A New Term For the New Year:  Heterosity

Posted by Ian on January 01, 2006, 02:21 PM | #

Another good word to describe diversity is conflict.

Posted by Phil on January 01, 2006, 02:24 PM | #

Isn’t the right word heterogeneity?

Posted by James Bowery on January 01, 2006, 04:23 PM | #

“Heterogeneity” isn’t used as a more accurate term than “diversity” because:

1) It is phonetically awkward.  Heterosity is a direct phonetic competitor for “diversity”.

2) Its definition is not sufficiently linked to locality.  A confederation of ethnostates could be said to exhibit “heterogeneity”.  Heterosity is strongly linked to the agricultural term “heterosis” which means heterozygosity or hybridization—a worship word of adherents to the localized heterogeneity state religion.

3) There is a conflict between the supposed antonyms of “homogeneity” vs “heterogeneity” in that the natural result of localized heterogeneity applied globally is global homogeneity and loss of diversity.  This can lead to more confusion.  Heterosity avoids this confusion of antonyms.

Posted by Søren Renner on January 01, 2006, 05:37 PM | #

The opposite of heterosity would be homosity, which we must never confuse with ‘homocity’, i.e. Sodom.

Posted by James Bowery on January 01, 2006, 06:01 PM | #

And, to be sure, there would be endless attacks by adolescent twits on the basis that our ideology could be linked with a word that sounded like “homo city”.

But compare the moral stature of someone who is defending the great diversity of nature to the moral stature of someone who is being an adolescent satirist and I think the use of “heterosity” still pays off handsomely.

Posted by Søren Renner on January 01, 2006, 07:19 PM | #

I believe, Sir, that you are impugning me. I am nothing if not gentle; I will allow you to deny it. Please do so at once.

Posted by Søren Renner on January 01, 2006, 07:21 PM | #

I should add that I like the suggested word “heterosity” and think we might adopt it to our credit.

Posted by James Bowery on January 01, 2006, 08:21 PM | #

I do deny it and apologize for not being more sensitive to the possibility that my comment as worded might be taken as impugning you.

Posted by John S Bolton on January 01, 2006, 08:46 PM | #

Why not impurism? The NYT of 1-1-06 has featured on its magazine cover a philosophical quota placeholder’s article on contamination as cosmopolitan value.
Appiah, the author, suggests a global ethics of contamination, echoing Rushdie in order to “rejoice in mongrelisation”. If the world “celebrates hybridity"(again quoting Rushdie), as if mutagens were positive value, and not to be regarded as poisons; why wouldn’t they want to put chimp genes into people, and in quantity?
Appiah is not as dishonest as the conventional cosmopolitanist; he even admits that a cosmopolitanism like his, cannot distinguish itself from that of Bin Laden, in terms of being radically tolerant.
Since there cannot be a cosmopolitanism which is not also intolerant in its way, it can be made nevertheless different from that of international socialism and Islam by proposing ‘impurity’ as a standard of value. That is a contradiction-in-terms, though: puristic cosmopolitanism does not equal the impuristic one.
World-citizenism is political.
Politics is the ethics of aggression.
Global-citizenism promotes the increase of aggression on the net taxpayer and the real citizen; therefore it promotes evil, and the essence of evil in politics.
It is an excuse for aggression.
Such cosmopolitanism can only conceal, by refusing to mention, the aggression which is involved, and thus, depravedly, set up as a value.

Posted by James Bowery on January 01, 2006, 09:54 PM | #

John, if it is a word that gets across the parasitical nature of the minority cosmpolite as created by local heterogeneity then perhaps the better word is “parasity”.

Impurism (or contaminism) doesn’t really get across the active, self-interested nature of the impurity (or contaminant).

Parasity retains the phonetic alignment with diversity and it also confronts the recent moves by some pop-ecologists to characterize most ecological relationships as parasitical as a way of justifying what might be called the artificialistic fallacy:  that the consequences of mans artifices, such as global transport and habitation technology, are morally correct.

Posted by John S Bolton on January 02, 2006, 04:24 AM | #

In this context of heterosity defined in terms of local diversity, there remains the consideration of value. The pro-heterosity are not so stingy with the vaue-laden terms. The anti-heterosity, though, have yet to define these concepts in realtion to value-significance. It is this way to such extent that, there has remained unspoken, the name of an all-but-unspeakable depravity.
Vectorism! There exists a depravity in the government professoriate so abysmal, that it would set up as value that which efficiently transmits the parasite to the host. Vectorist citizens of the world, are even now asking us to value that which transmits the parasite on to healthy hosts, even in proportion as it does so, and even insofar as the parasite is virulent.
What does valuing openness to diversity mean, if taken radically? What is the meaning of contaminationism as a value, that it would be better to have more of? In this connection, is not immigration restrictionism anti-vectorist?