diversity vs. solidarity?

here’s something scary, a new study from Harvard’s poli sci department shows a direct linkage between ethnic diversity and lack of engagement in the community. The study is the largest of its kind ever conducted and – if we accept it at face value – would seem to show that

Higher diversity meant lower social capital. In his findings, Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, 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.”

the findings are definitely not politically correct and seem to have upset the people behind the study as much as anyone else. The authors of the study spent a lot of time trying to explain their findings away.

the most important question (to me at least) is are these findings true? and if they are true, what does this mean for anarchists and others who are trying to build up the strength of community-based organizations and use them to supplant and replace the State. After all, it’s hard to have a society based on mutual aid and free association when the very ethnic makeup of that society undermines people’s natural inclination to help each other and makes them reluctant to associate with one another. And yet, we can’t possibly advocate against diversity, can we? to tell people that they should all either assimilate into a monoculture or segregate themselves along ethnic lines would be to betray our commitment to individual liberty and opposition to national and State borders that artificially seperate people. This is a problem.

On one level it just seems like common sense, of course people are going to trust members of their own tribes more then members of other, potentially rival, tribes. At the same time, however, how much of that is chicken and how much egg? how much of the way we divide ourselves along ethnic and racial lines is the cause of lack of engagement in a common community and how much is the result of the lack of a common community? Anyone who knows american histoy knows that capitalists have worked very hard to encourage and inflame divisions between working class people along ethnic and racial lines, is this survey merely showing the results of those efforts or is it helping to explain why ruling elites have found it so easy to do so?

more questions I don’t have the answers for. what do ya’ll think?

Posted: August 7th, 2007 under community, race & racism, science and history.
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