,” no common moral baseline, no shared story. The result is a society fragmented into micro-communities — each nursing its own history, vocabulary, and grievance — bound together not by solidarity, but by proximity.

This obsession with difference has seeped into nearly every corner of life. We now have diversity in cuisine, fashion, entertainment, and pronouns — everything, except thought. We’ve replaced moral diversity with menu diversity. We’ve traded the deep pluralism of ideas for the shallow pluralism of brands. Cultural difference has become a consumer experience, not a moral achievement. The modern West confuses cultural consumption with moral depth. You can buy your way into cosmopolitan virtue by eating food from enough countries and watching films with enough subtitles. It is a hollow kind of pluralism, built around appetite rather than aspiration.

Meanwhile, the foundation that makes difference tolerable — the sense of common moral order — has been steadily eroded. A nation is not a random collection of individuals; it’s a shared enterprise. It depends on predictability, on trust, on the confidence that one’s neighbors operate by the same moral compass. Laws can’t hold that together on their own; it’s the unwritten norms, the cultural expectations, that give a society coherence. When those vanish, what remains is legalism without trust, bureaucracy without community. People live side by side but no longer together.

Contrast this with Israel — a society often caricatured as divided, yet in reality bound by a remarkable common core. Israel is not free of argument; in fact, it may be one of the most argumentative societies on earth. But the argument takes place inside a shared story. Israelis disagree about how to be Jewish, not whether being Jewish matters. Across the spectrum — secular to religious, Left to Right, native-born to immigrant — there is a deep understanding that Jewishness is the organizing principle of public life. It’s not a theocracy; it’s a civilization built around a collective memory, a language, a rhythm of time, and a sense of destiny.

That shared moral and cultural baseline gives Israeli society a coherence that Western societies have lost. Despite constant external threats, Israel consistently ranks among the happiest countries in the world. Despite economic ups and downs and political tension, it has one of the lowest rates of violent crime.

When Palestinians enter Israel illegally to commit acts of terror or lob rockets at Israeli population centers, the same people who were cursing each other on television the day before rush to the same shelters and volunteer for the same rescue efforts. Israel’s cohesion is not the absence of difference; it’s the triumph of solidarity over fragmentation. In moments of crisis, it doesn’t dissolve; it fuses.

You can see this everywhere in daily life. Walk through the shuk in Jerusalem and you’ll see the ultra-Orthodox baker and the tattooed techie arguing passionately about soccer, both buying challah for Shabbat. You’ll hear Arab vendors chatting with Jewish customers in Hebrew and Arabic, haggling like old friends. You’ll see soldiers on leave joking with retirees, and teenagers debating politics at cafés. There’s tension, noise, contradiction, but there’s also continuity. The society holds because it shares something sacred: the belief that the story of the Jewish People is worth carrying forward.

This is what the West has forgotten. The purpose of society is not to maximize difference, but to cultivate belonging. Belonging is not the enemy of freedom; it’s the precondition for it. Freedom detached from belonging leads only to loneliness and confusion. The great tragedy of modern liberalism is that it liberated people from everything except themselves. It replaced duty with desire and community with choice. The result is a world of individuals endlessly searching for connection while fearing commitment.

In Israel, by contrast, identity is not experienced as a constraint; it’s a connection. There, belonging is a source of meaning. You may not always like everyone in your extended family, but you know you’re part of something larger than yourself. That “something larger” gives life coherence, a sense of direction and purpose that purely individualistic societies can’t replicate. It’s the difference between a crowd and a community, between people who merely coexist and people who know why they’re together.

Other nations have understood this too. Japan, Denmark, Uruguay, and South Korea all maintain strong social cohesion precisely because they have preserved deep reservoirs of shared cultural norms. None are particularly “diverse” by Western standards, yet they are among the safest, happiest, and most stable countries on earth. Their citizens generally trust one another; they have predictable social codes; they share a sense of who they are. They demonstrate that unity does not require uniformity, only a shared framework of meaning.

The collapse of that framework in the West has led to the collapse of trust. Public faith in institutions, media, and even neighbors has plummeted. People increasingly view those around them not as fellow citizens, but as potential threats. Without shared moral assumptions, every interaction becomes fraught. Common ground isn’t just a cultural nicety; it’s a practical necessity. It’s what allows contracts to be honored, communities to function, and democracies to endure. You cannot have freedom without order, and you cannot have order without shared norms.

The irony is that the Western pursuit of diversity was originally meant to create peace. Yet, without common ground, diversity becomes a source of conflict. When nothing is sacred, everything becomes contested. When everyone is encouraged to “speak their truth,” the actual truth evaporates. Every disagreement becomes existential because there’s no longer a shared standard by which to resolve it. The public square turns into a battlefield of identities, each demanding validation, none offering cohesion.

Israel shows another way. Its common ground is not bland uniformity; it’s a living argument inside a shared home. It’s not the absence of division but the presence of meaning that holds it together. Israelis shout at each other because they care about the same thing: the future of their people, their land, their story. They understand that even their fiercest disagreements take place within a covenant, a bond that precedes politics. That bond is not something you vote on; it’s something you inherit and renew. It’s what gives a country its soul.

Once upon a time, the West had something like that: a civic religion built around shared ideals of liberty, duty, and decency. Americans, for instance, used to speak the language of a common creed: “E pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”). Immigrants came not just to participate in the economy, but to join a moral project. Diversity was welcome, but assimilation was expected — not as erasure, but as entry into a common story. That balance of difference within unity made the West dynamic and resilient. But as the idea of a shared moral center faded, so did that resilience.

Today, we confuse maturity with neutrality. We think that to hold any conviction deeply is to be intolerant, that to prefer one set of values is to exclude others.

But civilization is impossible without preference. A society that believes in nothing can’t defend anything. The choice isn’t between diversity and homogeneity; it’s between common ground and confusion. Without shared meaning, freedom becomes fragility, and pluralism becomes paralysis.

This is why common ground is not just underrated; it’s sacred. It’s the invisible architecture that allows a society to be both free and functional. It gives people a sense of belonging strong enough to contain difference without collapsing under it. It lets you argue with your neighbor without fearing they live in a different moral universe. Common ground is what turns the chaos of freedom into the harmony of civilization.

Diversity, by contrast, is a spice. It can add richness and color to a society, but it cannot feed one. Without a meal to season, without shared norms, shared language, shared purpose, you’re just sprinkling flavor on an empty plate. The modern West is feasting on variety, but starving for meaning. We celebrate what distinguishes us and have forgotten what binds us.

Israel’s experience offers a counterexample: a society that endures because it believes in something deeper than difference. Its strength lies not in how diverse it is, but in how united it remains in spirit — a unity that allows for endless debate yet prevents disintegration. That is the paradox of real freedom: only shared constraints make it sustainable.

If the West wants to rebuild its moral and civic foundations, it must rediscover the value of common ground. That doesn’t mean suppressing diversity, but subordinating it to something greater: a shared moral compass, a sense of belonging that transcends identity politics. A healthy society is not a kaleidoscope of disconnected selves but a symphony: many instruments, one song. It’s built on shared commitments to family, to decency, to community, to the continuity of the nation itself.

Diversity may color a society, but common ground gives it shape. Civilization is not sustained by what divides us beautifully, but by what binds us quietly. The West doesn’t need more kinds of people; it needs more kinds of commitment. Because a nation that cannot say “we” for very long won’t be able to say anything else at all.

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