mtpolitics.net

Here’s One for the “Diversity Über Alles” Crowd

One of the shibboleths of the left is that “Diversity is Good™”, sometimes phrased as “Diversity is our Strength.” Personally, I’m not against diversity, per se, but I am against it when it is used as a means to an end, or when it is contrived for reasons known only to the contrivers.

At any rate, I naturally found this article quite illuminating.

Here are the opening paragraphs, just to whet your appetite.

It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has 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. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

What I’d be interested in learning is if this holds true for populations who have assimilated culturally, versus those who have not. I have a hunch that those results would be rather telling.