{"id":97893,"date":"2016-06-01T12:12:10","date_gmt":"2016-06-01T20:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=97893"},"modified":"2016-06-01T12:12:10","modified_gmt":"2016-06-01T20:12:10","slug":"steve-sailer-multiculturalism-doesnt-make-vibrant-communities-but-defensive-ones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=97893","title":{"rendered":"Steve Sailer: ‘Multiculturalism doesn\u2019t make vibrant communities but defensive ones’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Sailer wrote in 2007<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it\u2019s not just that we don\u2019t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don\u2019t trust people who do look like us.
\n\u2014Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam<\/em><\/p>\n

It was one of the more irony-laden incidents in the history of celebrity social scientists. While in Sweden to receive a $50,000 academic prize as political science professor of the year, Harvard\u2019s Robert D. Putnam, a former Carter administration official who made his reputation writing about the decline of social trust in America in his bestseller Bowling Alone, confessed to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that his latest research discovery\u2014that ethnic diversity decreases trust and co-operation in communities\u2014was so explosive that for the last half decade he hadn\u2019t dared announce it \u201cuntil he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it \u2018would have been irresponsible to publish without that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In a column headlined \u201cHarvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity,\u201d Lloyd summarized the results of the largest study ever of \u201ccivic engagement,\u201d a survey of 26,200 people in 40 American communities:<\/p>\n

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. \u2018They don\u2019t trust the local mayor, they don\u2019t trust the local paper, they don\u2019t trust other people and they don\u2019t trust institutions,\u2019 said Prof Putnam. \u2018The only thing there\u2019s more of is protest marches and TV watching.\u2019
\nLloyd noted, \u201cProf Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, \u2018the most diverse human habitation in human history.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

As if to prove his own point that diversity creates minefields of mistrust, Putnam later protested to the Harvard Crimson that the Financial Times essay left him feeling betrayed, calling it \u201cby two degrees of magnitude, the worst experience I have ever had with the media.\u201d To Putnam\u2019s horror, hundreds of \u201cracists and anti-immigrant activists\u201d sent him e-mails congratulating him for finally coming clean about his findings.<\/p>\n

Lloyd stoutly stood by his reporting, and Putnam couldn\u2019t cite any mistakes of fact, just a failure to accentuate the positive. It was \u201calmost criminal,\u201d Putnam grumbled, that Lloyd had not sufficiently emphasized the spin that he had spent five years concocting. Yet considering the quality of Putnam\u2019s talking points that Lloyd did pass on, perhaps the journalist was being merciful in not giving the professor more rope with which to hang himself. For example, Putnam\u2019s line\u2014\u201cWhat we shouldn\u2019t do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us\u201d\u2014sounds like a weak parody of Bertolt Brecht\u2019s parody of Communist propaganda after the failed 1953 uprising against the East German puppet regime: \u201cWould it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?\u201d<\/p>\n

Before Putnam hid his study away, his research had appeared on March 1, 2001 in a Los Angeles Times article entitled \u201cLove Thy Neighbor? Not in L.A.\u201d Reporter Peter Y. Hong recounted, \u201cThose who live in more homogeneous places, such as New Hampshire, Montana or Lewiston, Maine, do more with friends and are more involved in community affairs or politics than residents of more cosmopolitan areas, the study said.\u201d<\/p>\n

Putnam\u2019s discovery is hardly shocking to anyone who has tried to organize a civic betterment project in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. My wife and I lived for 12 years in Chicago\u2019s Uptown district, which claims to be the most diverse two square miles in America, with about 100 different languages being spoken. She helped launch a neighborhood drive to repair the dilapidated playlot across the street. To get Mayor Daley\u2019s administration to chip in, we needed to raise matching funds and sign up volunteer laborers.<\/p>\n

This kind of Robert D. Putnam-endorsed good citizenship proved difficult in Uptown, however, precisely because of its remarkable diversity. The most obvious stumbling block was that it\u2019s hard to talk neighbors into donating money or time if they don\u2019t speak the same language as you. Then there\u2019s the fundamental difficulty of making multiculturalism work\u2014namely, multiple cultures. Getting Koreans, Russians, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Assyrians (Christian Iraqis) to agree on how to landscape a park is harder than fostering consensus among people who all grew up with the same mental picture of what a park should look like. For example, Russian women like to sunbathe. But most of the immigrant ladies from more southerly countries stick to the shade, since their cultures discriminate in favor of fairer-skinned women. So do you plant a lot of shade trees or not?<\/p>\n

The high crime rate didn\u2019t help either. The affluent South Vietnamese merchants from the nearby Little Saigon district showed scant enthusiasm for sending their small children to play in a park that would also be used by large black kids from the local public-housing project.<\/p>\n

Exotic inter-immigrant hatreds also got in the way. The Eritreans and Ethiopians are both slender, elegant-looking brown people with thin Arab noses, who appear identical to undiscerning American eyes. But their compatriots in the Horn of Africa were fighting a vicious war.<\/p>\n

Finally, most of the immigrants, with the possible exception of the Eritreans, came from countries where only a chump would trust neighbors he wasn\u2019t related to, much less count on the government for an even break. If the South Vietnamese, for example, had been less clannish and more ready to sacrifice for the national good in 1964-75, they wouldn\u2019t be so proficient at running family-owned restaurants on Argyle Street today. But they might still have their own country.<\/p>\n

In the end, boring old middle-class, English-speaking, native-born Americans (mostly white, but with some black-white couples) did the bulk of the work. When the ordeal of organizing was over, everybody seemed to give up on trying to bring Uptown together for civic improvement for the rest of the decade.<\/p>\n

The importance of co-operativeness has fallen in and out of intellectual fashion over the centuries. An early advocate of the role of cohesion in history\u2019s cycles was the 14th-century Arab statesman and scholar Ibn Khaldun, who documented that North African dynasties typically began as desert tribes poor in everything but what he termed asabiya or social solidarity. Their willingness to sacrifice for each other made them formidable in battle. But once they conquered a civilized state along the coast, the inevitable growth in inequality began to sap their asabiya, until after several generations their growing fractiousness allowed another cohesive clan to emerge from the desert and overthrow them.<\/p>\n

Recently, Princeton biologist Peter Turchin has extended Ibn Khaldun\u2019s analysis in a disquieting direction, pointing out that nothing generates asabiya like having a common enemy. Turchin notes that powerful states arise mostly on ethnic frontiers, where conflicts with very different peoples persuade co-ethnics to overcome their minor differences and all hang together, or assuredly they would all hang separately. Thus the German heartland remained divided up among numerous squabbling principalities until 1870. Meanwhile, powerful German kingdoms emerged on Prussia\u2019s border with the Balts and Slavs and Austria\u2019s border with the Slavs and Magyars.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the 13 American colonies came together by fighting first the French and Indians, then the British. In this century, two world wars helped forge from the heavy immigration of 1890 to 1924 what Putnam calls the \u201clong civic generation\u201d that reached its peak in the 1940s and \u201950s.<\/p>\n

Half a millennium after Ibn Khaldun, Alexis de Tocqueville famously attributed much of America\u2019s success to its \u201cforever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types\u2014religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.\u201d<\/p>\n

The transformation of economics into a technical rather than empirical field discouraged hard thinking about co-operation. It was much simpler to create mathematical models based on the assumption that rational individual self-interest drove human behavior, even though that perspective could hardly explain such vast events as the First World War, that abattoir of asabiya.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, the importance of civil society was widely talked up as crucial in transitioning post-Soviet states away from totalitarianism, but the free-market economists\u2019 prescription of \u201cshock therapy\u201d prevailed disastrously in Russia, as gangsters looted the nations\u2019 assets.<\/p>\n

An important contribution to the scholarly revival came in Francis Fukuyama\u2019s 1995 book Trust: The Social Virtues & the Creation of Prosperity. Fukuyama raised the hot-potato issue that Americans, Northwestern Europeans, and Japanese tend to work together well to create huge corporations, while the companies of other advanced countries, such as Italy and Taiwan, can seldom grow beyond family firms. (As Luigi Barzini remarked in The Italians, only a fool would be a minority shareholder in Sicily, so nobody is one.) Fukuyama prudently ignored, though, the large swaths of the world that are low both in trust and technology, such as Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.<\/p>\n

As an economics major and libertarian fellow-traveler in the late 1970s, I assumed that individualism made America great. But a couple of trips south of the border raised questions. Venturing onto a Buenos Aires freeway in 1978, I discovered a carnival of rugged individualists. Back home in Los Angeles, everybody drove between the lane-markers painted on the pavement, but only about one in three Argentineans followed that custom. Another third straddled the stripes, apparently convinced that the idiots driving between the lines were unleashing vehicular chaos. And the final third ignored the maric\u00f3n lanes altogether and drove wherever they wanted.<\/p>\n

The next year, I was sitting on an Acapulco beach with some college friends, trying to shoo away peddlers. When we tried to brush off one especially persistent drug dealer by claiming we had no cash, he whipped out his credit-card machine, which was impressively enterprising for the 1970s. That set me thinking about why we Americans were luxuriating on the Mexicans\u2019 beach instead of vice-versa. Clearly, the individual entrepreneurs pestering us were at least as hardworking and ambitious as we were. Mexico\u2019s economic shortcoming had to be its corrupt and feckless large organizations. Mexicans didn\u2019t seem to team up well beyond family-scale. Read on.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Sailer wrote in 2007: In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it\u2019s not just that we don\u2019t trust people who are not … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29733],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diversity"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t