Discovery Institute's own Logan Gage has a great column in today's DC Examiner which takes an insightful look at what ethnic diversity means to American society. To the dismay of many on the left, a recent study by Harvard professor Robert Putnam claims that "ethnic diversity actually harms community."
Not only that, but as Gage puts it, "... doubly disturbing for many secular liberals, it turns out that one of the only places in America defying these results -- where true diversity and community thrive -- is evangelical megachurches."
(Try telling that to anti-religious alarmist Lauren Sandler.)
Churches seem to provide an answer to this riddle of social fractions by encouraging interaction across ethnic and cultural barriers. Why this doesn't happen as often elsewhere is another puzzle which Gage addresses:
As cosmopolitan urbanites, even the conservative among us like to think we are more tolerant, more liberal-minded than backwoods red-state America. And maybe we are. But perhaps this is only because it is easy for us to tolerate neighbors we do not know.Ironically, perhaps in the heartland where there is less ethnic diversity but more communal interaction, we would be forced to actually converse, at the local fair or PTA, with those different from ourselves.
British historian Paul Johnson once wrote of "The Heartless Lovers of Humankind," by which he referred to intellectuals like Karl Marx, who waxed eloquently of the plight of the common man and claimed to love "humanity," yet was nearly a monster to his servants. Perhaps we who claim to love "the city" or "diversity" but do not know our neighbors' names are a little like that.
Decades before Paul Johnson, C. S. Lewis noted the tragic irony of those who profess a deep and abiding love of humanity yet are cold or even cruel to the individuals with whom they are in contact. His poem "The Genuine Article" puts it thus:
You do not love the Bourgeoisie. Of course: for they
Begot you, bore you, paid for you, and punched your head;
You work with them; they're intimate as board and bed;
How could you love them, meeting them thus every day?You love the Proletariat, the thin, far-away
Abstraction which resembles any workman fed
On mortal food as closely as the shiny red
Chessknight resembles stallions when they stamp and neigh.For kicks are dangerous; riding schools are painful, coarse
And ribald places. Every way it costs far less
To learn the harmless manage of the wooden horse-So calculably taking the small jumps of chess.
Who, that can love nonentities, would choose the labour
Of loving the quotidian face and fact, his neighbour?
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