Downside of diversity doctrine emerges

WASHINGTON — One of the many distasteful and underestimated influences on American and European life to emerge from the turbulent, anti-establishment ‘60s was the concept of “multiculturalism” — which still dooms us today.

It sounded so good. Not only were all people “created equal,” as our founding documents had it, but equal opportunity was to be solemnly strived for, and men and women of every stripe and culture were to be guaranteed equal outcome. There was also the underlying (and insulting) idea that those “others” had no culture or memory or history of their own — they were just like us. They wanted the same things that we did.

Ironically, these doctrines were born in the utopian lefts in American and European universities, but they came to have a hammer hold on the administration of George W. Bush, as well. Remember all the tripe about the father in Mosul wanting “just what we want for our kids?”

Astonishing findings

But now the entire, miserable multicultural voyage has made a sudden port call, and it is a curious one. One of the theory’s major protagonists is the respected liberal Harvard professor Robert Putnam, known for his 2000 book “Bowling Alone,” in which he uncovers a sobering decline in civic engagement in America. He has now come up with some astonishing findings.

The truth, Putnam found, is that the greater the amount of multiculturalism and diversity in a society, the lower the level of civic engagement and shared sense of community cohesiveness. The multiculturalists who have dominated our social thinking for nearly 50 years got it all wrong.

Because the study has been published only in an obscure journal, it took a major newspaper like The Boston Globe to ferret out this “downside of diversity.” Writing in the Globe, Michael Jones reports that, after interviewing approximately 30,000 participants in the widest-ranging survey on this subject, Putnam found that, “The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects.”

Moreover, the wise commentator John Leo adds that, “Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves.”

If Putnam’s findings are true, then they may offer one explanation for why the American people responded so little and so lamely when our “leaders” dragged us, not even whimpering, into the most foolish war in history in 2003. I have often in these four years awakened in the middle of the night thinking something like: “Nobody simply cares. Nobody is related to anybody else in this country anymore. All the old connections between citizens and government — and one another — somehow got lost along the way.”

Putnam is saying that yes, indeed, that’s exactly what did happen, leaving us lost and atomized.

But Putnam, a serious intellectual who does not usually let his liberal leanings affect his work, is not the only liberal having second thoughts these days. Writing in The New York Times Magazine recently, Michael Ignatieff, former Harvard professor and now a prominent Liberal Party politician in Canada, published a “mea culpa” on his stand supporting the Iraq war. Essentially, he says: “In academic life, false ideas are merely false, and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions, and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.”

It’s an old, old story: utopian dreaming of perfect worlds and ignoring the harsh reality of this one vs. the politician or the journalist or the candy-maker who has to have an innate and polished street sense to survive.

Multiculturalism — the notion that everyone is actually the same and will fit right in — is palpably absurd. It disrespects the new person, his history, his reality, his personality. Bringing in unlimited numbers of people disrespects the society into which they are coming — no society can absorb that many totally different peoples. Witness Europe and Islam. Witness California and its overwhelming Hispanic numbers. This becomes, then, no melting pot, but a boiling pot and a roiling sea of numbers that defy assimilation and that leads to the breakdown and anomie of society.

Universal Press Syndicate