Five Multicultural Obstacles to Civic Betterment

Just as the most recent findings of Robert Putnam regarding trust and ethnic diversity were first becoming public, Steve Sailer wrote about the difficulties of fixing up a public park in a multicultural neighbourhood. Many of us like to see this sort of anecdotal flesh added to the bones of quantitative studies like Putnam’s:

Fifth problem: the fundamental difficulty in making multiculturalism work, namely, multiple cultures. Getting Koreans, Russians, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Assyrians (Christian Iraqis) to agree on how to landscape a park is not impossible. Yet it’s certainly far more work than fostering consensus among people who all have the same picture in their heads of what a park is for.

For example, Russian women like to sunbathe. But Latin American women want to stay in the shade, since their culture discriminates in favor of fairer-skinned women. So do you plant a lot of shade trees or not?