Deliberations

This article by Scott London has been around a while, but it is worthwhile to flag as an excellent overview of deliberative dialogue. Scott London is a journalist, photographer and ultimately a social commentator. He has been a moderator for National Issues Forums, by far the largest grass roots deliberative democracy movement in the United States, operating for more than a quarter century.

Scott's most-cited article is a 1997 interview with Richard Rodriguez entitled A View from the Melting Pot. Whereas Canada has had an official policy on multiculturalism for decades, current Australian policy just sees immigration as something to control rather than welcome. And the popular, dare I say commercially-driven, culture of America continues to steam-roll all else before it, spilling well outside its own borders.

This passage particularly struck me:

London: Many people feel that the call for diversity and multiculturalism is one reason the American educational system is in such dire trouble.

Rodriguez: It's no surprise that at the same time that American universities have engaged in a serious commitment to diversity, they have been thought-prisons. We are not talking about diversity in any real way. We are talking about brown, black, white versions of the same political ideology. It is very curious that the United States and Canada both assume that diversity means only race and ethnicity. They never assume it might mean more Nazis, or more Southern Baptists. That's diversity too, you know.

London: So how would you define diversity?

Rodriguez: For me, diversity is not a value. Diversity is what you find in Northern Ireland. Diversity is Beirut. Diversity is brother killing brother. Where diversity is shared — where I share with you my difference — that can be valuable. But the simple fact that we are unlike each other is a terrifying notion. I have often found myself in foreign settings where I became suddenly aware that I was not like the people around me. That, to me, is not a pleasant discovery.

For deliberative fora, it is accepted rhetoric that we need diversity to achieve vigorous and expansive dialogue. I do think we have it right--it is the range of views and perspectives and frameworks that is important, not just our demographic reality.

This struck me because it relates directly with a lecture given late last year in Sweden by Robert Putnam of social capital fame, and published as E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century. The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies (Vol 30, No. 2, pp 137-174). His remarkable claim is that the sum of both bonding ("ties to people who are like you in some important way") and bridging ("ties to people who are unlike you in some important way") social capital is diminished in more diverse communities. In Putnam's terms, these communities "hunker down", demonstrating amongst other things:

• Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.
• Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in their own influence.
• 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.
• Lower likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.
• 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'.

I was quite disturbed that Putnam's study stayed within the American Census' definition of diversity which is limited to four stereotypes: Hispanic, non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black and Asian. Even Putnam recognises that this straitjacket may assist in research expediency but has dubious relevance. In fact, it appears that throughout his article Putnam accedes to the prevalence that Rodriguez identified a decade earlier in viewing American diversity only through the shuttered lens of ethnicity.

Nonetheless, Putnam's study does reinforce the experience in my own municipality of Maribyrnong, which two years ago invited more than 2000 residents to a consultation exercise in future visioning, yet only got about 60 responses. This small inner-city locality is probably the most ethnically diverse in the country (it might have to do with there being a migrant detention centre here).

So this gets me back to my earlier question of how we go about engaging the whole community and getting everybody in it (or representatives of them) learning from each other.

Image credit: Wikipedia.

Published under a Creative Commons License

Posted by rlubensky on 23 August 2007 at 12:52 PM | Link