The Downside of Diversity?

You can add this to the list of things that everyone knows but that just aren't true.  Diversity is prized social goal across academia, governments, and the business world.  The general idea is that the more we come into content with people of different ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds, the more tolerant, open-minded, and trusting we will be.  Once we discover for ourselves that "those people" are just people, like ourselves, prejudices will slowly but inevitably melt away.  And then along comes Harvard Political Scientist Robert Putnam to burst the happy, multi-cultured bubble.  Rubin Navarette has this, at Real Clear Politics. 

Putnam has surveyed about 30,000 residents of 41 different communities in the United States -- which he divides up into whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. The objective was to gauge how much faith these people have in their institutions, how much they trust their neighbors, how often they vote, and how much community involvement they have. The more diverse a community, Putnam reports, the fewer people vote or volunteer and the less they give to charity, contribute to civic projects, trust local government or believe the media. In fact, the more diverse their surroundings, the more likely people are -- in Putnam's words -- to "hunker down" and "pull in like a turtle."

Putnam's findings arrive at a rather unfortunate time, when the U.S. and Europe are struggling with immigration.  His study was immediately seized upon by cultural and racial isolationists as proof that immigration is a mortal threat to America.  "Robert Putnam: Diversity is Our Destruction!" is how Pat Buchanan put it, which is not at all how Robert Putnam put it.  But you get the drift.  There goes the neighborhood.

But in fact Putnam isn't telling us anything we didn't already know.  Immigration is never the cuddly cozy kind of thing you see on public TV, with a motley group of faces smiling up at a purple dinosaur.  I recently enjoyed a marvelous dinner in Boston's North End, which was once English, and then became Irish, and was later overwhelmed by Italians.  The food became progressively better, but not without a lot of heat both in and outside of the kitchens.  It's not easy to adjust to change.  You have to learn to pronounce a whole new set of names, recognize a new set of gestures, and survive a new wave of competitors. 

It's easy to imagine that the United States could be like South Dakota: comfortable and homogeneous.  All you have to do is forget how all the Norwegians and German Russians and Irish got here and what the adjustment was like.  And you have to forget how empty many places were until these immigrants arrived, and how empty they will become if we try to lock the doors and seal the windows.  And you have to believe the unbelievable: that we can lock out diversity.  It's coming, whether we like it or not.  Our ability to manage it, like we did in the past, will determine our future. 

On a more positive note, I heard more different languages during my recent visit to Boston than I have heard anywhere else.  But the people of Boston were astonishingly friendly.  Everywhere we went, perfect strangers would volunteer to help us with directions, or to explain how to navigate the various forms of public transport.  If you want to know how to manage diversity, don't read mutlicultural literature.  Instead, go eat some lobster.