Diversity divides our culture, says Harvard prof—so let’s destroy our culture altogether!

According to a study by political scientist Robert Putnam that several readers have sent me, the more racially diverse a community is, the less its inhabitants trust each other. “In the presence of diversity,” Putnam writes, “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.”

Having stated a finding that challenges the most sacred belief of modern liberal society, the goodness of racial diversity, what conclusions does Putnam draw? The Financial Times story continues:

Prof Putnam stressed, however, that immigration materially benefited both the “importing” and “exporting” societies, and that trends “have been socially constructed, and can be socially reconstructed”.

In an oblique criticism of Jack Straw, leader of the House of Commons, who revealed last week he prefers Muslim women not to wear a full veil, Prof Putnam said: “What we shouldn’t do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us.”

Thus the discovery that the diversity of the Other damages the bonds of our culture, far from making Putnam conclude that we should stop pursuing diversity and return to a traditional and natural emphasis on our own culture’s homogeneity, leads him to propose that we should surrender to the Other’s diversity completely and change our culture—our very being—into something else.

Putnam’s switch from an anti-liberal finding to a hyper-liberal conclusion recalls a similar reaction I discussed in my 1994 talk, “Multiculturalism and the War against White America.” When liberals realize that racial diversity has created insoluble contradictions, I said, instead of deciding that the multiracial experiment is not a good idea, they announce that everyone should intermarry and so blend all the races into one.

Ultimately the pursuit of race-blindness (in anything more than a legal and procedural sense), leads to complete incoherence. Columnist Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Examiner once complained about the fact that we are supposed to respect everyone’s differences, while at the same time we’re supposed to treat everyone equally—which requires us not to notice differences at all. Carroll continues:

“One is required to deny the evidence of one’s senses. I perceive that African American men are different from Caucasian men are different from Asian women are different from (what?) Ethiopian Jews. Can we compare these differences? No, we cannot. We may say for the record that these differences are beautiful, equally beautiful, precisely geometrically equally beautiful, but that’s it.”

And if we do begin to compare these differences, Carroll says, that leads us right back to value judgments about racial differences, which immediately devolve into “racism.”

Paralyzed by these contradictions, as well he should be, Carroll concludes: “I think intermarriage may be the only way out…. Of course, we’d lose a lot of interesting specific cultures that way… “ What he means, of course, is that we’d lose a lot of interesting races that way, including our own.

Along the same lines, but with far more enthusiasm, Morton Kondracke in the New Republic wondered how America could overcome its racial inequalities, and concluded that racial intermarriage is the only solution: “It would be a lot easier if each of us were related to someone of another color and if, eventually, we were all one color. In America, this can happen.” Racial intermarriage is even more aggressively championed by Ben Wattenberg, who sees it as the path to universal salvation.

I want to make the meaning of all this very clear. Modern liberalism told us that racial differences don’t matter, and on the basis of that belief, liberals then set about turning America into a multiracial, integrated, race-blind society. But now that very effort has created so much race consciousness, race conflict and race inequality, that the same liberals have concluded that the only way to overcome those problems is to merge all the races into one. The same people who have always denounced as an extremist lunatic anyone who warned about “the racial dilution of white America,” are now proposing, not just the dilution of white America, but its complete elimination. Race-blind ideology has led directly to the most race-conscious—and indeed genocidal—proposal in the history of the world.

This is the insanity that results from uncritically accepting the idea that race doesn’t matter. And the moral paralysis of whites in the face of immigration comes from the terror or distaste that they feel at saying that race does matter. There is also whites’ inability to face the fact that they are a civilizationally distinct group—comprising only 15 percent of the world’s population—that is demographically threatened by the rest of the world’s desire to live in the uniquely attractive societies that whites have created.

If whites continue to be open to nonwhites, as their race-blind moralism tells them they must, their societies will cease to exist; but if they exclude or disengage from nonwhites, that will require them to be “harsh,” “unkind,” “mean-spirited.” It will require them to say that they care about the survival of their race vis-a-vis other races. To the contemporary white person, such an idea is utterly evil and unacceptable. But the funny thing is, there is really nothing evil or horrible about it at all. It turns out to be the most reasonable and commonsensical thing in the world. It is the current race-blind ideology that is insane.

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Carl Simpson writes:

The quote from the illustrious Professor Putnam: “We should construct a new us” says it all. Yet another variant on liberalism’s monotonous theme. Where have we heard this before?

Let’s see, the “classless society” of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin where a “New Soviet Man” would emerge (40-50 million slaughtered), the National Socialist regime in Germany, who also likewise attempted to construct a new ‘us’—the Aryan master race—from Germanic raw material (21 million slaughtered), Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and “Great Cultural Revolution” (78 million slaughtered), and of course Pol Pot (a minor player at 2-3 million).

Perhaps Prof. Putnam was inspired by Berthold Brecht:

“The solution After the uprising of 17 June The Secretary of the Writers’ Union Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee Stating that the People Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?”

The Muslims have nothing on folks like Putnam. Liberalism is truly the well-paved road to hell.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 10, 2006 06:37 PM | Send