Robert Putnam’s “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century”

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1.  In case you haven’t heard all the hoopla, sociologist Robert Putnam, most famous for his book Bowling Alone, has published a new article arguing that “In the short to medium run, … immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital.”

2.  It’s an excellent article; a thought-provoking read. Apart from a dicey section on the multivariate analysis of data to control for the effect of certain variables, the study is accessible to non-experts like me.  Don’t make the same mistake as 98 percent of the people who are currently dismissing Putnam’s results: read the article for yourself.

3.  An aside: More interesting than Putnam’s article, in my view, has been the sociology of its reception. There’s a palpable hesitancy, in polite liberal circles, to bring up the subject.  First, it’s never his article, but rather somebody’s gloss on it that my colleagues suggest I read.  Second, no person of conscience broaches the subject of Putnam’s article unless, in the same breath, he also recommends a book or article that purports to advance a countervailing thesis.  Putnam’s work is clearly radioactive.

4.  Never fear the truth, whatever it might be.

5.  Putnam’s article might ultimately rival Christine Letts’s “Virtuous Capital” for the volume of eyebrow-raising commentary it will generate—much of it, I predict, involving a great deal of hand-wringing.

6.  Liberals are in some ways hoist on their own petard: Putnam uses variation in ethnic/racial category as a proxy for “diversity.”  This is what I sometimes refer to as the Whitman’s Sampler Model of diversity, an impoverished notion that enables well-meaning liberals to declare victory when they have “one of these, one of these, and one of those” on their staff or on their board.

7.  Putnam’s results will play handily to those conservatives who believe that self-segregation works with, rather than against, “the grain of human nature.”  We hear this kind of argument in apologetics for “a conservatism comfortable with materialist self-interest.”  These same conservatives will likely pass over in silence those sections of the article that review the many benefits of increased immigration and diversity: greater creativity; better, faster problem-solving; and more rapid economic growth, among others.  Putnam never argues that diversity is, on balance, a bad thing.

8.  Putnam’s results discredit the idea that greater diversity is correlated with increased inter-ethnic hostility.  He stresses that “[d]iversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation.”  To put it another way, “In more diverse settings, Americans distrust not merely people who do not look like them, but even people who do.”

9.  Putnam points out that:

All our empirical analysis to this point has involved ‘comparative statics’—that is, we have compared people living in places with different ethnic mixes at one point in time—namely different American communities in the year 2000. Although our evidence does suggest that it is the level of diversity that matters, not the rate of change, we have not yet considered any ‘dynamic’ evidence about the effects of immigration and diversity over long periods of time within a single place (whether a single community or the nation as a whole). Exploring the dynamics, as opposed to the comparative statics, of diversity and social capital requires entirely different methods, and my research group has only begun to explore those avenues.

What would these further studies likely reveal?

10.  Finally, and most importantly in my opinion, Putnam doesn’t argue that we can’t learn to respond to ethnic and racial diversity better than we currently do.  We’re not fated forever to respond irrationally to fear of the “other,” however much recent history has inclined us to this view.

Comments

[erasmus]

I can vouch for the radioactivity of Putnam's article. Apparently nobody did more hand wringing on this one than Putnam himself.

The liberal hand-wringing fest is in full view from my front stoop.

You see, I live in one of those so called urban diverse neighborhoods that all my crunchy ****** pals have been using to counter Putnam's thesis.

"But I live in a gloriously diverse neighborhood where blah, blah..."

But is it? Or are they holding on their reconstructed racial narratives that give them power and priveledge?

Take a look with me from my stoop.

Yes, we have chocolates, and cremes, and nut filled, and maybe we bump into each other here and there at restaurants or the Shop-n-Pay, schools, and parks, but the body politic is awfully darn segregated.

See the rich white folks in the condos over there? They don't even like kids. We don't even walk on their fancy lawn.

That Puerto Rican family next door in the duplex have a big party every weekend in the summer but I have never seen a black or white person crack open a Bud with them.

Behind us is an apartment building of filled with white activists, artists, and those insufferable goofy ass cultural creative types. They only talk to other folks if they are handing about a protest flyer.

See that old grumpy guy with the chihuahua? He is the president of the neighborhood association. A bag of marshmallows has more diversity than those geezers.

Oh, its not all bad. Take a look at my park round the way. The kids and dogs mix it up.

Kids and dogs. What does that tell you?

They are the only ones keeping it real.

Yeah, Mr. Putnam, I got your social capital right here.

[Albert Ruesga]

I recall being on a bus tour of DC many years back during a national conference. As we passed through one especially blighted neighborhood, our tour guide commented that thanks to development efforts, “people [were] beginning to move back.” There were, of course, people already living in the area. They just happened to be mostly poor and black. I assumed our guide was referring to an uptick in the neighborhood census numbers, but her words gave me pause. That same neighborhood is currently in the “immiscible” state you describe in your comment.

All the diversity trainings in the world aren’t going to get us past the immiscibility, the misconstruals, the things said that are better charged to the head than the heart. I glimpse the new Eden every now and then, in a neighborhood park or in a Hip-Hop club—and yes, it’s mostly young people who are mixing it up.

P.S. I pixelated one of the words in your comment. I buy the argument of Words">http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Dwords%2Bthat%2Bwound&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title">Words That Wound in a big way, and all ******* are welcome on this blog.

Peace.

[digital dissertation]

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