Diversity is Bad

A very interesting article in City Journal talks about how multi-culturalism is hurting the country, not the other way around. People like each other a lot less when faced with strangers. And homogeneous cultures have much more robust sense of community than diverse ones. It’s pretty obvious everywhere you go if you look around.

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.

Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend “to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings “may underestimate the real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.”

None of this surprises me. I’ve been studying cultures for a long time. Places with “diversity” seem to have more crime and more problems. I guess its the bird of a feather principal. People feel more comfortable around “their kind”. We’ve been told time and time again not to be racist or whatever, but human nature is what it is. And as the article explains, racism isn’t the issue. Even people of the same race distrust each other when things get too mixed up.

It’s too late to stop the trends. But the immigration bill needs to die. It’s wrong for so many reasons its not even funny. And this article provides yet another reason to see it fail.

What remains to be seen is which politicians are stupid enough to sell us out. 

1. In a word: yes.

   Posted by Macker  on  06/27  at  02:50 AM

2. ... you sure are scared of that you are not familiar with ...

   Reminds me of the middle ages

   Posted by  on  06/27  at  04:13 AM

3. Some points (obviously):
   o Racism is not disliking diversity and is most certainly not prejudice.
   o “Enforced” multi-culturalism is the problem. If one chooses to be around people they have a much better time of it than otherwise. Also, cities are terrible places to judge concepts like “trust” so it is not surprising that rural areas—and even cities in the Dakotas— with families that have lived together for eons show a higher level of trust.
   o That said, of course I understand that it is human nature to prefer the company of like-minded, even like-complexioned people, but it’s nowhere as bad as this article seems to show. More than anything, I believe the main idea should be less focused on diversity per se and more on ideology, philosophy, and ideology. By this I mean simply that people who generally think the same, share the same values and principles but may look differently get along better than not.
   History is full of examples in which supposedly very different groups of people live together in harmony. Heck, immigration into the US is a proximate example: the eighteenth century Europeans arrived and quickly assimilated, albeit with some initial problems, but they are now part and parcel of the American cultural landscape.
   The latter day immigrants however, want to modify the culture to suit themselves. This will alway cause problems.
   o It’s too early for me to be thinking.

   Posted by Fred Woodbridge  on  06/27  at  06:36 AM

4. Fred,

   I have always got along with people of other races and cultures, since I was a little kid. So I agree that its forced multiculturalism. And the left has pushed this whole identity politics thing, which has a very racist undercurrent. And too many immigrants these days don’t want to assimilate and our government doesn’t encourage assimilation. It tries to accommodate them through multi-culturalism.

   And multi-culturalism and identity politics rives things like willful segregation and ethnic and race problems, because it stirs up feelings of animosity and divisiveness.

   Posted by James Hudnall  on  06/27  at  09:52 AM

5. The U.S. Government doesn’t encourage assimilation?  Trust me, it can’t be as bad as it is here in Canada where for many years the Liberals wanted Multi-culturalism to be the definition of this country.

   Posted by  on  06/27  at  12:00 PM
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