Synthetic Diversity vs. Organic Diversity: A Right-Wing Definition of Diversity

One of the dominant concepts in today’s Europe is diversity. It is a word long claimed by the Left, while the Right has struggled to formulate a vision of its own. The Right is better at articulating what it is against than what it is for. This is partly because diversity today usually evokes immigration, integration, and people of different origins living in Europe. Yet this is only one meaning of diversity, and not the deepest. Europe already possesses another: older, more organic, and more rooted in history, the diversity of churches, regions, peoples, languages, rites, folk memory, and inherited ways of life.

Organic diversity is not invented by bureaucrats in Brussels. Rather, it grows from the bottom up through generations and centuries. Synthetic diversity is engineered from the top down by bureaucrats who have ignored the will of Europe’s peoples. Organic diversity is not one uniform thing but an order of smaller, interconnected forms: the regional cultures of Europe, formed and refined over centuries; local customs, food and drink, dialects, folk songs, traditional dress, legal traditions, local myths and stories, and inherited ways of life.

Organic diversity is the opposite of the Left’s synthetic diversity, which endangers organic diversity, especially microcultures where only a few thousand people still speak a dialect, preserve an accent, or live according to a rooted local way of life. Synthetic diversity is not diversity at all. Contrary to its advocates’ claims, it creates a homogenising effect throughout Europe: the same slogans, global cities, consumer culture, and multinational stores. Athens, when shaped by organic diversity, has its Athenians, Greeks from the provinces and islands, descendants of Asia Minor Greeks uprooted by the Catastrophe and genocide, other Europeans, and a number of non-Europeans, all helping make the city uniquely and spiritually Greek. London, when shaped by organic diversity, has native microcultures developed over centuries, alongside other Europeans and a number of non-Europeans living within its inherited English form. But Athens and London remade by synthetic diversity become interchangeable global cities: different in architecture and size, perhaps, but increasingly the same city in spirit.

This same organic diversity is not limited to the spirit of European cities; it is also visible in Europe’s Christian heritage. When one thinks of Christian Europe, one usually imagines a flat religious category or, at best, its main families: Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox. But beneath these families lies an organic plurality of smaller churches, rites, and traditions: Melkite Greek Catholics, Ruthenians, Waldensians, Moravians, Hussites, and Russian Old Believers, some of whom fled persecution in Russia from the late 17th century onwards and settled in Romania as Lipovans, preserving older Russian speech and pre-Nikonian Orthodox rites. Europe has also received Christians not European in origin but spiritually and historically connected to it through the wider Mediterranean, late antique, and Eastern Roman Christian worlds: Armenians, Syriac Orthodox, Copts, Maronites, and others. The point is not to produce a catalogue of denominations, but to show that Christianity has never existed as one flat cultural form. Rather, it contains an organic plurality of cultures, rites, liturgies, languages, customs, sacred inheritances, and even traditional clothing. Their presence reveals that organic diversity is not reducible to crude ethnic categories, but belongs to deeper civilisational continuities of rite, memory, worship, and inheritance. This is organic diversity in practice: a diversity that the Right should preserve and protect, and which synthetic diversity, with its mass immigration, threatens.

Europe’s ethnic minorities also form part of this organic diversity, such as the Frisians, a Germanic people found in Friesland, East Frisia, and North Frisia. Their related languages are spoken by roughly half a million people: West Frisian in the Netherlands and North Frisian and Saterland Frisian in Germany, where they have regional status. Germany also has a native Slavic minority, the Sorbs, often estimated at around 60,000 to 80,000 people, mainly in Lusatia, between Saxony and Brandenburg. Their languages are Upper and Lower Sorbian. These languages have long been contracting, not helped by cuts to Sorbian institutions and schools, while far greater resources are found for the projects of synthetic diversity.

Romania, too, has organic minorities; one of these is the Transylvanian Saxons, a German-speaking people whose ancestors settled in Transylvania from the 12th century onwards from various Germanic and western European regions such as Flanders and Luxembourg. They speak Transylvanian Saxon, a native dialect developed over centuries, which is close to Luxembourgish, and have their own culture, customs, and costumes.

Another case is the Griko people in Southern Italy. They are heirs to the Greek-speaking world of Southern Italy, with roots often associated with Magna Graecia and later Byzantine continuities. They do not speak Standard Modern Greek, but Griko, a Greek variety shaped by ancient, Byzantine, and southern Italian influences. Many of these minorities have created microcultures in Europe and testify to organic diversity working over centuries and, in cases like the Griko, for millennia. Some are threatened by synthetic diversity and mass immigration, especially because many of these languages and minorities are very small in number. Even regions without ethnic minorities in the same sense, such as Flanders, are deeply diverse in their own way: Flemish is not one uniform dialect or pronunciation; in a small place, one need only travel a few kilometres to encounter a different local speech.

Beyond Christianity, organic diversity also appears among Europe’s historic non-Christian minorities, such as Jewish communities. Jewish Europe is not one flat category either, with different communities preserving their own languages, dialects, and microcultures. The best-known Jewish tradition with its own language is that of the Ashkenazi Jews, whose Yiddish developed in Central and Eastern Europe. In Greece and Cyprus there are the Romaniote Jews, present since the Hellenistic period and preserving their own Judaeo-Greek tradition and culture. Sephardic Jews, originally from Spain and Portugal, preserved Ladino or Judeo-Spanish, derived from Old Spanish and enriched by Hebrew and Mediterranean influences. Europe also has Muslim minorities of its own, such as the Pomaks, a native Slavic Muslim people living especially in the Rhodope Mountains of Greece and Bulgaria, including a Greek community often estimated at around 50,000, with their own culture. Here again, the point is not multicultural abstraction, but rooted historical presence: communities formed by time, memory, loyalty, language, and place.

Besides the Abrahamic religions, Europe also preserves very ancient organic diversity in its pre-Christian survivals, some of which now survive under a Christian framework. The Lithuanian Rasos is a midsummer festival connected to the summer solstice, later Christianised as Saint John’s Day. During the festival, people light bonfires, gather herbs, and search for a mythical flower. In the French Pyrenees, people still mark the summer solstice with fire festivals. After sunset, people carry flaming torches from the mountains to light beacons built in the traditional way. It marks the passage from adolescence to adulthood. In Northern Greece, Anastenaria survives as a Christianised ritual associated with Saints Constantine and Helen, involving music, ecstatic dances, and walking barefoot over coals. It is often associated with older Dionysian traditions.

These movements are not always unbroken traditions, but they reveal a related desire: the recovery of ancestral memory, sacred symbolism, and vertical continuity after rupture. Europe’s organic diversity is therefore not only Christian, ethnic, religious, or linguistic; it also includes symbolic and mythic diversity, whether preserved through inherited festivals or sought through ancestral recovery.

If one applies Traditionalism with a capital T, the 20th-century school of thought, rather than small-t traditionalism, the difference between organic and synthetic diversity mirrors the difference between verticality and horizontality, sacred and profane, quality and quantity, form and formlessness. Verticality, in the Traditionalist sense, means continuity with what is eternal, enduring, and transcendent. It binds the living to the dead and the local to the sacred. Horizontality means life reduced to quantity, utility, comfort, interchangeability, population, economy, administration, consumption, and individual preference. In Mircea Eliade’s sense, the sacred gives everyday life meaning and orientation through festivals, myths, symbols, and sacred places, while the profane reduces the world to management and interchangeable space. Quality means metaphysical and spiritual form; quantity means counting. A Transylvanian Saxon dress, a Griko dialect, a Cockney accent, a Maronite liturgy, a Romaniote Jewish tradition, or a Lithuanian midsummer festival is not just one more difference, but an inheritance with shape, rhythm, memory, and soul, because it belongs to an intergenerational chain of transmission carried across centuries and millennia. While synthetic diversity is formless: it replaces living rhythm and soul with mechanism, control, and bureaucratic beat.

As a response to liberal homogenisation and synthetic diversity, the contemporary Right answers with slogans like “the West,” “Europe,” or “our Graeco-Roman and Christian heritage.” But it rarely defines what these things mean in form, materially or spiritually. But if the Right wants to mature and acquire real depth against a modern liberalism that is shallow and horizontal, then it must know what it claims to defend and become more vertical. This would enable voters to imagine another kind of diversity, so that voters know they are defending something bigger and older than themselves. Instead of merely fighting its opponents’ manufactured diversity, the Right should preserve the organic diversity that history has given Europe. Instead of surrendering Europe to those who want to dissolve every bit of inheritance and turn it into interchangeable sameness, the Right should recover, not develop, because it is already there: diversity as inheritance, heritage, and legacy.