EDITORIAL

Our future in Obama’s world must be to solve Putnam’s problem - 8-Jul-2008

IT became a shibboleth of sociological truisms after the 20th century’s Second World War that every society in the world benefits by being racially, ethnically, culturally diverse. Multiculturalism, multiracialism are seen as societal barometers of progress and strength. No society has embodied this truism more than the United States.

The ‘American Dilemma’ as it was called, was seen to contain the seeds of both potential racial failure and segregated societal division on one hand, as well as a progressively evolving unity springing from a dynamic tension of interdependent microcosms of ethnic difference yet each cohering around a common patriotism.

That was then. At the dawn of this 21st century, new research by Harvard political scientist, Robert Putnam, seemingly challenges this shibboleth. Putnam’s work and findings are based on interviews with almost 30,000 of his fellow Americans. Through their confessions and admissions, 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’. Indeed, ‘in the most diverse communities, neighbours trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings’. According to one report, Putnam’s study is ‘the largest ever on civic engagement in America’ and the outcome that ‘virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings’ has certainly unsettled the orthodoxies of integrationism, multiracialism and multiculturalism that have so long been taken for granted as evidenced in metaphors of ‘the melting pot’ and the ‘salad bowl’ and so on.

One report rightly observes that Putnam’s study ‘comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues’. Accordingly, his study is apparently giving ammunition to American conservatives looking for ‘proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes the [American] social 'fabric’. But if greater diversity is a ‘problem’ right-wingers celebrate, the problem for them is that the problem will not go away. Not now or in the conceivable future. As one report notes, US demographic trends are ‘already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity’ and ‘the real question’ will be ‘how to handle the unsettling social changes that [his] research predicts’.

Indeed, Putnam himself concedes that ‘it would be unfortunate if a politically correct progressivism were to deny the reality of the challenge to social solidarity posed by diversity,’ and ‘it would be equally unfortunate if an ahistorical and ethnocentric conservatism were to deny that addressing that challenge is both feasible and 'desirable.’ Undoubtedly, denial is one of society’s most corrosive reposes. The answer to Putnam’s problems is not to resort to the posture of ostrich. Withdrawal from contact with those who are different from us is not the way of the future – Barack Obama is proof of that. We all, not just Americans, must engage in reaching out to others and resist the temptation to pull our heads in turtle-like. Reaching out across racial divides brings with it enrichment that Putnam has also elsewhere called ‘social capital’. We all, even here in Fiji and not just in the United States, need to foster more networks and friendships across our ethnic and racial differences. Every future world leader knows this or must come to understand it. There can be no retreat to ethnic or racial enclaves – no matter how negative the short-term side-effects may be.




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