Diversity

John Leo
Bowling With Our Own
Robert Putnam’s sobering new diversity research scares its author.
25 June 2007

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so...

As reviewed by John Leo, this looks like a very interesting and very well-done piece of research. I wrote an article a few months ago that tried to make a case for the positive value of diversity for a society, and I think the argument is sound. But it's also true that diversity comes with some social costs attached, which is what Putnam appears to have documented. I think the premise you have to start with is that people are most comfortable with other people who are just like them, and they become less comfortable with others to the extent that they are different. The question is how, and to what extent, you can overcome that so that the larger community does not become fragmented and lose its ability to act in any unified way.

Assimilation is one solution, but in our multi-culti era, it tends to be viewed as a form of cultural imperialism on the part of the dominant group. (And if assimilation were fully successful the benefits of diversity would also be lost; but assimilation is almost never that complete.) The old Contact Hypothesis said that if you throw initially hostile groups together they will gradually learn to like each other due to the increase in acquaintance. That idea was highly naive; sometimes when groups interact they find out they like each other even less than they thought. One modification of the theory was to specify that contact leads to increased liking only if interactants have approximately equal status. So putting a black public housing project in the middle of a white middle-class neighborhood will likely not produce enhanced inter-racial acceptance. But equal status is no magic bullet; much data suggests that while it may be a necessary condition, it's not sufficient.

An important additional proviso may be that equal-status contact increases acceptance only if it involves mutual engagement in some kind of cooperative effort toward shared goals. So for example in a multi-ethnic neighborhood with a teenage mischief problem, which each group is blaming on the others' kids, mutual acceptance would be increased by an anti-crime effort (neighborhood patrols, etc.) that drew on all the groups that make up the community; smart leadership would make sure those patrols were mixed.

The larger point is that there is no easy, automatic way to make initially hostile or mutually-suspicious groups come to accept and like each other. People prefer their own, and it takes deliberate measures to overcome that as much as it can be overcome. Where such measures aren't taken, what Putnam found is exactly what you'd expect to find. Unfortunately, the rather mindlessly idealistic version of multiculturalism that is most common today makes it less likely that the problem of inter-group acceptance will be approached seriously and systematically. That's because what I termed "vacuously celebratory" multiculturalism romanticizes cultural differences, and treats them as if they were non-problematic. That's a mistake.

Byron

Media Askew

"MSNBC.com identified 144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties."

"Most" lean left? Excluding the two who gave to both (we don't know if they gave equal or very unequal amounts), we have 144 Democrat/liberal contributors and 17 GOP contributors. That's 89+% Democrat/liberal.

With this kind of wild disproportion, media bias is inescapable and simply a given. The entire culture of newsrooms and editorial staffs leans heavily in the liberal direction, and that is constantly reflected in how news is covered, and in what stories are covered in the first place. In extreme cases, like that of the woeful New York Times, the result is a kind of journalistic jihad in which even the pretense of objectivity is discarded.

We are saddled with a mainstream media that is institutionally incapable of providing the public with unbiased information, and which cannot be trusted. Fortunately, that media is becoming less relevant and important with every passing day, and this is part of the reason.

Notice that even this story itself gets biased coverage by MSNBC, who would like us to believe that "most" is an appropriate adjective to describe a near-90% tilt. A very odd use of language. Rather than trying to minimize the disproportion, a straight news report would have said, accurately, that "Almost all of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left," or words to that effect. As usual, however, we are not given a straight news report; instead we get yet another biased product of MSNBC's ideological digestive system.

Byron

Party Animal

BY RON RADOSH
Time for Pete Seeger To Repent
June 12, 2007

Today, Jim Brown's new documentary, "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song," opens the annual American Film Institute/Discovery Channel Silverdocs Festival near Washington, D.C.

We come out of the film viewing Mr. Seeger as a man who always stood for peace. The truth was that he called for peace when the Party line demanded it, changed to supporting military intervention when the Party line changed, and then resumed the campaign for peace during the Cold War, when he regularly endorsed disarming America and excusing the Soviet arms buildup. Now, he constantly tells interviewers that he is a communist with a small c. He has finally gotten off the Stalinist bandwagon — a little late to make any difference, but better late than never.

Radosh has known Pete Seeger since childhood.

I've always thought those who fell for Communism out of idealism during the Depresssion should be given a pass, depending on how they performed on certain tests that occurred along the way. The first test was the Great Terror of the 1930s, including the show trials by which Stalin eliminated all possible competitors for power by torturing (to get "confessions") and executing all the key figures and original heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution. (It took him a little longer to get Trotsky.) Some Communist idealists in the West became disillusioned by these events, and they redeemed themselves by leaving the Stalinist fold. More probably would have left, except that what was happening in Russia was the subject of systematic misreporting by the New York Times. As was later shown, the Times' man in Moscow, Walter Duranty, was a propagandist and shill for Stalin; he had been blackmailed into covering up every crime of the regime, including the mass starvation murder of the Ukrainian Kulaks. The Times admits all this today, but still refuses to return Duranty's Pulitzer.

The second test was more demanding. It was whether you stuck with Stalin when he allied himself with Hitler in the 1939 pact that launched WWII. (Among other things, Stalin and Hitler agreed to divide Poland, and Poland was attacked from both sides shortly thereafter; Stalin also got to grab the Baltic states in return for securing Hitler's eastern front.) The idealists had been following the Party line by urging the US to enter the war as an anti-fascist ally of Russia against Germany. They had seen the beloved Soviet experiment being threatened by Hitler, and they believed the tripe about Communism being the bulwark against Fascism. Save Uncle Joe! So the 1939 Stalin-Hitler pact was a shocking betrayal of every idealist principle, and Western idealists abandoned Communism in droves. Those who remained Stalin loyalists followed the new, reversed Party line that called Churchill and FDR war-mongers in the pocket of industrial interests, pursuing a "Capitalist War" against socialism (Nazi = National Socialist, recall). The remaining Stalin loyalists instantly became dutiful anti-war advocates for "peace," doing everything they could to keep the US out of the war. Those anti-war efforts were orchestrated by the domestic Communist Party, which as in every country, was completely a creature of Moscow.

Those relatively few who STILL stuck with Stalin had to be pretty hard-core loyalists. But they got a third, even tougher test two years later, when Hitler pulled a double-cross and attacked Russia in 1941. The Party line again turned on a dime, and all good Stalinists in the US instantly became vehemently...wait for it...Pro-War! Save Uncle Joe! This was another chance -- and not one requiring much in the way of deep thought -- to recognize what kind of unprincipled pawn a Communist sympathizer and fellow traveler was expected to be. But, bless his heart, Pete Seeger passed every single test of Stalinist loyalty with flying colors, hanging proudly out there, Blowin' in the Stalinist Wind for all he was worth.

To paint this dedicated Communist hack as an idealist is a scandal, an vicious insult to all the true idealists (Natan Sharansky, et al.) who stood up to the evil of Stalinism in countries all around the world, and who suffered or died doing it. Just a few more corpses on the stack of 100+ million.

Where's your song for them, Pete?

Seeger may be a good musician, but he's a nasty piece of work otherwise.

Byron

Terrific Reporting

While the major media types spend most of their time in the Green Zone or close by, Michael Yon is out in the field with the troops. If you haven't been reading his reports, take a look at this one, Part I of IV, describing the operations of several crack British units in southern Iraq.

Like Yon, Johannes (click "Blog" button along top) is another independent reporter out with the troops, and on his own nickel.

These guys are doing the job of providing context from the battlefield that the mainstream media hasn't done since the original assault on Baghdad. CBS et al. think they are doing their job when Katie or whoever somberly announces how many Americans were killed that week, and rolls up the new total. When the numbers take a jump, there is no explanation in terms of changes in the nature of the operations being carried out, and no estimate of enemy casualties. Just more American victims of Bush.