Imagining a way into nationhood

Robert Putnam, the Bowling Alone guy, has acquired many friends he might prefer he didn't have.

David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan has cited Putnam's research on his website. Pat Buchanan, the arch-conservative who thinks America is being overrun by Third World migrants is another fan.

Surely, that's enough to make a good liberal prof from Harvard blush.

I wrote about Putnam last week. He's the Harvard political scientist whose book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, appeared in 2000 and argued that Americans are retreating from civic engagement.

Now he's published another study about how multiculturalism is further tearing holes in the U.S. national fabric. According to his research, Americans have become more suspicious and isolated than they were seven years before.

Buchanan believes Putnam's thorough research backs up his argument that the country is being stolen out of under its inhabitants.

A good liberal

Putnam is a polite and fair-minded Harvard professor. I heard him on a panel on National Public Radio and found him immensely likable, the very model of the engaged scholar.

He said that as a social scientist, he could not help how people used his research. But he also identified himself as a "progressive," someone of the liberal left. And he understood that it is his fellow progressives, as they like to call themselves nowadays, who he may be really upsetting.

One progressive ally on the panel dismissed Putnam's argument about diversity's alienating effects. The problem is still inequality, this person argued. Extreme poverty and the unequal distribution of wealth are the progressive's real enemy. They don't like to be distracted from these challenges. And they don't like to get entangled in issues that can be tinged by racism.

But Putnam says liberals, progressives, call 'em what you want, should not duck hard truths.

That view was underscored by several African American callers who complained about immigrants and illegal migrants especially, saying these newcomers were sucking up valuable public resources, such as health care and education, that they weren't paying for.

Then Buchanan chimed in that he'd spoken to many African Americans who told him that these migrants, mostly Hispanics, were taking over "their" country. He went on to say that by 2050, 100 million Hispanics would be living in the American Southwest and California. And they didn't even care to be Americans.

They could care less about speaking English, he said. They wanted jobs, and money to send their relatives, and not something as insubstantial as an American identity.

Think back

In Buchanan's view, immigration must be vastly curtailed. Let the U.S. absorb the immigrants it already had. As for illegal migrants, put up a wall, said callers. I heard this on NPR, hardly right-wing talk radio.

The gentlemanly Putman took a deep breath. He did not shout at anyone or bite back. He even agreed with Buchanan that the country needed time to assimilate immigrants, as it had during the last century. But he also said that his research showed that Hispanics and new immigrants wanted to speak English, as much as the old immigrants had.

Programs were needed to ease the transition (he's a progressive, remember). Then he also told the following story.

He has two friends, one from an Irish, the other from an Italian family. In the 1960s, they wanted to get married. But their parents hated the idea of a "mixed marriage."

Now just think about that, said Putnam. Irish and Italian. Both Roman Catholics, both white. Just over 40 years ago that was a no-no, marrying outside your ethnic group. Today, that kind of barrier would be considered a joke.

There's hope there, in that story, in the unexpected, in the new ways people band together, intermarry, and make new, more exotic connections. People may marry people they shouldn't. But marriage isn't a flag to hang a country on.

A bigger 'we'

For centuries, Americans have prided themselves on what they called their "civil religion," their sense of national identity. Michael Ignatieff calls this kind of nationalism "civic," rather than "ethnic." It's actually a great accomplishment of the Enlightenment, the West. Anyone is allowed to be an American, no matter who you were.

Robert Putnam wants a more "encompassing we" to develop in the U.S. This may be even more difficult in Canada, where regional identities and new ethnic identities are so pronounced. For many, it seems, Canada is just a flag of convenience where people receive medicare and dream of retiring on a Canadian pension to their "country of origin."

But countries are mental constructs, ideas. They are born in the mind, not just in the blood.

Years ago, I was a producer on CBC Radio's Morningside, which, under host Peter Gzowski, was as Canadian as snow. Working on it was almost as if a country was being created on air, right before our eyes and ears.

Now, everybody knew it wasn't the real Canada. Perhaps it was too white or middle class or Gzowski-ish (fill in the your own critique). But you could actually hear Peter listening, to all the voices that we gathered for him every morning. It was both a real and imagined country, even if it only existed on the radio.

Perhaps it's harder to do that now, in a culture that operates like a shopping mall, with everybody selecting their identities as if at their favorite boutique. Call me sentimental, but there was something about that public airing of a country, even if presumptuous, that sticks in my memory.

If Robert Putnam is right, and "we" the citizens must create a more "encompassing we," it won't be just by creating a better health-care system or energy policy. A country is a work of the imagination. We breathe our life into it. And it creates itself in ways we can only dream.

Letters:

If Americans are feeling disconnected from each other, lacking community, and don't trust their neighbours, it could be because in today's society, we drive around in our individual cars disconnected from other people.

Check out the article "Bogota: From Living Hell to Living Well" (The Globe and Mail, June 25, 2007) and see how society has been transformed by taking cars off the street. Yes, people walk to work instead of driving.

Vancouver, Canada has had "no car zone" days on Commercial Drive where people take to the streets and have fun, dance and play hacky-sack and of course shop and eat. Vancouver's Mayor snuck in a no-car zone one Saturday night on Granville Street, its downtown entertainment zone where arrests are normally high. The result: arrests down from 35 to 1. Peace results.

People are on the streets and feel connected, the air is clean, people are having fun. Everyone knows that in cars, people act more rudely than they would face-to-face. Bogota's mayor says "streets can be car-friendly or people-friendly, but not both."

Getting out of your car and interacting with others lessens aggression and creates community. Let's try it.

Mary-Ellen Meyers | Delta, BC