Every once in a while, a studio releases a movie that
perfectly exemplifies everything the corporate culture stands
for. Aside from the lack of royalty, that's Zootopia,
Disney's
latest crowd-pleaser.
Zootopia
starts with a common cartoon conceit, funny-animals that
think, act
and
talk mostly like humans while looking and somewhat feeling like
animals, and takes it to its logical extreme: a beautifully-drawn
highly-technological civilization carefully designed to allow
participation by everything from elephants to lemmings, from polar
bears to camels. With this tremendous array of diversity
comes the politically correct message: you can be anything you want to
be no matter who you are! Anybody who says you can't is just
plain wrong! Diversity rules!
Sure enough, the hero is a police-rabbit who runs rings around
the more obviously-talented rhinos, elephants, and cape buffalo; the
bad guy
turns out to be a sheep; and a conniving, shysterly fox grows beyond
his cultural predispositions into a surprisingly useful policeman
himself. Score one for the rainbow team!
Yet we know, for all the propaganda, this bumper-sticker
philosophy is transparently false. I cannot be an NBA
player. You cannot win a gold medal at the Olympics unless
Scragged
has a much wider audience than Google Analytics suggests!
So where's the logical flaw? It's because of a
surprising gap in definitions.
Giving slothful bureaucrats a
whole new meaning.
Words and the Limits to Thinking
When we tell a small child "You can be anything," what do we
actually mean? We don't mean they can literally be
anything - they cannot turn into a rock, say, or become the Sun.
If we give the matter even a moment's thought, we also don't
mean that they can fill any individual specific job. There's
no way that the same child could, if they dedicated themselves, be a
doctor, and
a champion swimmer, and
a hero soldier, and
a fireman. Quite possibly they could be one or two of the
above but
not all of them, not even one at a time.
No, what we're thinking of is the list of generic careers
found in the dictionary - lawyer, cop, mailman, taxi driver, astronaut,
accountant - and, rightly, thinking that any normal child could
potentially dedicate themselves to achieving a living wage in any one
such job category.
To that extent,
"You can be anything" is largely true, which has been the glory of
America. We love to see examples of unlikely successes -
poverty-raised Dr. Ben Carson, for instance, rising to the heights of
brain surgery. There are countless such "Only in America"
stories great and small.
And by the same token, getting rid of racial or gender bans on
general occupations is a Good Thing. Once upon a time, women
could not be doctors or lawyers because the schools wouldn't accept
them. Likewise, black people once were not accepted in the
professions or even professional sports. Most all Americans
now agree that this was morally wrong.
That's the real-American meaning of the phrase "equal
opportunity": Not everyone can be a doctor, lawyer, etc., but everybody
has the right to try their best regardless of who they are.
What has this to do with dictionary lists of
occupations? Simply this: one single word can cover an
enormous array of,
yes, diversity.
Consider Zootopia's
police. Can
Officer Hops be an effective police officer? Her fellow
officers didn't think so, but the usual training montage gives us
clues. Like most rabbits who live long enough to grow up, she
is extremely fast and agile,
and very fast at picking up clues. Clearly, those skills are
useful in law enforcement - they make her a good beat cop, and she
probably could serve a detective as well.
But it does not logically follow that Officer Hops could
effectively fill any
role, even in the police force. If a soccer match between the
Bears and the Lions turns into a riot, the riot squad had better be
made up of rhinos and hippopotami if it's going to have any
effect. You could have the entire rabbit population of
Zootopia in
uniform and they wouldn't be able to calm things down.
When we as a country decided to open up all occupations, in the general dictionary sense,
we were making a reasonable moral decision.
To The Illogical Conclusion...
Unfortunately, as in all things, our leftist culture and
overweening government have taken a generally decent idea and turned it
into an utterly wrongheaded one. Today's affirmative action
regulations are not the (reasonable) equivalent of letting Officer Hops
on the police force; they are the (preposterous) equivalent of letting
her on the riot squad or SWAT team even though she could not possibly
be effective
there.
Obviously, a politically-correct victory for Riot Squad
Officer Hops would end very badly for both her and the citizenry of
Zootopia. That's exactly what we see in, for example,
graduation rates of black law-school students. As a famous
research study proved:
Large preferences often place students in environments where
they can neither learn nor compete effectively -- even though these
same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still
quite good schools...
The student who would flourish at, say, Wake Forest, instead
finds himself at Duke, where the professors are not teaching at a pace
designed for him.
The predictable result: students drop out of top-ranking
schools instead of graduating from perfectly decent second-rank
ones. This is called the "mismatch" effect - where
commonsense and
honest evaluations would steer an individual person in a direction
where they are actually able to excel, the pernicious fraud of
affirmative action combined with the absurd lie of "You can be literally anything
you want" ends up ruining people who would otherwise
have a perfectly
decent life.
...Or, Maybe, The Right One
There's one small element of the Zootopia plot that
must have slipped past the PC censors. The villain is a sheep
who is tired of having the predator-type animals occupying all the top
spots in society. The sheep's resentment keeps growing
despite, on the evidence presented, the predators having
done an extremely impressive job of both creating the society and
extending the
benefits of civilization to one and all.
To this end, she develops a poison that causes the civilized
animals to regress into actual animals. Naturally, this
causes panic in the population - a reverted rabbit isn't going to harm
anyone whereas a reverted tiger on a commuter train would cause
mayhem. The objective is for predators to all be judged by
their
race and expelled from Zootopia,
or at least from power.
As in the real world, this evil plan is promoted only by a
small minority even of the prey species, but without the brilliant
police work of our equal-opportunity hero Officer Hops, it probably
would have worked, and Zootopia would have been a far weaker if not
completely collapsed place.
In the real world right now, there is a small minority
demanding the overthrow
of the builders of Western civilization, who - sorry, it's a historical
fact - were predominantly white
men. But it isn't that way today: for at least the last fifty
years, it's been perfectly possible for
everyone other than white men to achieve success,
which is as it should
be.
The
problem is that for the violent thugs of Black Lives Matter and the
more
urbane but equally destructive leftist diversity bureaucrats, it's not
enough that anyone can build themselves up no matter who they are if
they simply follow the rules and work hard. No, members of
the
"traditionally dominant groups"
must be torn down, regardless of their own personal merits, simply
because of who and what they are.
Zootopia
rightly depicts this as evil. I wonder how many viewers made
the connection?