Twice a week, my husband and I drive past the new Hindu temple in northwest Toronto. Built from 24,000 pieces of hand-carved marble and limestone, it is a testament to devotion, and to the astonishing diversity of Canada's biggest city. A few kilometres up the road are a shopping mall with stores selling South Asian and Caribbean food, and a vast new subdivision where men in turbans and splendid white beards stroll along the sidewalks. Nearby, another temple dwarfs the small old church across the street.
I like all of this. Whenever I ride into the city on the subway, I am reminded that my face is fast becoming a minority - just another minority in a sea of minorities. I don't mind. It makes me feel as if I'm living in a Coke commercial, a world of perfect harmony, the sort of idealized world I dreamed about when I was in Grade 8 and studied the United Nations. Most people I know feel the same way, vaguely self-congratulatory over what we imagine to be Canada's amazing multicultural success story.
Indeed, we have plenty to congratulate ourselves about. We don't have race riots or interethnic wars. Nobody is passing bylaws to discourage immigrants from moving in next door.
Yet, there are signs that not all is well in paradise. Immigrants aren't catching up as quickly as they used to, and many of them never catch up at all. An alarming number of their kids say they aren't very attached to Canada, and don't really feel Canadian. If there's nothing that's driving us apart, there's nothing that's gluing us together, either.
And, now, along comes Robert Putnam, an influential social scientist from Harvard who has done the biggest study yet on diversity and its impact. His findings are unequivocal: Diversity has a negative impact on community and social cohesion. It diminishes what he calls our "social capital" - our networks of friendship, neighbourhood and trust.
"Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us," he writes. People who live in more diverse communities tend to "distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television." People who are disengaged from their community lose their taste for social spending. They're far less likely to believe in welfare, or more school funding, when they think those benefiting are not like them.
Mr. Putnam isn't all that thrilled with what he's found. He checked and cross-checked his data for years before publishing his findings. By inclination, he is liberal-minded, and he knows his work will be used by racists and nativists to prove they were right all along. "It's not pleasant to be called a hero on David Duke's website," he says, referring to the former Ku Klux Klan leader.
He also believes there are ways to remedy the negative effects of diversity - once we acknowledge that those effects are real. "It would be unfortunate if a politically correct progressivism were to deny the reality of the challenge to social solidarity posed by diversity," he writes.
This is awkward stuff. Mr. Putnam's work is a sharp rebuke to the brand of feel-good multiculturalism that has ruled Canada for decades - the sunny belief that says diversity is good for its own sake and that, if we all hold hands and teach our children the right lessons about celebrating difference, all will be well. Better than well, in fact. The official version is that difference makes us stronger. We have no idea what to do if the opposite turns out to be the case.
Mr. Putnam's work is attracting attention in Britain and the U.S., where, for different reasons, issues of national identity have become urgent. In Britain, the ethnic fissures are so deep that a national debate has begun about what it means to be "British." In the U.S., many communities are feeling overwhelmed by tides of unassimilated Hispanics. They don't know how to cope. As immigration bills die in Washington, dozens of municipalities and states are passing laws designed to make newcomers feel as unwelcome as possible.
Canada has far higher immigration rates than both the U.S. and Britain. Our hope is that all the newcomers' children will be magically turned into Canadians by the school system, which we rely on as our chief instrument of socialization. Will it work? What's a Canadian, anyway? We have no idea. Meantime, we all go home to our little ethnic enclaves, where we socialize with people like ourselves.
It's possible, of course, that these problems will sort themselves out. Mr. Putnam points out that, only a generation ago, a mixed marriage was when an Irish Catholic married an Italian Catholic. We have adapted relatively quickly to all kinds of profound change. And he says that, even though most measures of a healthy civic society are on the wane, at least two U.S. institutions have proved superb at managing diversity. One is the military, the other the vast new megachurches that have built communities where there were none.
I can't see Canadians embracing either of these entities as role models. So what do we have to offer? Frankly, I'm not confident that having politicians bless Hindu temples, or paying lip service to other people's holidays and gods, will be enough.
Maybe we'll just bumble along and hope time will help create a new "we." Or maybe we'll evolve into the perfect postmodern state, where there is no "we" but no one cares. Instead, there's only a bunch of interest groups, all pitted against each other to grab what they construe as their fair share of the pie. Kind of like the Canada we have now, only more so.