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