Just to clarify, I am describing rather than making arguments. As I said upthread, I am not claiming that they are actually good arguments nor endorsing the conclusion they (by construction) point towards. With that out of the way:
that it’s “good” [...] for people to be tribal at the nation-state level but bad for them to be tribal at more granular levels?
The argument doesn’t have anything to say about what should happen at the nation-state level. I guess most people do endorse tribalism at the nation-state level, though.
For most cohesion you want a very homogeneous population [...] any diversity reduces social cohesion
If you have a more or less fixed national population (in fact, what we have that’s relevant here is a more or less fixed population at a level somewhere below the national; whatever scale our postulated school segregation happens at) then you don’t get to choose the diversity at that scale. At smaller scales you can make less-diverse and therefore possibly more-cohesive subpopulations, at the likely cost of increased tension between the groups.
(I think we are more or less saying the same thing here.)
The obvious counterpoint is that diversity has advantages.
Yes. (We were asked for arguments against segregation by ability, so I listed some. Many of them have more or less obvious counterarguments.)
The argument doesn’t have anything to say about what should happen at the nation-state level.
Concerns about social cohesion and stability are mostly relevant at the nation-state level. This is so because at sub-state levels the exit option is generally available and is viable. At the state level, not so much.
In plain words, it’s much easier to move out if your town loses cohesion and stability than if your country does.
you don’t get to choose the diversity
You don’t get to choose the diversity, but you can incentivise or disincentivise the differentiation with long-term consequences. For an example, look at what happened to, say, people who immigrated to the US in the first half of the XX century. They started with a lot of diversity but because the general trend was towards homogenisation, that diversity lessened considerably.
Just to clarify, I am describing rather than making arguments. As I said upthread, I am not claiming that they are actually good arguments nor endorsing the conclusion they (by construction) point towards. With that out of the way:
The argument doesn’t have anything to say about what should happen at the nation-state level. I guess most people do endorse tribalism at the nation-state level, though.
If you have a more or less fixed national population (in fact, what we have that’s relevant here is a more or less fixed population at a level somewhere below the national; whatever scale our postulated school segregation happens at) then you don’t get to choose the diversity at that scale. At smaller scales you can make less-diverse and therefore possibly more-cohesive subpopulations, at the likely cost of increased tension between the groups.
(I think we are more or less saying the same thing here.)
Yes. (We were asked for arguments against segregation by ability, so I listed some. Many of them have more or less obvious counterarguments.)
Concerns about social cohesion and stability are mostly relevant at the nation-state level. This is so because at sub-state levels the exit option is generally available and is viable. At the state level, not so much.
In plain words, it’s much easier to move out if your town loses cohesion and stability than if your country does.
You don’t get to choose the diversity, but you can incentivise or disincentivise the differentiation with long-term consequences. For an example, look at what happened to, say, people who immigrated to the US in the first half of the XX century. They started with a lot of diversity but because the general trend was towards homogenisation, that diversity lessened considerably.