| Conceptual Problems with the Multicultural Dream
In an important book, Democracy and Association , Mark E. Warren examines the basic conceptual arguments that ground the dream of multicultural dialogue and finds them wanting. His analysis draws on the classic distinction between the option for "voice" within or "exit" from a group. In other words, people can either remain within a social group and try to "voice" their complaints in an effort to change how that group operates, or they can simply give up on the group and "exit."
What Warren shows is that in groups where an option for exit is freely available, where the cost of exit is not very high, it makes sense that people who aren't happy with the group's beliefs or structure will vote with their feet. Only in groups in which exit carries a real cost, like unions, are people likely to stick around to deal with the often knotty challenges involved in continually hammering out shared visions of a common aim and shared processes for participation. This tendency for exit is magnified by the fact that, as diversity increases in a group it will become more difficult to find commonalities that respond equally to the desires and practices of every participant.
In other words, Warren argues that diverse spaces for democratic dialogue, in his vision, are unlikely to emerge "naturally" in an open civil society. By their very nature the kind of democratic free associations imagined by multiculturalists are most likely to generate groups of like-minded individuals..
This is a crucial issue for social action groups, because while the cost to a community or a society may be large if people "exit" from participation, the cost to an individual is not large. In fact, participation can be a real pain in the ass-and costly of time-without much clear concrete benefit for an individual in the first place.
The Conflict Between Diversity and Social Action
This is not simply a conceptual problem. Researchers have found that tensions like the ones identified by Warren do actually play out in real communities. For example, in Hearing the Other Side, Diana Mutz, found patterns like those predicted by Warren in her empirical research on deliberation in organizations.
In somewhat different terms than Warren, then, Mutz argues that collaborative deliberation and political participation are opposing forces in organizations. Organizations that can tolerate extensive dialogue across difference are unlikely to be those that can engage in political struggle. In other words, as long as you don't have to agree on anything, it is possible to maintain some significant level of ongoing dialogue in a group across diversity. However, once a group actually has to make decisions, has to act-often in an aggressive manner-the tension between "exit" and "voice" seems to become a critical force reducing diversity.
Thus, those organizations with the capacity to engage in political struggle are also those likely to be most lacking in internal diversity of opinion.
(This also indicates that we need to create very different kinds of organiztions to promote either social empowerment or cross-cutting dialogue--something I may discuss later on. For a good example of the latter, see http://www.studycircles.org.)
Diversity and Social Trust
Robert Putnam is one of the most important proponents of the idea that social capital-in a simple sense, extensive social connections between individuals in a community-is critical to community agency, action, and improvement. He burst into public view with his article, "Bowling Alone," later turned into a book, that used the ongoing disappearance of bowling leagues as a key metaphor for the loss of social capital in America. (Other scholars have complicated Putnam's findings.)
Recently, Putnam completed an extensive research project on the relationship between diversity and social trust in local communities. He didn't find what he wanted to find, and didn't actually publish a report on the findings for a number of years (2001-2007), apparently trying to find some way to read the data that wouldn't conflict with his own desires to promote the kind of multicultural communities he sought.
What he finally admitted finding was that diversity in a community is directly correlated with lower levels of social trust. As his Wikipedia entry notes, as diversity in a community increases, people hunker down and "go into their shells like a turtle." In fact, diversity seems to be related to a whole range of problematic characteristics, including:
• Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.
• Lower political efficacy - that is, confidence in one's own influence.
• Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.
• Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).
• Less likelihood of working on a community project.
• Less likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.
• Fewer close friends and confidants.
• Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.
• More time spent watching television and more agreement that "television is my most important form of entertainment".
So Segregation is Fine?
My point, here, is not that we should welcome the deep segregation that infects our cities, especially. And, of course we must acknowledge that there are real benefits to diverse groups. As Bill Bishop notes in The Big Sort (a book I have only read reviews of) "Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes."
However, we need to acknowledge that there are real tensions between "integration" in a multicultural "let's all retain our creative differences" sense and the reality of conflict and inequality that comes with breaking up or refusing to acknowledge the benefits of relatively homogenous groups.
One key issue is power, as I've discussed before. When you bring together people with different levels of power in different ways, you inevitably generate differences in who is able to participate and who is more likely to remain quiet (and eventually "exit"). I'll talk about this issue on the level of individual groups in my next post. Here, the point is that the multicultural dream assumes that these power issues can be overcome by people with good intentions. And the empirical research indicates that this does not happen. The fact is that Bishop's findings seem to fit quite well with Mutz's. The "moderation" of diverse groups is also a move away from political action. In fact, Bishop's work seems to imply a move away from social action, citing "research suggesting that, contrary to the standard goo-goo exhortations, the surer route to political comity may be less civic engagement, less passionate conviction." As others on this blog have repeatedly noted, while we don't need chaos, it is not clear that "comity" is what we most need in our incredibly unequal society.
Taking Advantage of Segregation?
The fact is that we are segregated. And whether this is "good" or "bad" or, almost certainly, both, there may be ways that we can take advantage of this fact. (Note: this section extends on an argument I have made in an earlier post. )
Currently, most community organizing groups, in my experience and reading, seem to try to use the "multicultural" model. "Throw 'em all together in meetings and let people sort it out," drawn together by a shared interest in social change.
The research I have cited indicates is that people are not likely to be able to make this work very well. Without the kind of expert facilitation that organizing groups cannot generally afford (and that may, in fact, problematically restrict democratic dialogue) it seems likely that the multicultural approach is likely to lead to a lot of "exit," and a lot of movement towards homogeneity. As I have described in earlier posts, this is, in fact, what I have seen happen in my own group.
Hannah Arendt once noted that democratic power was the one property that actually increased as you divided it up. One way of understanding this is that the more you centralize power, the less you can benefit from the energy of multiple contributions to the democratic polity.
Extending on her insight, it may be that community organizing groups may generate more power if they create relatively separated, relatively homogenous groups within their organizations. Within these groups, people from similar backgrounds and cultures and with similar levels of social power are likely to be able to construct common efforts that also allow the emergence of individual voices without, at the same time, resulting in wholesale "exit."
These individual groups could pursue their own local projects. At the same time, they could send representatives to a central group that would coordinate common efforts across all of these groups.
This structure has the added benefit of disarming some of the power issues that tend to reduce the participation of the less powerful in groups like these. As I noted earlier, when less powerful people enter a group as representatives of their group, they tend to feel more empowered to participate. This is one of the few concrete mechanisms I know of that has been shown to effectively deal with power issues in face-to-face discourse without extensive retraining of participants or expert facilitation.
Of course, the challenge is more complex than I have laid out, here. If you create a bunch of different groups, you may also simply recreate social tensions between these groups that already exist. I am inclined to think that it would be best to create separate groups only for the less powerful members of an organization. So you might create a "black caucus," a "Hispanic caucus," and, in our city, a "Hmong caucus" but not a "white middle-class caucus. In this way, powerful people would participate as individuals or congregation representatives in the larger organization, while people from less powerful groups would often participate as representatives of entire groups of congregations (but could also participate as individuals as well). In other words, the powerful would be excluded from less powerful spaces, but the less powerful could participate in both as they saw fit. [update in italics]
It is also hard to know how to "split" people up in coherent ways that don't involve identifying people as less powerful. While geographical distinctions are not perfect when it comes to churches in congregational groups, it seems likely that geographical splits might be the best way to do this, even if there are a few "white" or "rich" churches in the central city. But I wonder if it might be possible to bring in groups that currently don't participate much-like storefront Holiness and Pentecostal churches-by creating separate groups for them.
In any case, as usual, I am only speculating, here. These are empirical questions that must be answered pragmatically in every specific community. But while I don't know what the answers are, I do think that the new research on diversity and participation, on diversity and trust, raise crucial questions about the working of community organizing groups that, in my limited experience, they tend not to address. |
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