"A liberal who sometimes seems to shrink from the impact of his own findings"

You could say that. From the Financial Times :

When Robert Putnam published “Bowling Alone” six years ago, the book brought the Harvard professor such fame he was invited to speak at Camp David, 10 Downing Street - and Buckingham Palace ...

Now, after several years of further research, Putnam has come up with a more disturbing picture of contemporary American life: the more people of diverse ethnic backgrounds live in a community, the lower the level of trust among the community’s citizens.

This is, as he knows, an extremely contentious finding in a climate of growing concern about immigration in the US. It is potentially more controversial in Europe, which is struggling to cope with Islamic communities that can be actively hostile to Western democracy at their most extreme, and even in more moderate forms often prefer to live apart rather than integrate.

Putnam makes an important distinction between two different types of social capital: Bridging, in which an individual from one religious, ethnic, or class group, does something for someone in another group for an expected return, and bonding, when people who are “like us” – white Irish Catholic police officers, say, or black Alabama Baptist labourers – act in the expectation of a return.

The second kind, says Putnam, can “lead to Bosnia or Beirut” at most (I think he means 'at worst' - LT), and ever-wider social distance in wealthier societies.

It makes for close and warm relations among the “in” group but can freeze out or even make enemies of those considered “out”.

His diversity research reveals not just that bonding capital is strong and bridging capital weak in ethnically diverse communities, but also that both are weak in such societies: distrust permeates all relationships and people try to “minimise the hits on them from the society around them” by withdrawing into private space, often in front of a television.

That is a depressing picture ...

It certainly is. More here.

His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.

This is a contentious finding in the current climate of concern about the benefits of immigration. Professor Putnam told the Financial Times he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it “would have been irresponsible to publish without that”.

The core message of the research was that, “in the presence of diversity, we hunker down”, he said. “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.”

Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, “the most diverse human habitation in human history”, but his findings also held for rural South Dakota, where “diversity means inviting Swedes to a Norwegians’ picnic”.

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.”

British Home Office research has pointed in the same direction and Prof Putnam, now working with social scientists at Manchester University, said other European countries would be likely to have similar trends.

Hmm. His observations certainly fit well with a society where our rulers alternate 'we need more diversity, it's a strength, valuable contribution etc etc' with 'what's happened to political engagement ? Why does no-one get involved any more ?'

Naught for our comfort in the Sunday Times either, looking at our own LA - London. Our most diverse city - and one where you can be stabbed to death on a bus while everyone looks in the opposite direction.

Many peaceable residents, however, are being pushed out of the area. Carly, 25, a white telephone receptionist, said that every day during her 15-minute walk to and from work she tries to “make myself invisible”.

"Europe is still living off its religious heritage"

Robert Putnam - the chap who believes that mass immigration is a good thing and whose research shows that "the higher the diversity in a neighbourhood, the lower the levels of trust, political participation and happiness between and within the ethnic groups", in the Grauniad.

"Diversity is a social construction that can be deconstructed and reconstructed - you can erase a line and draw a new line [to define identity] and we do it all the time," says Putnam, who adds that there has been much more response to his research in the UK than in the US.

"Some critics [in the UK] on the right say that's all hogwash. What gets the conservatives irritated is that I say the task is not to 'make them like us' but to create a new 'we' - a new, more encompassing identity. They say: 'Why should we? We don't want a new we, we like the old we.' But in the US, we don't have that problem because we have changed in the past," he says.

America IS a nation of immigrants. Britain has not been - the 'nation of immigrants' nonsense is a liberal myth used to justify mass immigration.

Up until 7/7 our new liberal rulers didn't care about integration. The USP of immigrants was precisely the fact that they 'weren't like us' i.e. the natives. What they actually were like was unimportant.

Now they've seen the writing on the wall in Tavistock Square.



So integration seems like a good idea after all.

The trouble is that the destruction of British culture was a prerequisite for mass immigration - a self-confident nation would either not have allowed it or would have ensured integration was a priority - which was what happened in America until very recently.

The continuing effort to reinvent a national identity should at least provide sour amusement for a few decades.

Back to Mr Putnam. The key driver for the British cultural revolution - and the Britain we see today - was the decline of Christianity.

He credits religion with a vital role in spurring on progressive change in the US over the past 150 years - contrary to popular European wisdom, religion has predominantly been a force for good in America and its current use by the political right is an aberration from its history, he argues.

"Religious revival has been an essential ingredient of every progressive movement: the abolition of slavery came out of the second great awakening; the progressive era of 1900-15 when the US first passed labour and environment legislation came out of the social gospel movement," says Putnam, who is a convert to Judaism.

Much of his book will be devoted to analysing how that progressive potential in religion was lured to the Republican right. It is easy to see how his interest in social capital and religion fit together, but he is quick to acknowledge that religion can also have detrimental consequences, and it is possible to have social capital that has no religious underpinning.

He strikes a warning on the secularisation of Europe, which he describes as the first large-scale effort to see whether secular progressive countries can reproduce themselves and successfully pass on the values on which they were built. "I believe they can," he says, "but the evidence is not yet in. Europe is still living off its religious heritage."

Christianity may be dying in Euruope, but Nature abhors a spiritual vacuum. I notice a continual drip of British Muslim converts. They may be misguided, but they are generally intelligent, well-meaning young men and women. The canaries in the coal mine ?

"I am a white, middle-class left-wing atheist, who embraced Islam, and I see it has having the solutions to all the social ills of British society (poverty, drug abuse, gambling addictions, robbery, individualism, depression and terrorism, amongst many others"

I'll pass on whether there are no poor people in Muslim countries - but for the rest, you could say much the same of the Christianity that was - before the churches turned into a branch of Social Services.

Maybe the Sixties cultural revolutionaries who are dying off, the George Melly's, won't see their new Utopia.

"And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse."

Robert Putnam

I blogged last year about Robert 'Bowling Alone' Putnam's research which suggested that the level of trust in a community is inversely related to the level of ethnic diversity.

He presented a paper with some of the data here.

(Professor Putnam is still optimistic though. As far as I can see the reasoning goes - America is a successful society. America has had lots of immigration. Therefore lots of immigration is the recipe for a successful society. It's not recorded if the Native Americans were asked for input.)


(name corrected - thanks)

The End Of The Journey Will Soon Be In Sight...

Mass immigration doesn't "just" depress wages and reduce the power of working people vis a vis employers.

I haven't blogged much over the last year due to long hours, but still sniped over at CiF - and this comment sums my emerging view :

The greatest prize for the very rich would be the total dismantling of the welfare state and the removal of its consequent tax burden (although venture capitalists, on 10% tax - "entrepreneurs relief", do pretty well already).

It's a lot easier to justify a welfare state when the recipients are "people like us" and therefore easier to identify with and to think "there but for the grace of God". Social solidarity among working people, whether it be support for a welfare state or a trades union, will always be stronger in the absence of cultural, religious or racial divisions. Social scientists like Robert Putnam have noted how diversity weakens a sense of community.

So were I an evil capitalist billionaire looking to reduce the power of trades unions and destroy the welfare state, I'd start by funding Left groups supporting mass immigration.

I'd encourage such groups, and left-wing lawyers too, to support the most outrageous abuses of the welfare system, knowing that it would discredit welfare in the eyes of ordinary working people - and I'd chuckle to see Telegraph and Mail readers - and BBC commenters, too - getting angry when benefits rise, as they should do, with inflation.

"The plan is working ... heh heh heh ..."

I'd suggest, with all its faults, that the Welfare State is the most outstanding instance of UK social solidarity - started in Edwardian times by Lloyd George and nailed down in the aftermath of WW2 by a strong people, annealed in the fire of two world wars and quenched in the depression years of the 1930s.

I'd also suggest that the plan is continuing to work :

Despite the tough economic climate, the study by independent social research agency NatCen reveals attitudes towards welfare and welfare claimants have toughened. Only 28% of those asked wanted to see more spending on welfare - down from 35% at the beginning of the recession in 2008, and from 58% in 1991.

Report author and NatCen chief executive, Penny Young, said the study showed the public's view on welfare was "in tune... with the coalition's policies".She said: "The recession doesn't seem to be changing things; attitudes continue to harden. One thing that we've seen is that even where groups are seen as perhaps more deserving - so retired people, disabled people - again for the first time since 2008 we've seen that the number of people who are prepared to see more money go on disability benefits has actually fallen."

 "Heh heh heh ...." - the BBC Today programme this morning couldn't get over it - in the early 90s recession 58% thought we should increase welfare spending, now it's down to 28%. What could possibly have changed since the early 90s? They just couldn't understand such a dramatic shift in attitude.

"You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come,
Knock as you please, there's nobody at home"

In various posts over the last year, I've aired the fancy that in ten, fifteen years, the Guardian will be simultaneously

a) bemoaning the end of the welfare state and the new poverty of the working class
b) celebrating our ever-greater diversity

and I've pointed out that

Western welfare states carry a high tax burden, which makes life uncomfortable for the mega-rich. It would be a lot easier for them if social solidarity was destroyed to the extent that the welfare state no longer existed and their taxes could come down. A good way to do that is to create atomised societies of competing ethnicities.

Mass immigration will IMHO mean the end of the Welfare State, probably in the next thirty years. A pity. It was a good concept - for 1948 Brits and their descendants. And as an ageing boomer, I don't want the NHS to turn into any more of a death factory for the old than it currently is.

But at least we'll all be equal in our barrios, looking up at the gated communities on the hills.







UPDATE - "The government is considering ending the automatic annual increase in benefits in line with inflation, sources have told BBC Newsnight.

The whole point of benefits is that they're meant to be a liveable minimum amount.So if inflation rises, so should that amount. But there'll be little sympathy for that view from those whose expenses are rising but whose wages are static - and that means most of us. 

"Heh heh heh ..."

UPDATE2 - "To promote prudence and responsibility, rather than the dependency and waste of the welfare system, we should return to mutual aid societies

"Heh heh heh ..."

"No Irish Need Apply"

The (American) liberal myth of 'No Irish Need Apply'.

The fact that Irish vividly "remember" NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists. No other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one. This is especially strange since signs were primarily directed toward these others: the signs said that employment was available here and invited Yankees, French-Canadians, Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. The courts are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through the window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend?

As every Brit liberal knows, the streets of 1950s London were full of 'No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish' signs. Yet on the Web there's only one photo which looks as if it could be authentic - source unknown to me - and in an admittedly cursory trawl of the web I've not found any contemporary reports of them - just hundreds of "are we returning to the days of" blog posts and dozens of "my father came to London at a time when" pieces. You really would think that it might turn up in Hansard - I must take a look. Maybe it's yet another liberal myth aka libel against the native Brits. Not that there aren't similar signs to be seen in London to this day - only strangely, no one makes a fuss about them. Can't imagine why.



















(cropped photo from ruskin51's photostream)

Now I've got no real problems with an Asian family wishing to share their house with people of their own culture or ethnicity - or even rent it. You want as tenants/lodgers people you can trust, and as the late Emperor Claudius puts it 'the knee is nearer than the shin'. For good reasons, people tend to trust people who are like themselves, and as Robert Putnam points out :

"the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor"

But these signs are presumably illegal under British law. I suppose the reason we're not seeing these cases in the court reports is that the law was designed to stop natives putting up these kinds of advert.