Atlantic Community:Open Think Tank Article "In Diversity We (Sorta) Trust"

June 27, 2008 | 2 comments | Print this Article | E-Mail Your Research

Journal Article: In Diversity We (Sorta) Trust

Peter H. Schuck: Americans’ belief in the value of diversity is complicated by a recent study. Is law the answer? Perhaps, but only to a limited extent. The US government must find ways to encourage interaction and exchange, thereby generating social capital, rather than mandating forced diversity.

Religious diversity in America has resulted in neighborhood suspicions, a decrease in civil society, and more time spent in front of the television.

Put into a historical context, diversity has been the cause of endless bloodshed, political dissolution and regional instability for centuries on end. Why is it that Americans have felt to be the exception to this historical paradigm?

A generation ago, "contact theorists" posited that increasing contact and heterogeneity would be a means to greater social harmony. This school of thought, however, seems to be giving way to a new "conflict theory". In the end, however, it depends on the eye of the beholder. Diversity is what a society makes of it and in that spirit, the author maintains that long-term trends could lead to a healthy treatment of diversity.

So what role does law play in all of this? Laws can promote diversity through immigration laws and social cohesion through housing subsidies; however, it should not be the role of government to mandate interaction and integration. Laws can create incentives for certain behaviors, but it ultimately comes down to the people to choose a most effective model and put it into practice.

Parts of American culture demand diversity, but it is becoming increasingly important for Americans to understand what it is, how much it costs, and how it can most effectively be managed. Unfortunately, this question has only recently begun to be considered.

Peter Schuck, a law professor at Yale, is the author most recently of Targeting in Social Programs (Brookings) and Meditations of a Militant Moderate (Rowman & Littlefield).

In Diversity We (Sorta) Trust. In: the American Lawyer (December 2007)

Download PDF: Diversity.Putnam.alm.12-07.pdf

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Comments

July 1, 2008

ilyas m mohsin, ppp, Platinum Contributor (253)

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Americans still, generally, believe in diverssity. The conflict-theory appears to have been misused by the neo-cons since 9/11. As an average American tends to be lissfully ignorant of the world, paranoia was easy to sell. The recent disclosures from influential people proves how fuzzy practices were patronized by the Administartion to fool its own people. All this has poisioned the minds of some people but the West still remains the traditional bastion of American diversity with some ifs and buts.
If history is any guide, the next President would make a difference for the better as he would be much better off about the world than the incumbent who had not travelled beyond Mexico. To retrieve US' prestige/ goodwill lost by the incumbent in Iraq/Afghanistan a la Gitmo, Abu Ghuraib etc, the new President will have to engage with the world as a civilized person. As the goodwill gets repaired, the flow of visitors to US will also register an upward trend as it had, reportedly, fallen by about 30% lately which cost her about $100 Billion, as per one estimate, besides the perverse fall-out for her diversity.

July 7, 2008

Jeffery Allen Richard, lawyer/contributor, Silver Contributor (38)

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Prof. Schuck -

Although I agree that promoting interaction and exchange is preferable to mandating forced diversity, I am going to quibble with two of your points:

1. The US government should take a lead role in promoting interaction and exchange. I think this is exactly backwards - the US government should have little or nothing to do with promoting diversity. Its role should be protecting the legal rights of racial, religious or political minorities through the courts and those agencies Congress deems appropriate. However, the Federal Government is a terrible instrument for such soft social programs as "promoting interacting and exchange". State and local government, school districts, and public universities are a much better starting point than the US government.

2. You say, "religious diversity in America has resulted in neighborhood suspicions, a decrease in civil society, and more time spent in front of the television." I find this statement a complete non sequitur. Religious diversity has always been present in American society and I find little evidence that there is more or less religious diversity in recent years.

A much bigger problem is the role that technology has in allowing us to create self-contained and self-selecting communities that do not have to interact with other groups. From social networking programs that allow like-minded people to communicate to niche cable television programming to the internet's idealogical echo chambers, the internet and niche programming has a much bigger role in the decline of social capital than religious diversity.