Double standards over diversity

One of the most important contributions a scientist can make is to successfully question opinions that seem self-evident and obvious to the public. Once it was commonly accepted in the West that the world was flat and that the heart was the residence of the soul.

By the same token one of the biggest dangers for a scientist is to get sucked into simply stating things that go along with what is commonly believed but are not really self-evident at all. It's very easy to make statements that go with the grain without applying the same amount of thought given to statements that go against the grain.

To do this is to reinforce potentially false beliefs and give them a veneer of scientific credibility. The danger seems most obvious for social science, where hardly anything can be proven beyond doubt. One needs to make clear the level of certainty that applies to whatever statements are made.

Consider ethnic diversity (commonly seen as a good thing) and Aboriginal welfare (widely regarded as having grown worse).

Last month The Australian ran an article ("The downside of difference", January 31 and republished in On Line Opinion on February 19, 2007) by the Australian National University economist Andrew Leigh, based on his research into ethnic diversity. In his first paragraph he offers various platitudes about the advantages of diversity. He states, for example, that "our restaurants would be bland imitations of themselves without the flavours brought by successive waves of Italian, Thai and Vietnamese immigrants".

That diversity has transformed the way we eat seems a sensible statement, but is this based on anything more than gut feeling?

Whose culinary diversity are we talking about? A century ago in England there might well have been 100 intricate ways to cook a parsnip; today you can't buy one in most shops.

Nor is it obvious that we have a happier relationship with food. Obesity rates suggest that our average eating experience has worsened: many choose fleeting gratification at the cost of long-term wellness. As for the pleasure of novelty - in food as in anything else - that diminishes with familiarity. But the point is that Leigh feels the need for an introduction where he is seen to value diversity. And when it comes to these positive statements, he feels no need to apply critical standards.

Having asserted without evidence that diversity is good for society, he proceeds to his controversial argument: that an impressive array of findings - his own and those of overseas studies - put a negative complexion on diversity. He argues plausibly that diversity is related to low levels of trust, low levels of community involvement, high levels of crime, and a weak welfare state.

In doing so he takes pains to cite several researchers and their data sets, and he is careful to note the niceties of the findings. Apparently this is how you need to write when you say something outside the prevailing cultural norm. The contrast with his introductory remarks - well within the norm - is striking. There is a double standard at work.

The debate surrounding Sorry Day and Aboriginal welfare appears to suffer from similar double standards. For example, news articles often report the claim by academics that the life expectancy of Aborigines is almost 20 years below the national average.

As social science researchers, we lack a data set of all those with some Aboriginal ancestry. What we rely on is the group that self-identifies as Aboriginal, so we cannot say with certainty what Aboriginal life expectancy is. The number of people reporting their Aboriginality has risen sharply in the past 20 years - the population registered in this way has almost doubled - so the official figures captured over time may not be representative.

What can be said is that self-identified Aborigines - who may not be representative - are estimated to die on average 17 years earlier than other Australians. One behavioural scientist, Nikola Balvin from the University of Melbourne, used this at best partial finding to argue last year in the Australian Journal of Peace Studies that "Australia, because it permits such inequities and poor care for its indigenous people, is not a civilised nation".

Is it really self-evident that Aboriginal peoples are worse off than their ancestors 200 years ago, or that they are poorly cared for? The best guess of anthropology is that hunter-gatherers such as the Aborigines had a life expectancy of about 30 years. Average expectancy in Aboriginal surveys now is close to 60 years. On the face of it, that's a doubling of the length of life, related to Western medicine (vaccinations and the like) and Western-style public services (such as pure drinking water, relatively safe transport, and basic housing).

According to the federal Department of Health, average health expenditure on Aboriginals is 20 to 50 per cent higher than on other Australians. Such a figure is fraught with uncertainties, partly because we don't always know the ethnicity of healthcare users and because not all health expenditure is effective, for instance because hospitals in remote communities are much more expensive to maintain per patient.

Even so, the sacrifice made by public servants and taxpayers on behalf of Aborigines does not immediately jump at you as being so "poor" that it is "uncivilised".

It's not at all clear that the present generation of Aborigines leads a worse life than their ancestors, nor that Aborigines are short-changed in terms of access to public services. Note that here we are dealing with a rather mild example of academic commentary on the issue. More radical academic voices - such as historian Ben Kiernan of Yale University, who claimed in 2002 that a genocide had been and was being committed against Aborigines - are an embarrassment to the profession.

As with ethnic diversity, Aboriginal welfare is a subject where academics feel free to make sweeping statements unsupported by evidence, as long as those statements do not violate the prevailing social norm.

The most fascinating thing about the ethnic diversity debate is that we as an academic community seem reluctant to push our arguments to their logical conclusion.

If diversity is so great, then why don't we argue the supposed advantages for Aborigines of the greater diversity brought in with European settlement? If living in a sea of diversity is so wonderful for other Australians, why not for Aborigines?

Why don't we bemoan also the loss of diversity within Anglo-Saxon heritage? Now you may have only one box on the census for speaking English, yet the whole notion of Englishness is a medieval invention and hides the fact that until 300 or 400 years ago this was a far from homogenous identity. The War of the Roses testifies to that. The cities of what we now call England were thick with linguistic and cultural diversity.

A Scouse would have had trouble understanding a Cockney not too long ago. That diversity has all but disappeared, and its disappearance may be related to positive outcomes such as communal trust and participation, as Leigh's argument would suggest.

But again, the point is not so much whether his argument is correct or whether the net effect of diversity is desirable. Nor is the immediate issue whether Aboriginal welfare on balance has improved. What matters is that social scientists think critically about statements in support of truisms, just as they do about statements at odds with contemporary social norms. Only then can we hope to understand complex and important issues such as ethnic diversity or Aboriginal welfare.