The Arts and Letters Daily provided a link to an interesting article yesterday, one picked up by Deborah over at In A Strange Land.
It’s a compelling article. The author discusses the work of a social scientist called Robert Putnam. Putnam has been studying the impact of ethnic diversity in American cities for a decade and has produced some interesting findings. Without having read the original article (and relying on the Boston Globe story), Putnam has demonstrated that trust and civic engagement is lowered in diverse communities.
What this result means is that people are less likely to mix with their neighbours, even ethnically similar neighbours, and less likely to participate in political, social or cultural life, when diversity is high.
A very big finding. One that potentially undermines the arguments posed in favour of multiculturalism. For example, if introducing people into communities has a negative effect on democratic interaction, then why encourage immigration from ethnically distinct sources?
As you can imagine, the conservatives are having a field day.
What’s interesting about Putnams results though is that he’s demonstrating that old ideas about civil society are defunct in the modern world. Much like conservatives who haven’t caught up with the realities of metropolitan life, the ideal of the perfect civil society has simply had its day. Whereas once we could aspire to perfect social and political interaction in gleaming cities without poverty, disease or hunger, modern advances in communication, transport and economics have put all those ideals out the window.
But, what Putnam has not demonstrated is that civil society is under pressure from diversity. Instead, what Putnam has effectively demonstrated that civil society is an outmoded utopian dream in the face of modern social realities. It isn’t the issue of diversity that needs to be addressed. Unless some massive change occurs, such as the end of easy international travel, diversity is here to stay.
What needs to be addressed is our outmoded social and political institutions. Institutions that rely on homogeneity and uniformity to operate effectively. As I indicated in another post, our institutions were designed and constructed in during the Industrial Revolution, and are becoming increasingly irrelevant to a wired, globally mobile population. Blaming diversity for an unresponsive and defunct socio-political system is pointless, new systems need to be devised to accommodate the needs of diverse societies.
Fortunately, as Putnam has discovered, diverse societies, workplaces, teams and communities are hard-wired for innovation and higher productivity. Maybe the answers are in the communities themselves.
PS. I did some snooping around, and here’s the original Putnam article. I’ll read it over and maybe make another post based on it, and your comments.
9 August, 2007 at 10:16 pm
[...] More on diversity Published August 9th, 2007 Institutions , Citizenship , Democracy Jordan has been talking about diversity, DPF has been talking about direct democracy, and in both places, people have been discussing, in varying degrees of civility, how to live with minorities, and minority groups. Oh, and Dr Tibby and I have been rehearsing our views on diversity in an earlier post. It has been a great day. Update – Che has a great post about diversity at Object Dart. [...]
9 August, 2007 at 10:19 pm
[...] Update 9/8/07 – Che has a great post about diversity at Object Dart. [...]
9 August, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Yes. But I think that our institutions aren’t too bad, ‘though they need to be modified and updated, so that we use differing modes of engagement. Iris Marion Young has written on this, and I have the paper somewhere, buried in the garage…
10 August, 2007 at 8:40 am
Weird,
I read Putnam’s book (the title is something about bowling) way back in 2003. It’s an interesting piece and one that had my team very interested and did inform our work to some extent (un-named govt department).
The overarching idea is more around homogeneity of communities. Ethnicity is just the easiest difference to notice. Hence the reaction of “see, now keep those [insert racial slur] out of mah neighbourhood”.
We used to talk about a hypothetical model-ship building club made up of Israelis, Palestinians, Republicans, Democrats, Muslims and Fundys and how they’d all get along together as long as the subject was model ships.
10 August, 2007 at 10:01 am
good point. maybe civic democracy needs to remove culture from discussions, and only talk about widgets.
the widgets become a proxy for other types of issues.
hmmm… thinking about it… putnam could be argued to be reinforcing the need for secularisation of democratic politics?
10 August, 2007 at 10:41 am
Remove culture? Ouch! I don’t think that’s possible in any case – people bring their embodied selves to public discussion. If you strip away culture, you’re left with something like Cass Susteins (sp?) procedural republic, or Rawls’ political liberalism (c/f A Theory of Justice). So it all becomes about process and procedure, and we make people retreat to their own private little worlds, and as discussed elsewhere, I think we end up in Chandran Kukathas’ liberal archipelago.
10 August, 2007 at 11:08 am
that’s the thing. i’m starting to think that we don’t arrive at the liberal archipelago.
i think we’re returning to the archipelago, and bringing liberal tolerance of difference with us.
the nation-state, homogeneity-within-boundaries concept has become increasingly irrelevant.
10 August, 2007 at 4:29 pm
What needs to be addressed is our outmoded social and political institutions. “Institutions that rely on homogeneity and uniformity to operate effectively. As I indicated in another post, our institutions were designed and constructed in during the Industrial Revolution, and are becoming increasingly irrelevant to a wired, globally mobile population. Blaming diversity for an unresponsive and defunct socio-political system is pointless, new systems need to be devised to accommodate the needs of diverse societies.”
Che, I totally agree on this point. Last semester my MPP class touched on deliberative democracy which attempts to strike a balance between direct democracy and representative democracy. More importantly it focuses on how to better involve citizens within the decision-making (i.e law-making) processes of democracy, and contribute to its outcomes. With changes in techonology, there are more opportunities to do this, but it’s not the ‘silver bullet’. Ulimately there is a responsibility to ensuring citizens (whether diverse or not) are given that opportunity to participate. How that is best achieved and what system that fits into is a good question to ponder.
12 August, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Back to my earlier comment regarding Iris Marion Young and the politics of inclusion, I think that the book I was referring to is: Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy, Princeton University Press, 1997, and in particular, the chapter on ‘Communication and the Other’. I don’t have a copy, alas, so I must have borrowed it from the library. Anyway, groping back, vaguely, to six or seven years ago when I was working on these ideas, I think she advocates allowing ‘other’ modes of discourse to be used in political arenas, such as greeting, story telling and rhetoric. I don’t quite know what she means by those terms. I must get around to reading it again sometime, soon!