Katie’s Dad 2.0

HT: VDare Blog

I’ll start off by admitting that despite my disdain for his assumptions, Harvard Professor Robert Putnam is probably a pretty smart guy. But I contend he falls into the same trap a lot of researchers do when they are trying to come up with justification for one of their big, bold ideas. A little digging I did suggests that Putnam has a history of holding back his work when he can’t figure out why his research doesn’t fit snugly enough into his little box of preconception. It appears that in his life focusn, he’s trying to find some new grand theory about how he can make people forget about their own human nature. Trying to make diversity work is a fools errand, but I suppose it pays his bills.

People in mixed-race areas ‘feel isolated’ | Uk News | News | Telegraph

“Diversity does not produce bad race relations or ethnically defined group hostility,” Prof Putnam says in an article setting out his findings. “Rather, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours regardless of the colour 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 make a difference.”

I’m going to try to clear Putnam’s disconnect: The study’s abject failure to prove that “diversity” is a “net positive for all” with solid research should raise red flags with even the dullest uninvolved observers. In a nutshell, Putnam considers the prevalent social withdrawal that affects people - almost all the time - when their daily lives become steeped in “diversity” to simply be a benign artifact of the study. Didn’t anyone ever suggest to him that witdrawal was a form of rejection that might actually be more than a bit latently agressive?

When man withdraws unintentially, and this profoundly, it’s a pretty notable psychological side-effect, not just a minor reaction to a change in feelings of security and safety. I think Putnam might have been better served if he did a comparative study to what might happen with animals when subjected to the same stressors. Under stress, people simply don’t act fully as people, they act more like animals.

If Putnam had been honestly willing to find truth, he’d have brought in some additional experts with experience with animal behavior: If you make an animal withdraw into it’s most limited marked territory and you don’t put a lot of pressure on him, he probably will stay withdrawn until you go away… or until he feels further threatened . Make it feel cornered, and all bets are off!

Professor Putnam did not ask or try to determine, as far as I can tell, whether or not people would stay simply in a state of withdrawal, go deeper into that state of withdrawal, or… reach a tipping point at which the newly imposed social situation takes a complete turn for the wors, resulting a social conflagration. I don’t know what scares me more: That Putnam is trying to sell flawed conclusions or that some of our leaders are stupid enough to believe him.

In light of his failure to close the loop in his conclusions, this is actually sort of funny to read:
Robert Putnam’s Profile at Harvard University

He has written a dozen books, translated into seventeen languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and more recently Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of promising new forms of social connectedness. His previous book, Making Democracy Work, was praised by the Economist as “a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber.” Both Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone rank high among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last several decades.

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Culture, Diversity