The conclusion reached in a study administered by Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam — that "in the presence of diversity, we hunker down," or in other words when ethnic blocs converge they don't mix but instead displace — appears to be something that a skeptic of multiculturalism, the postmodern cordon sanitaire girdling Western culture, will welcome.
Putnam's contrast most noted in the press, however, is between a given community in Los Angeles and one in South Dakota. The first Putnam judges to be heterogeneous and distrustful, the second homogeneous and comfortably interdependent; yet another four disparities are population, local culture, politics, and the influence of government. Los Angeles: sprawling, modern and coarse and indifferent, left-statist, high taxes and many means to "promote health, personal responsibility, and economic independence." South Dakota: one of the fifth-least populated states, traditionalist and mild, right-libertarian, taxing sparingly and following federal mandates with minimalist intent.
One theologian to another, Francis Schaeffer told R.C. Sproul, says Sproul, that "the providence of God has been replaced by the providence of the federal government." He meant that charity, enterprise and association had been — after Lyndon Johnson assessed "the rich society and the powerful society" as inadequate — assigned to bureaucratic automation, when once it was the province of moral volition. Human temperament has in it an aversion to redundancy; so while the running joke about duplicative government exertion continues, communities, especially urban ones, atrophy where the state has invested itself. If city hall or the capital or Uncle Sam has vouched for an obligation, be it parentage or professional education or even neighborly fellowship, what is the incentive to do the same; particularly, in decreasing numbers and against the possibilities that lie in self-interest? What happens when communities separated by language and custom are also encouraged to remain at a cultural disjunction?
Putnam limned this five years ago in a book titled Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community. But where does the great American ethnic pastiche come into this? Surely it and urbanity arrived before cosmopolitanism and statism. The city in which I grew up and currently live, North Olmsted, a middle-class suburb on the far western edge of Greater Cleveland, has been and still is statistically homogenous. The corner of the subdivision of my childhood wasn't. At the end of the street, a family of Brahman East Indians, whose eldest son was a playmate of mine and another boy who lived three doors to the right; there, the father a Hungarian and the mother an Argentinean. Next door on one side, Christian Lebanese with a single child; and on the other, an Irish-Italian family of four. Sharing values and traditions, ours was a neighborly street.