Stumble it!Diversity, Trust, Putnam and Survival
posted in Society by themaiden |RightReason has an interesting piece on some of Robert D. Putnam’s recent work on social diversity, trust, and something he calls ’social capital’. Putnam, for the record, is a professor of sociology at Harvard. In short:
… ethnic diversity undermines social capital, because it undermines social trust.
…“In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.” Case in point? Los Angeles: “the most diverse human habitation in human history” - and, not coincidentally, the most untrusting place in the U.S.A. today.
I’m not going to argue with the science, with the report. In fact, I can’t honestly say that I’m surprised with the results. Strange people who dress funny, talk with an accent– if speaking the local language at all–, eat odd foods, worship the ‘wrong’ god, or worship the ‘right’ god the wrong way, celebrate the wrong holidays… well, who could trust such folks?
Actually, what Putnam has done is restate what anthropologists have known for decades: In general, people don’t like people who are different (except perhaps when browsing for porn). Historians have known the same thing for a great deal longer. Both the Greeks and the Romans defined ‘barbarians’ as ‘people who aren’t Greek or Roman, respectively’. Stepping outside of academia, a person over the age of ten, who hasn’t lived in a cave and who has paid some minimal attention to human behavior, has probably come to the same conclusion.
There is probably some biological, or socio-biological, component to this xenophobia in that shared values and behaviors help create a group identity, which in turn provides group cohesion, which strongly social animals, like humans, need for survival.
So what do we make of Putnam’s findings? More specifically, what do we do with Putnam’s findings? Do we, as suggested by Steve Burton, author of this RightReason article, use Putnam’s findings to justify encouraging this xenophobia? Do we use his work to justify political or legislative enforcement of sameness?
There’s a lot more to be said about all this. But, for the moment, I’ll confine myself to a single point: the architects of our current open borders immigration policy are foolish children, playing with dynamite.
No.
For one, encouraging what is essentially prejudice tramples rather harshly on principles like ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’. But ideology aside, there are simply too many of us on this planet, and our weapons are too powerful, for us to play these isolationist games. We make this work together, as a species, or we kill each other. We are not bound to our history or our biology. We can make of the future what we want, and I don’t think we want to make of it a divided world at war with itself.
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