Right out of the gate, let me say I am one of those few people who like Charles Murray's thesis in The Bell Curve. That book was scholarly, statistical, but echoed with common sense and universal observations. When the New York Times gave a miserable review to his latest, Coming Apart, The State of White America, 1960-2010, I knew I had to read it as another counter blind liberalism treatise. I did not enjoy the book as much as The Bell Curve; I suppose the rancor Murray was exposed to has somewhat tempered either his own writing style of spurred his editors to modify his arguments to be more centrist.
Like Gaul, the book is divided into three parts: the formation of a new upper class, of a new lower class and why it matters. I only started dog-earring pages once I got to part three. Murray's premises and observations which he lays out in multiple graphs and through the comparison of two hypothetical towns of Belmont and Fishtown do not seem as scholastically rigorous as the data he employed in The Bell Curve. Maybe he had to argue more exhaustively about phenomena that are not readily observable, to wit, people's mental capacities. Here is mathematically backing up trends that are much more observable where people live, what work they do (or can't do), how they educate their children, what their social networks are like (if they still have any).
But the third section is strong. Murray quotes deTocqueville, and as any Slacker blog reader knows, I'm a sucker for writers who stand on Alexis' shoulders Murray cites four founding virtues as being the attributes that made America different and great marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity. Over the last fifty years, he finds Americans at the lower end of the economic curve to have devalued these social principles almost to the point of lacking critical mass to recoup and bend the slope upwards. In many ways, Murray is also standing on the shoulders of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Although Murray avoids also racial comparisons, once burnt, twice shy, he writes about white women not marrying, white men claiming disability so as to avoid working to support a family and about "bowling alone," with the decline of participation in civic and religious groups.
I guess it is my Yankee upbringing that stresses industriousness above all. (After all, there always are hidden scarlet letters and folks can be facetious about how they spend their Sunday mornings.) But to support your lifestyle and facades you need to make some money. Trade, and here I am leaking into Pinker's premises, underlies democracy and comity. Work confers pride, status, and a tolerance for reciprocity. Idleness promotes aloof dependency and drives a demand for "Big Daddy/Big Government." Or as Murray writes: "But when families become dysfunctional, or cease to form altogether, growing numbers of children suffer in ways that have little to do with the lack of money. When communities are no longer bound by their members' web of mutual obligations, the continuing human needs must be handed over to bureaucracies -- the bluntest, clumsiest of all tools for getting people the kind of help they need."
Part three often reads like very well thought out and written Sunday editorials, but Murray is a cut above the typical blather:
"... People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned ... and they only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing. People need intimate relationships with others, but intimate relationships that are rich and fulfilling next context, and that context is supplied only when humans are engaged in interactions that have consequences ... Responsibility for the consequences of our actions is not the price of freedom, but one of its rewards."
Murray sees signs that the new upper class is weakening, or at least moving towards the European model of entitled happiness and ease. He quotes from the McGuffey Readers as the conveyance of the code for males. He says that code of behavior has collapsed. "In today's new upper class ... the code that has taken its place is a set of mushy injunctions to be nice. Call it the code of ecumenical niceness ... The new upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them. It has lost self-confidence in the rightness of its own customs and values, and preaches nonjudgmentalism instead ... The members of the new upper class are industrious to the point of obsession, but there are no derogatory labels for adults who are not industrious. The young women of the new upper class hardly ever have babies out of wedlock, but it is impermissible to use a derogatory label for nonmarital births ... When you get down to it, it is not acceptable in the new upper class to use derogatory labels for anyone, with three exceptions: people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites." Ah-yuh, have you all noticed this in the media and presidential campaign?
Speaking of candidates, think of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum against this observation: "The most powerful and successful members of their class increasingly trade on the perks of their privileged positions without regard to the seemliness of that behavior. The members of the new upper class are active politically, but when it comes to using their positions to help sustain the republic in day-to-day life, they are AWOL."
Finally, Murray exposes the underlying foundations of a welfare state. As opposed to the founding fathers four principles, today's policy makers believe that people are equal not just in the ways that the Declaration of Independence meant equal in the eyes of God and before the law) but equal, or nearly so, in their latent abilities and characteristics. The corollary to this is that human nature can be changed. The second belief paraphrases liberal political party platforms: "... at bottom, human beings re not really responsible for the things they do. People who do well do not deserve what they have gotten -- they got it because they were born into the right social stratum. Or if they did well despite being poor and disadvantaged, it was because the luck of the draw gave them personal qualities that enabled them to succeed. People who do badly do not deserve it either. They were born into the wrong social stratum ... Thus it is morally appropriated to require the economically successful to hand over most of what they have earned to the state ..."
But he is not a Debbie Downer. Murray believes that America is ripe to move beyond its current moral stagnation and enter a new age. Unfortunately, Murray attests that this is his last book; we will not have his insight to assess any improvement, or woe is us, deterioration.
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