A funny thing happened on the way to the publisher for political scientist Robert Putnam.
His research didn't support his hypothesis.
That isn't earth-shattering; it happens to the best of scientists. What's interesting is that his hypothesis was that diversity made communities more open and better.
What he found was that the more ethnically diverse a community is, "the less likely the residents are to trust anyone--from their next door neighbor to the mayor."
The core message of the research was that, "in the presence of diversity, we hunker down", he said. "We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us."
Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, "the most diverse human habitation in human history", but his findings also held for rural South Dakota, where "diversity means inviting Swedes to a Norwegians’ picnic".
When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. "They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions," said Prof Putnam. "The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching."
I'm not sure I believe that diversity is the reason people don't trust each other so much. I have no scientific evidence to back up my conclusion, but could it be that our attitudes about various groups is affected by television news and entertainment? By other information sources? Could it be that "I vant to be alone" isn't just a Greta Garbo line?
I've lived in some fairly ethnically diverse areas in my life, and I've lived in some rather homogeneous ones, as well. I can't say I trust any of my neighbors now less than I trusted neighbors 20 years ago when I lived in a different area. And I've always had a healthy skepticism when it came to government, local or national.
It would be nice if the outcome of Putnam's study were that all the diversity garbage would go away. It would be terrific if we weren't constantly bombarded with the idea that white people are racists if they don't seem thrilled with diversity, or minorities are just ignorant if they don't embrace other cultures willingly.
But I doubt any of that will happen. Instead, we'll be put through even more diversity training where we'll be told how much more accepting and open we will be if we just expose ourselves to this group or that. Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal puts it this way:
The diversity ideologues deserve whatever ill tidings they get. They're the ones who weren't willing to persuade the public of diversity's merits, preferring to turn "diversity" into a political and legal hammer to compel compliance. The conversions were forced conversions. As always, with politics comes pushback. And it never stops.
The harvest of bitter fruit from the diversity wars begun three decades ago across campuses, corporations and newsrooms has made the immigration debate significantly worse. Diversity's advocates gave short shrift to assimilation, indeed arguing that assimilation into the American mainstream was oppressive and coercive. So they demoted assimilation and elevated "differences." Then they took the nation to court. Little wonder the immigration debate is riven with distrust.
We need to accept the idea that assimilation isn't a dirty word; it's the way communities are built. That's why certain communities have certain characteristics. But the United States should have certain characteristics, too, which is why emphasizing our differences--rather than our similarities--tears at our national spirit.
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