Melting Pot Good

Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist whose Bowling Alone documented Americans as non-joiners, has a new, shocking study about diversity’s not working. His researchers did 30,000 interviews in 41 U.S. communities, and found that people in ethnically diverse settings don't want to have much of anything to do with each other.

According to Putnam:

 "Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, 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." Yet they have little confidence in the "local news media."

 Diverse communities may be yeasty and even creative, but trust, altruism and community cooperation fall. Putnam calls it "hunkering down."

 Diversity is working in a surprising place: Christian evangelical megachurches. "In many large evangelical congregations," he writes, "the participants constituted the largest thoroughly integrated gatherings we have ever witnessed." The churches do it with low entry barriers and by offering lots of little groups to join inside the larger "shared identity" of the church.

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger, in writing about Putnam’s study, notes that in the past, diversity's advocates gave short shrift to assimilation, even arguing that assimilation into the American mainstream was oppressive and coercive. Henninger wants some young minority writer to recast diversity in a way that restores the worth and utility of assimilation, the old “melting pot” ideal.