Luke Ford

I routinely hear appeals for Jewish unity. Here’s one I got via email today from a worthy organization:

Shalom Luke,

Rav Kook taught that “we need to educate toward spiritual unity.”

I agree – and I am very gratified that Ayeka has become a force of unity in the Jewish world.

We educate to individual unity, seeking to harmonize mind, body, and soul. We focus on community unity in our cross-city Soulful Education training. Acharon acharon chaviv, we care about Jewish People unity, with every Ayeka mixed cohort comprised of rabbis and educators from every type and affiliation.

I feel that this approach has helped to deepen and cohere my own life.

In an often scattered, confusing, and multi-tasking world, we need to be at one with ourselves, our communities, and our nation.

If this vision resonates with you – please help us expand our programs to reach even more participants, institutions, and cities.

I expect that every group has appeals like this, every group but whites. I would not be expected to hear blacks, Muslims, Mexicans, etc appealing for unity, but if I heard about an appeal for white unity, I’d immediately think about Nazis. Why? Because the Nazis are the most famous example of an explicit call for a type of white ethnic unity.

You probably react to this one of two ways. One way is to say, if Nazism was a movement of white German ethnic unity, then it wasn’t so bad. The other common reaction is that when whites call for unity, it leads to genocide and is an evil thing that must be opposed. Whites are the one group that are not allowed to have group interests.

What rarely gets mentioned in all calls for strong in-group identity is that hostility to outsiders is inevitably a part of all strong in-group identity. That does not mean that every Jew who strongly identifies as a Jew will be hostile to non-Jews, but it does mean that fostering a strong in-group identity, such as Jewish, will lead generally (though not among every member of the in-group every minute of the day) to hostility to outsiders.

Americans segregate themselves by race at every opportunity. They chose to live among their own, to work among their own, to socialize among their own, and to worship among their own. The more people are forced to mix with different races, the more unhappy they are (in general).

Jason Richwine wrote for the American Heritage Foundation Aug. 12, 2009:

Science is telling us that ethnic diversity causes significant problems by diminishing valuable social capital. What then should we do about it?

It was not the kind of message a Harvard seminar expects to hear. Ethnic diversity causes a lot of problems, our guest speaker told us. It reduces interpersonal trust, civic engagement, and charitable giving. It causes us to disengage from society, like turtles shrinking into their shells, reducing our overall quality of life. The more diversity we experience in our lives, the less happy we are.

I came to Harvard to study public policy in the fall of 2004. All of the first-years like me had to take a special seminar class where we would discuss the philosophy of science and the nature of good research. The best class days featured established scholars who would come to present their own papers, which were real-life examples of good research.

The guest speaker who came to discuss diversity was political scientist Robert Putnam, who is something of a celebrity in academic circles. With the publication of his 1995 article “Bowling Alone,” Putnam helped bring the issues of social trust and civic participation to the forefront of social science. His article became a popular book, also called Bowling Alone, in 2000. Written for a general audience, the book chronicled the rapid decline in civic engagement that had taken place in the United States since 1950, and argued that communities without strong social ties are less happy and less successful. The article and the book garnered Putnam numerous media appearances and spawned reams of response articles in academia.

Putnam began by telling us about one result he encountered that was thoroughly upsetting to him—the more ethnically diverse a community is, the less social capital it possesses. When a person lives in a diverse community, he trusts everyone less, including those of his own ethnic group.

So how did Putnam come to conclude that ethnic diversity is so problematic? The answer begins with the notion of “social capital,” which Putnam defines in simple terms—“social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness.” Social capital turns out to be an exceptionally valuable commodity. Building complex networks of friends and associates, trusting others to keep their word, and maintaining social norms and expectations all grease the wheels of business by enabling cooperation.