American Conservative
Trust me
Submitted by James on Sat, 01/06/2007 - 1:18pm.
On weekends, I often find myself trolling through the sludge of right-wing America, searching (usually in vain) for evidence of intelligent life. Today I thought I might have found it, but no such luck.
Fragmented Futures, the article that caught my attention on the American Conservative website, appeared at first glance to be an interesting analysis of the challenges facing a multicultural society. As North Carolina experiences dramatic growth and new challenges around diversity from all directions, the issue weighs heavily on my mind. I should have started at the end of the article where I eventually discovered that author Steve Sailer makes his living as a film critic.
The article purports to be a critical analysis of work by Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor and Nobel Prize winner who wrote Bowling Alone, a provocative book about the nature of multicultural societies. Sailer opens his commentary with this quote from Putnam.
In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, 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.
After that, it's all downhill, as Sailer assumes he knows more about what Dr. Putnam meant to say in his book than Dr. Putnam himself.
