Trust me

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.

Suffice it to say, Sailer starts with a white-man's world view and spends his entire article whining about how whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Arabs, Italians, and every other minority population in America don't "trust" each other, well, because they are white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Arab, Italian and whatever.

It’s often assumed that low-trust societies can be fixed just by everyone deciding to trust each other more. But that can only work if people become not just more trusting but more trustworthy.

Although most Asian-Americans originate in low-trust cultures centered around the family, they typically adapt well to middle-class American life because their high degree of honesty makes them dependable neighbors and co-workers. Hispanics in America, in contrast, have a relatively high crime rate—while their imprisonment rate is less than half that of blacks, it is 2.9 times worse than that of whites and 13 times that of Asians. Alarmingly, the Latino crime rate goes up after the immigrant generation, suggesting a troubling future. While many American-born Hispanics assimilate into the middle class, others descend into the gang-ridden underclass. Further, the illegitimacy rate has reached 48 percent among Hispanics (versus 25 percent among whites), and it’s higher among Mexican-Americans born here than among newcomers from Mexico.

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When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. ‘They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions,’ said Prof Putnam. ‘The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching.’

I don't doubt any of these statistics. But what one does with those statistics - how you attempt to explain them - is where the great divide occurs between progressives and reactionaries.

Sailer's response? Recruit everybody onto football teams and make them pray together. No shit.

Among soldiers and college football players, for instance, co-operation between the races is up due to an increased emphasis on a common transracial identity as Christians.

I've never heard of Steve Sailer before this, and I hope I never do again. From all I can tell he's a free-market theocrat with the integrity of a slug. Sailer's prescription for meeting the challenge of diversity is tantamount to a return to resurrecting the Crusades. We all know how well that worked out.

I do agree with one piece of Sailer's argument: Trust depends on someone being trustworthy. Where I part company is in my judgment of who is fundamentally not trustworthy. White America has arguably wrought more destruction and heartache in this world than any population in history. We have enslaved entire populations, annihilated others, all but destroyed the environment, and worse. This goes deeper than whether Bob or Mary Smith works in the inner city to carry the White Man's Burden. This goes to the heart of our culture, and despite all the good America has created, we have given the rest of the world gracious plenty of reasons not to trust us.