Posted on 08/14/2007 11:02:57 AM PDT by freedomdefender
One of the many distasteful and underestimated influences on American and European life to emerge from the turbulent, anti-establishment '60s was the concept of "multiculturalism" -- which still dooms us today. It sounded so good. Not only were all people "created equal," as our founding documents had it, but equal opportunity was to be solemnly strived for, and men and women of every stripe and culture were to be guaranteed equal outcome. There was also the underlying (and insulting) idea that those "others" had no culture or memory or history of their own -- they were just like us. They wanted the same things that we did.
Ironically, these doctrines were born in the utopian lefts in American and European universities, but they came to have a hammer hold on the administration of George W., as well. Remember all the tripe about the father in Mosul wanting "just what we want for our kids"?
But now the entire, miserable multicultural voyage has made a sudden port call, and it is a curious one. One of the theory's major protagonists is the respected liberal Harvard professor Robert Putnam, known for his 2000 book "Bowling Alone," in which he uncovers a sobering decline in civic engagement in America. He has now come up with some astonishing findings that are so shocking that he did not release them for several years.
The truth, Putnam found, is that the greater the amount of multiculturalism and diversity in a society, the lower the level of civic engagement and shared sense of community cohesiveness. The multiculturalists who have dominated our social thinking for nearly 50 years got it all wrong.
Because the study has been published only in an obscure journal, it took a major newspaper like The Boston Globe to ferret out this "downside of diversity." Writing in the Globe, Michael Jones reports that, after interviewing approximately 30,000 participants in the widest-ranging survey ever on this subject, Putnam found that, "The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogeneous settings." Moreover, the wise commentator John Leo, writing in the Web's City Journal, adds that, "Putnam's study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. ... The problem isn't ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation."
If Putnam's findings are true -- and there is every reason to believe them to be -- then they may offer one explanation for why the American people responded so little and so lamely when our "leaders" dragged us, not even whimpering, into the most foolish war in history in 2003. I have often in these four years awakened in the middle of the night thinking something like: "Nobody simply cares. Nobody is related to anybody else in this country anymore. All the old connections between citizens and government -- and one another -- somehow got lost along the way."
Putnam is saying that yes, indeed, that's exactly what did happen, leaving us lost and atomized with a government that no longer needed our assent for its hubris, arrogance and violence.
But Putnam, a serious intellectual who does not usually let his liberal leanings affect his work, is not the only liberal having second thoughts these days. Writing in The New York Times Magazine recently, Michael Ignatieff, former Harvard professor and now a prominent Liberal Party politician in Canada, published a "mea culpa" on his stand supporting the Iraq war. Essentially, he says: "In academic life, false ideas are merely false, and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions, and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual's responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician's responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm."
It's an old, old story: utopian dreaming of perfect worlds and ignoring the harsh reality of this one vs. the politician or the journalist or the candy-maker who has to have an innate and polished street sense to survive.
Multiculturalism -- the notion that everyone is actually the same and will fit right in -- is palpably absurd. It disrespects the new person, his history, his reality, his personality. Bringing in unlimited numbers of people disrespects the society into which they are coming -- no society can absorb that many totally different peoples. Witness Europe and Islam. Witness California and its overwhelming Hispanic numbers. This becomes, then, no melting pot, but a boiling pot and a roiling sea of unassimilable numbers that leads to the breakdown and anomie of society.
Professor Putnam delayed publishing his findings because he found them so shocking he felt he had to wait until he could offer some answers to the problem. There already is an answer. It is called common sense, and its handmaiden is human nature.
AKA: “when the melting pot turns into a chamber pot...”
One thing that has kept them White anachronisms is that they are usually economically depressed areas. Still it is a different world to go there and see what a homogeneous American county is like.
review
Yeah, sure, Georgie. Talk about drawing the completely wrong conclusions from a study. I see she takes the "logic" used to prove human-caused global warming and applies it to show that diversity helped cause the Iraq War.
1) Multiculturalism is not a good thing
2) Utopian dreaming is a waste of effort
And these two truths convince them that:
1) George Bush is the big problem
2) No one supports the war in Iraq
3) Liberalism is the way to go.
Just fascinating.
I wonder if this means that Ms. Geyer has realized that Moslem Albanians illegally immigrated into the Serbian province of Kosovo-Metohija and used a terror campaign to force out the legitimate populace of Serbs, Roma, and Jews, thereby repudiating her previous anti-Serb rantings?
It’s just another example of how liberals can take the most self-evident truths and still make spectacular wrong turns with them.
Bump!
And you were expecting....?
Putnam is saying that yes, indeed, that's exactly what did happen, leaving us lost and atomized with a government that no longer needed our assent for its hubris, arrogance and violence.
But Putnam, a serious intellectual who does not usually let his liberal leanings affect his work
This is so ironic on so many levels that I don't know where to begin.
"Putnam has not yet published this work. In 2006, Putnam was quoted in the Financial Times as saying he had delayed publishing this research until he could "develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity" (quote from John Lloyd of Financial Times) [1]
"In 2007, writing in City Journal, John Leo questioned whether this suppression of publication was ethical behavior for a scholar, noting that "Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings."
...to have a little fun giving the verbal equivalent of the classic Stooges double-eye poke to Ms. Geyer.
"The study is part of a fascinating new portrait of diversity emerging from recent scholarship. Diversity, it shows, makes us uncomfortable -- but discomfort, it turns out, isn't always a bad thing.
Actually, Putnam's work showed that diversity reduces "social capital", not "comfort".
So, with that, Jonas goes on to regurgitate tired old liberal diversity theory:
"Unease with differences helps explain why teams of engineers from different cultures may be ideally suited to solve a vexing problem. Culture clashes can produce a dynamic give-and-take, generating a solution that may have eluded a group of people with more similar backgrounds and approaches."
Putnam's work, however showed just the opposite. Instead of a "dynamic give-and-take", diversity engenders a foxhole mentality where people tend to insulate themselves from others.
It seems she's starting to see the light, but she's still a clue or two short of the answer.
Well, well, well. Georgie Anne is having her conservative awakening. I remember similar thinking in the early 1980s, when I realized that my liberal New York upbringing and the evidence of my eyes weren’t matching up with each other.
The writer is incorrect in one regard, however. People from different cultures, races, and creeds can come to America and become Americans - witness my Jewish great-grandfather from Russia and my Catholic great-grandfather from Bohemia, whose grandchildren married each other - but that will only occur with a vigorous promotion of American values througout society and assimilation for immigrants at every step of the way. It says something when all those different ethnic groups and religions, after the purposeful assimilation of the early and middle 20th century, are now just considered “white.” I’m old enough to remember when those “white” people were usually referred to by an ethnic name noting country of origin or religion.
What I want is that guy whose great-grandfather came from El Salvador waving the American flag and waxing poetic about the virtues of the Constitution and limited government. I don’t give a hoot where they’re from, as long as they seek to become American after arrival.
I thought Georgie Ann Geyer was a liberal. Guess I was wrong.
That phrase did sound a little thuddish in an otherwise well-presented tonal libretto.
If the answer is “common sense” — what does this mean, exactly? What specifically would Ms. Geyer have us do differently? Legislate a homogeneous society?
This is reminiscent of the recent statement by Stephen Mansfield that if we returned to the Founding Fathers’ view of the role of religion in society, the US would be “less open to non-Christian religions”, and that society would be better. What, EXACTLY, should we restrict, and HOW?
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