nskripchun
Jan 15th, 2007, 01:38 AM
^ah, it's not that long... :|
Interesting article, though I find many of the "points" to be borderline offensive and racist. Then again, Pat Buchanan co-founded the magazine that this article comes from.
On a related note, Putnam's writing are very interesting. I remember reading "Bowling Alone" for one of my PoliSci classes back when I was in college and agreeing with a lot of his conclusions about American life.
Fragmented Future
Multiculturalism doesnít make vibrant communities but defensive ones.
by Steve Sailer
In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And itís not just that we donít trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we donít trust people who do look like us.
óHarvard professor Robert D. Putnam
It was one of the more irony-laden incidents in the history of celebrity social scientists. While in Sweden to receive a $50,000 academic prize as political science professor of the year, Harvardís Robert D. Putnam, a former Carter administration official who made his reputation writing about the decline of social trust in America in his bestseller Bowling Alone, confessed to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that his latest research discoveryóthat ethnic diversity decreases trust and co-operation in communitiesówas so explosive that for the last half decade he hadnít dared announce it ìuntil he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it ëwould have been irresponsible to publish without that.íî
In a column headlined ìHarvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity,î Lloyd summarized the results of the largest study ever of ìcivic engagement,î a survey of 26,200 people in 40 American communities:
When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. ëThey donít trust the local mayor, they donít trust the local paper, they donít trust other people and they donít trust institutions,í said Prof Putnam. ëThe only thing thereís more of is protest marches and TV watching.í
Lloyd noted, ìProf Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, ëthe most diverse human habitation in human history.íî
As if to prove his own point that diversity creates minefields of mistrust, Putnam later protested to the Harvard Crimson that the Financial Times essay left him feeling betrayed, calling it ìby two degrees of magnitude, the worst experience I have ever had with the media.î To Putnamís horror, hundreds of ìracists and anti-immigrant activistsî sent him e-mails congratulating him for finally coming clean about his findings.
Lloyd stoutly stood by his reporting, and Putnam couldnít cite any mistakes of fact, just a failure to accentuate the positive. It was ìalmost criminal,î Putnam grumbled, that Lloyd had not sufficiently emphasized the spin that he had spent five years concocting. Yet considering the quality of Putnamís talking points that Lloyd did pass on, perhaps the journalist was being merciful in not giving the professor more rope with which to hang himself. For example, Putnamís lineóìWhat we shouldnít do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new usîósounds like a weak parody of Bertolt Brechtís parody of Communist propaganda after the failed 1953 uprising against the East German puppet regime: ìWould it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?î
Before Putnam hid his study away, his research had appeared on March 1, 2001 in a Los Angeles Times article entitled ìLove Thy Neighbor? Not in L.A.î Reporter Peter Y. Hong recounted, ìThose who live in more homogeneous places, such as New Hampshire, Montana or Lewiston, Maine, do more with friends and are more involved in community affairs or politics than residents of more cosmopolitan areas, the study said.î
Putnamís discovery is hardly shocking to anyone who has tried to organize a civic betterment project in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. My wife and I lived for 12 years in Chicagoís Uptown district, which claims to be the most diverse two square miles in America, with about 100 different languages being spoken. She helped launch a neighborhood drive to repair the dilapidated playlot across the street. To get Mayor Daleyís administration to chip in, we needed to raise matching funds and sign up volunteer laborers.
This kind of Robert D. Putnam-endorsed good citizenship proved difficult in Uptown, however, precisely because of its remarkable diversity. The most obvious stumbling block was that itís hard to talk neighbors into donating money or time if they donít speak the same language as you. Then thereís the fundamental difficulty of making multiculturalism workónamely, multiple cultures. Getting Koreans, Russians, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Assyrians (Christian Iraqis) to agree on how to landscape a park is harder than fostering consensus among people who all grew up with the same mental picture of what a park should look like. For example, Russian women like to sunbathe. But most of the immigrant ladies from more southerly countries stick to the shade, since their cultures discriminate in favor of fairer-skinned women. So do you plant a lot of shade trees or not?
The high crime rate didnít help either. The affluent South Vietnamese merchants from the nearby Little Saigon district showed scant enthusiasm for sending their small children to play in a park that would also be used by large black kids from the local public-housing project.
Exotic inter-immigrant hatreds also got in the way. The Eritreans and Ethiopians are both slender, elegant-looking brown people with thin Arab noses, who appear identical to undiscerning American eyes. But their compatriots in the Horn of Africa were fighting a vicious war.
Finally, most of the immigrants, with the possible exception of the Eritreans, came from countries where only a chump would trust neighbors he wasnít related to, much less count on the government for an even break. If the South Vietnamese, for example, had been less clannish and more ready to sacrifice for the national good in 1964-75, they wouldnít be so proficient at running family-owned restaurants on Argyle Street today. But they might still have their own country.
In the end, boring old middle-class, English-speaking, native-born Americans (mostly white, but with some black-white couples) did the bulk of the work. When the ordeal of organizing was over, everybody seemed to give up on trying to bring Uptown together for civic improvement for the rest of the decade.
The importance of co-operativeness has fallen in and out of intellectual fashion over the centuries. An early advocate of the role of cohesion in historyís cycles was the 14th-century Arab statesman and scholar Ibn Khaldun, who documented that North African dynasties typically began as desert tribes poor in everything but what he termed asabiya or social solidarity. Their willingness to sacrifice for each other made them formidable in battle. But once they conquered a civilized state along the coast, the inevitable growth in inequality began to sap their asabiya, until after several generations their growing fractiousness allowed another cohesive clan to emerge from the desert and overthrow them.
Recently, Princeton biologist Peter Turchin has extended Ibn Khaldunís analysis in a disquieting direction, pointing out that nothing generates asabiya like having a common enemy. Turchin notes that powerful states arise mostly on ethnic frontiers, where conflicts with very different peoples persuade co-ethnics to overcome their minor differences and all hang together, or assuredly they would all hang separately. Thus the German heartland remained divided up among numerous squabbling principalities until 1870. Meanwhile, powerful German kingdoms emerged on Prussiaís border with the Balts and Slavs and Austriaís border with the Slavs and Magyars.
Similarly, the 13 American colonies came together by fighting first the French and Indians, then the British. In this century, two world wars helped forge from the heavy immigration of 1890 to 1924 what Putnam calls the ìlong civic generationî that reached its peak in the 1940s and í50s.
Half a millennium after Ibn Khaldun, Alexis de Tocqueville famously attributed much of Americaís success to its ìforever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different typesóreligious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.î
The transformation of economics into a technical rather than empirical field discouraged hard thinking about co-operation. It was much simpler to create mathematical models based on the assumption that rational individual self-interest drove human behavior, even though that perspective could hardly explain such vast events as the First World War, that abattoir of asabiya.
In the 1990s, the importance of civil society was widely talked up as crucial in transitioning post-Soviet states away from totalitarianism, but the free-market economistsí prescription of ìshock therapyî prevailed disastrously in Russia, as gangsters looted the nationsí assets.
An important contribution to the scholarly revival came in Francis Fukuyamaís 1995 book Trust: The Social Virtues & the Creation of Prosperity. Fukuyama raised the hot-potato issue that Americans, Northwestern Europeans, and Japanese tend to work together well to create huge corporations, while the companies of other advanced countries, such as Italy and Taiwan, can seldom grow beyond family firms. (As Luigi Barzini remarked in The Italians, only a fool would be a minority shareholder in Sicily, so nobody is one.) Fukuyama prudently ignored, though, the large swaths of the world that are low both in trust and technology, such as Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
As an economics major and libertarian fellow-traveler in the late 1970s, I assumed that individualism made America great. But a couple of trips south of the border raised questions. Venturing onto a Buenos Aires freeway in 1978, I discovered a carnival of rugged individualists. Back home in Los Angeles, everybody drove between the lane-markers painted on the pavement, but only about one in three Argentineans followed that custom. Another third straddled the stripes, apparently convinced that the idiots driving between the lines were unleashing vehicular chaos. And the final third ignored the maricÛn lanes altogether and drove wherever they wanted.
The next year, I was sitting on an Acapulco beach with some college friends, trying to shoo away peddlers. When we tried to brush off one especially persistent drug dealer by claiming we had no cash, he whipped out his credit-card machine, which was impressively enterprising for the 1970s. That set me thinking about why we Americans were luxuriating on the Mexicansí beach instead of vice-versa. Clearly, the individual entrepreneurs pestering us were at least as hardworking and ambitious as we were. Mexicoís economic shortcoming had to be its corrupt and feckless large organizations. Mexicans didnít seem to team up well beyond family-scale.
In America, you donít need to belong to a family-based mafia for protection because the state will enforce your contracts with some degree of equality before the law. In Mexico, though, as former New York Times correspondent Alan Riding wrote in his 1984 bestseller Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, ìPublic life could be defined as the abuse of power to achieve wealth and the abuse of wealth to achieve power.î Anyone outside the extended family is assumed to have predatory intentions, which explains the famous warmth and solidarity of Mexican families. ìMexicans need few friends,î Riding observed, ìbecause they have many relatives.î
Mexico is a notoriously low-trust culture and a notoriously unequal one. The great traveler Alexander von Humboldt observed two centuries ago, in words that are arguably still true, ìMexico is the country of inequality. Perhaps nowhere in the world is there a more horrendous distribution of wealth, civilization, cultivation of land, and population.î Jorge G. CastaÒeda, Vicente Foxís first foreign minister, noted the ethnic substratum of Mexicoís disparities in 1995:
The business or intellectual elites of the nation tend to be white (there are still exceptions, but they are becoming more scarce with the years). By the 1980s, Mexico was once again a country of three nations: the criollo minority of elites and the upper-middle class, living in style and affluence; the huge, poor, mestizo majority; and the utterly destitute minority of what in colonial times was called the Republic of IndiansÖ
CastaÒeda pointed out, ìThese divisions partly explain why Mexico is as violent and unruly, as surprising and unfathomable as it has always prided itself on being. The pervasiveness of the violence was obfuscated for years by the fact that much of it was generally directed by the state and the elites against society and the masses, not the other way around. The current rash of violence by society against the state and elites is simply a retargeting.î
These deep-rooted Mexican attitudes largely account for why, in Putnamís ìSocial Capital Community Benchmark Survey,î Los Angeles ended up looking a lot like it did in the Oscar-winning movie ìCrash.î I once asked a Hollywood agent why there are so many brother acts among filmmakers these days, such as the Coens, Wachowskis, Farrellys, and Wayans. ìWho else can you trust?î he shrugged.
But what primarily drove down L.A.ís rating in Putnamís 130-question survey were the high levels of distrust displayed by Hispanics. While no more than 12 percent of L.A.ís whites said they trusted other races ìonly a little or not at all,î 37 percent of L.A.ís Latinos distrusted whites. And whites were the most reliable in Hispanic eyes. Forty percent of Latinos doubted Asians, 43 percent distrusted other Hispanics, and 54 percent were anxious about blacks.
Some of this white-Hispanic difference stems merely from Latinosí failure to tell politically correct lies to the researchers about how much they trust other races. Yet the L.A. survey results also reflect a very real and deleterious lack of co-operativeness and social capital among Latinos. As columnist Gregory Rodriguez stated in the L.A. Times: ìIn Los Angeles, home to more Mexicans than any other city in the U.S., there is not one ethnic Mexican hospital, college, cemetery, or broad-based charity.î
Since they seldom self-organize beyond the extended family, Los Angelesís millions of Mexican-Americans make strangely little contribution to local civic and artistic life. L.A. is awash in underemployed creative talent who occupy their abundant spare time putting on plays, constructing spectacular haunted houses each Halloween, and otherwise trying to attract Jerry Bruckheimerís attention. Yet there is little overlap between the enormous entertainment industry and the huge Mexican-American community.
In late October, I pored over the 64-page Sunday Calendar section of the L.A. Times, which listed a thousand or more upcoming cultural events. I found just seven that were clearly organized by Latinos. While itís a journalistic clichÈ to describe Mexican-American neighborhoods as ìvibrant,î they arenít.
Some of this lack of social capital is class-relatedóMiami indeed has a vibrant Hispanic culture, but itís anomalous because it attracts Latin Americaís affluent and educated. In contrast, Los Angeles is a representative harbinger of Americaís future because it imports peasants and laborers.
Itís often assumed that low-trust societies can be fixed just by everyone deciding to trust each other more. But that can only work if people become not just more trusting but more trustworthy.
Although most Asian-Americans originate in low-trust cultures centered around the family, they typically adapt well to middle-class American life because their high degree of honesty makes them dependable neighbors and co-workers. Hispanics in America, in contrast, have a relatively high crime rateówhile their imprisonment rate is less than half that of blacks, it is 2.9 times worse than that of whites and 13 times that of Asians. Alarmingly, the Latino crime rate goes up after the immigrant generation, suggesting a troubling future. While many American-born Hispanics assimilate into the middle class, others descend into the gang-ridden underclass. Further, the illegitimacy rate has reached 48 percent among Hispanics (versus 25 percent among whites), and itís higher among Mexican-Americans born here than among newcomers from Mexico.
The problems caused by diversity can be partly ameliorated, but the handful of techniques that actually work generally appall liberal intellectuals, so we hear about them only when they come under attack.
Putnam points out one success story but draws an unsophisticated lesson: ìI think we can do a lot to push change along more rapidly. There was a lot of racial tension around the time of the Vietnam War. Now, polls show that US military personnel have many more friendships across ethnic lines than civilians. If officers were told they wouldnít make colonel if they were seen to discriminate, they changed.î
Imposing martial law on the rest of America might prove impractical, however. And negative sanctions can hardly account fully for the growth of positive relationships within the military.
One important aspect that Putnam ignores is the militaryís relentless use of IQ tests. From 1992-2004, the military accepted almost no applicants for enlistment who scored below the 30th percentile on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. This eliminated within the ranks the majority of the IQ gap that causes so much discord in civilian America. Contra John Kerry, enlistees of all races averaged above the national mean in IQ: white recruits scored 107, Hispanics 103, and blacks 102.
Another untold story is the beneficial effect on race relations of the growth of Christian fundamentalism. Among soldiers and college football players, for instance, co-operation between the races is up due to an increased emphasis on a common transracial identity as Christians. According to military correspondent Robert D. Kaplan of The Atlantic, ìThe rise of Christian evangelicalism had helped stop the indiscipline of the Vietnam-era Army.î And that has helped build bridges among the races. Military sociologists Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler wrote in All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way, ìPerhaps the most vivid example of the ëblackeningí of enlisted culture is seen in religion. Black Pentecostal congregations have also begun to influence the style of worship in mainstream Protestant services in post chapels. Sunday worship in the Army finds both the congregation and the spirit of the service racially integrated.î
Similarly, itís now common to see college football coaches leading their teams in prayer. Fisher DeBerry, the outstanding coach of the Air Force Academy, who has led players with no hope of making the NFL to a record of 169-108-1, hung a banner in the locker room bearing the Fellowship of Christian Athletesí Competitorís Creed, which begins, ìI am a Christian first and last.î When the administration found out, he was asked to take it down.
Because policymakers almost certainly wonít do what it would take to alleviate the harms caused by diversityóindeed, they wonít even talk honestly about what would have to be doneóitís crazy to exacerbate the problem through more mass immigration. As the issue of co-operation becomes ever more pressing, the quality of intellectual discourse on the topic declinesóas Putnamís self-censorship revealedóprecisely because of a lack of trust due to the mounting political power of ìthe diverseî to punish frank discussion.
January 15, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative
KevMinh
Jan 17th, 2007, 01:54 PM
This article is a winding staircase to nowhere.
After reading it, it was clear to me that this represents a classic case of whites grading races/ethnicities/immigrant groups on a scale of 1 to 10 of who they would rather live with, do business with or, in general, put their trust in based on their superficial biases. Sailer attempts to pit us against Hispanics when he writes that we are more adaptable to the "white life" in contrast to Hispanics because we appear to be inherently honest. And, the only time he mentions black Americans is when he alludes to their brutishness or implies that a large percentage of them are in jail.
His recounting of a civic project that he and his wife took on in Chicago appears to me to just be an excuse to trash non-whites, especially recent immigrants. Judging from the attitude he expresses in this retelling of the development and execution of the project, it appears that communication was the main sticking point and not simply the "diversity" of the neighborhood. Or was that Sailer's point? Is he implying that "diversity" means human beings of different ethnicities, cultures, nations and creeds can never get along because they are incapable of (even unwilling to) communicating with each other in order to achieve a common goal? Or is the common goal (the American Dream) to imitate, emulate and assimilate into the white masses?
Sailer's opinion represents the racism and prejudices originating from that socioeconomic trend, "White Flight". Notice how he juxtaposes the quote from Peter Y. Hong's article about "homogenous places" (like New Hampshire and Montana) with the nightmarish (and cliched) scenario of an urban, mixed and predominantly poor city like LA. The placid versus the chaotic; the good white Americans (and those who choose to emulate them) versus the untrustworthy, dark-skinned immigrants. Sailer is reinforcing for himself, and his readers, the anti-immigrant pose that has been taken on by many a racist in these past couple years, which asserts that the only way recent immigrants (i.e., non-white people) will be accepted into the good graces of the American public is if they disavow everything that makes them who they are and re-invent themselves to act, look and be more "White". And, while they're at it they should simply convert to Christianity and join the military, so they can be sent off to fight other non-white people.
Jeez, I love his implication that the US military and the Christian religion (IMO, one and the same) are bastions of racial harmony and acceptance. This is the message that the mainstream media tries to shove down our throats on every Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
atlasien
Jan 23rd, 2007, 06:43 PM
I have heard of this Sailer before. He's a white supremacist. KevMinh just posted some good rebuttals to his claims. There is no data supporting a lot of those Sailer claims, just his dumb-ass anecdote. I could easily counter it with my own anecdote. I'm not white, I'm not Christian and I'm not in the military, but I (gasp) do volunteer work. I teach ESL to immigrants and I live in one of the most diverse cities in America, where whites are a minority. The other ESL volunteers are also a diverse bunch, some of them are old white southern grannies, a couple black people, established immigrants, and so on.
That thing about high crime rates in second generation immigrants of certain ethnicities is easily explainable with theories of human capital. Every immigrant comes here with a certain amount of capital, material and nonmaterial. Asians usually have the highest levels of capital. Even if they don't come with a lot of money, they come with intact families and high level of education. Mexican and Central American immigrants, who are more often illegal, frequently have their families broken apart and come here with low levels of education and not much more than the clothes on their backs. Some indigenous peoples are from places where they don't even speak much Spanish, let alone English. The main exception to Asian immigrants are southeast Asian refugees. Cambodians fleeing from genocide had extremely low levels of social capital since they came with nothing and were suffering from massive PTSD. Their rates of poverty, crime and lack of education are comparable to Mexican-Americans.
If you come into America on a low rung of the ladder it's much, much harder to climb up it.
Here is a quote with real immigration data and non-racist analysis of such:
http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?id=445
Educational Attainment
In Southern California, as shown in the first columns of Table 3, the greatest educational disadvantage is found among children of Mexican immigrants and Laotian and Cambodian refugees.
By their mid-20s, these groups had achieved less than 14 years of education on average and close to 40 percent failed to go beyond a high school diploma. These results are far worse than those found in the South Florida groups and reflect the difficulties faced by children coming from families with very low levels of human capital.
A positive governmental context of reception for Cambodian and Laotian refugees did not suffice to lift their second generation to a position of educational advantage. In fact, the proportion of children who achieved no more than a high school education is about the same as among their parents (as shown previously in Table 2).
In the case of Mexican youths, low levels of parental human capital, combined with a negative mode of incorporation ó that is, with a history of exploitation and discrimination, a high proportion of undocumented immigrants, and the prevalence of negative stereotypes ó produced high rates of school abandonment and low mean levels of academic attainment. However, in this case, the proportion that did not complete high school is only about half the figure among their parents.
This and other results indicate that Mexican-American young men and women have made considerable progress relative to the adult first generation. However, having started from such a position of disadvantage, they still could not match the educational attainment of other second-generation or native-parentage youths (see Table 3).
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