Those of us of a certain age have strolled the green long enough to recognize that the country has changed in fundamental ways from the one that we were born into, and that not all of those changes have been beneficent. Things that would have shocked the conscience of nearly all Americans fifty years ago are now commonplace. Shared assumptions about what it meant to be a part of the American way of life no longer obtain. We have gone from the congenial myth of “E pluribus unum” to a state of acknowledged and de facto cultural Balkanization, one that divides us into semi-permanent economic classes in a way that threatens the social mobility which used to separate us from the lands we’d fled. In doing so we have created politically reliable victim classes whose only hope at economic betterment is plundering their distant and unknown neighbors.
In the WSJ, Charles Murray creates two fictional American villages using actual demographic information from the 1960s to the present day, and comes to some conclusions about our increasing trend towards the cultural isolation of our wealthiest class from their working class brethren that tend to be more sobering than they are shocking:
Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of…
Once the deterioration was under way, a self-reinforcing loop took hold as traditionally powerful social norms broke down. Because the process has become self-reinforcing, repealing the reforms of the 1960s (something that’s not going to happen) would change the trends slowly at best.
Meanwhile, the formation of the new upper class has been driven by forces that are nobody’s fault and resist manipulation. The economic value of brains in the marketplace will continue to increase no matter what, and the most successful of each generation will tend to marry each other no matter what. As a result, the most successful Americans will continue to trend toward consolidation and isolation as a class. Changes in marginal tax rates on the wealthy won’t make a difference. Increasing scholarships for working-class children won’t make a difference.
He has some prescriptions that are equally unlikely to happen as unraveling well-meant but disastrously effected social policies: The super-elites in the upper class ought to reject their tacit custom of “non-judgmentalism” on the social mores of the working class – shaming, in other words – and sell down from their expensive cloisters to go and live among the unwashed.
You first, Charles.
A great tour d’horizon but at the end the classic LBJ question applies: “Therefore what?”
Lex; http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/288436/civilization-reverse-victor-davis-hanson
A little like this?
I think this is a root cause of the behavior described in the post above.
My former supervisor asked if I would be interested in a position on the East or West Coasts and I said I did not think so, because the cultural differences (note: this was before CA’s economic woes really got going). I sit out here in Flyover Country and wonder if some of the coastal elites would really notice (or care) if everything between the Appalachians and the east side of the Sierra Nevadas vanished.
I’m a historian by trade (and a pilot), and what Murry describes sounds a lot like the 19th century. It is as if society is rolling backwards into the world Hogarth’s prints so clearly depicted (Gin Alley, for example).
“There’s too many pigs for the teats” – So spoke Abraham Lincoln, besieged by officeseekers desiring jobs in the federal government, quoted by Shelby Foote in Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War.
Those who are well off have been able to gain a better foothold and reinforce the divide. Those who work for the Federal, State & Local governments set in place early retirements and lifetime bennies, even when the actuaries show that the numbers can’t support this model.
The rest of society will pay into the system, but not have more than a portion of social security in return. The game has been rigged, and those inside the system have made it a losing ame for all but themselves.
My Dad said it best when we were discussing this issue. He said, ” I don’t envy you, and I really don’t envy your kids.”
Charles Murray. Now there’s a man who knows his trees, knows them inside and out, backwards and forwards. He can graph those trees like nobody else can, lots of bars and pie charts, he’s got them all sorted, a thousand different ways to statistically slice and dice those trees. Yep, if you want to know about trees, Murray’s your man.
Forests, however, he doesn’t know jack about.
Social policy made it feasible to have a child if you were a single woman…our collective intent is to give that woman a step up in raising that child, however, the unintended consequence–the breakdown of the family–is the penalty our society has reaped. My daughter taught school in a poor school district in Florida, and it didn’t take her long to understand that most of the kids would have their only meal of the day at school, food was the lure, not education. Now in my southern city there is an additional program to send kids home on Friday with meals to carry them through the weekend! I’m not heartless, but we (that’s you and me) are making it much easier to suck on the government bottle. Don’t have kids unless you can afford them is a waste of words in an area where the poverty rate is pushing double the national average, kids don’t make it to graduation, and the only norm is government assisstance. Then there is the high crime rate because there is no father figure in the family for generations. Mothers and grandmothers raise the kids, and they have no memory of a stable man in the house, ever.
Now that we are in this hole, any words on how we are going to get out? I think we are in a death spiral moving farther and farther away from the US of A you, me, and Wally and the Beaver grew up in.
AMEN!
This is one of the best summaries of our plight I have seen. Horrifying, but accurate. To reverse this culture we need to be damn judgmental, and ruthlessly cease to offer additional government teats, and dry up the existing ones.
Bastardry needs to be resurrected as a shameful situation, and the sperm donors need to be held responsible for the support (and crimes) of their progeny.
Zane: Please elaborate.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18f.htm
The above was written by a man who taught for 30 years in NYC schools, roughly ten years in the “best” schools, roughly ten years in the worst Harlem schools, and ten years in middling schools. He was twice NYC Teacher of the Year, and once NY State Teacher of the Year. He resigned from teaching with the following op-ed published in the WSJ (the bolding is mine):
I think Murray falls into the “deliberate indifference” category, having lived his cloistered life on substantial subsidies donated by the very powers that have so much invested in government schooling. Either way, I have read what he has to say about education quite thoroughly and he is merely an advocate for the collapsing status quo, only bigger and more. That he doesn’t understand how government schooling plays directly into his two very tightly cherry-picked scenarios only renders him even more the well-paid fool, blowing smoke in our eyes.
Zane, if this is the Murray of “The Bell Curve” than I’m not sure I get your point. He certainly hit the nail on the head in Bell Curve, and we can see what he described in the out working in numerous countries with low IQ (Black Africa, mean IQ of 75, being the poster child).
That doesn’t mean I agree with his prescriptions. The best way to clean it up is to repeal the welfare state and place gov back in the place it should occupy, rather than being the chief charity in the country.
If that means orphanages, then so be it. Not that I like that idea either, but it beats leaving kids tied to the tracks to be cut down by the train the libtards are running.
Murray is a flak for the system that produces the problems he so thoroughly slices and dices on a corporate payroll. His work is pernicious, deceitful and IMHO, deeply anti-American.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm
Agreeing with Zane,
Differentiation doesn’t occur on the time frame Murray requires in the population sizes he uses. He says Belmont = 20% of white America (40 million), to get any significant differentiation would require at least 400 years of total isolation. To say it can occur in 50 years is total BS.
Your line about “non judgmentalism” hit home. By most standards–education, profession, relative economic success–I stuck at the 95% income percentile most of my working life but didn’t get much higher— I’m one of “the elite”. But in Los Angeles all of that doesn’t make you one of the elite–just poor upper middle class is all.
That said, it has always crisped my toast when I’ve heard people (or me) described as “judgmental”. The term is used as though one had committed Original Sin by being “judgmental”. To me the failure to be judgmental–at least when the situation requires it–is to reflect the total absence of thought or standards of conduct. For example I get danged judgmental when someone goes on the television, points a finger in my face and lies to me. [See "I did not have sex with that woman."]
Just before The Great Society and the mid 1960′s Civil Rights Act got rolling, I sat in a fraternity house meeting room–maybe the spring of 1964. Members of the Interfraternity and Panhellenic Councils had gathered to hear a lady speak. I’d say she’d been in a sorority in the very early 1950′s. She had it all–the Jackie O pillbox hat, white gloves and such. Probably a St. John knit dress (Marianne will recognize that) as well. So she was all togged out and toffed up as it were.
The burden of her message was that the English language had changed–and not for the better. Why in her day, to be “discriminating” was a good thing. Of course the word at the time meant that little Suzy Q in the Pi Phi house in 1949 was trained to select the right silverware, linen, and china, that she knew real turtle soup from mock as the song goes and that she had discriminating taste.
And now–it was 1964 and if you were “discriminating” you were a bad, bad person.
Well I had some empathy for her plight–but the times they were a changing, and so were the definitions and usages of words.
We got on this slippery slope down which we’re slithering by first changing the definition of words and then suspending all judgment. We’re not quite to Hell in a handbasket, but those of us who still think can see it from here.
Staying out of poverty is simple. Graduate from HS, have a full time job, wait to 21 to get married, wait until married to have children. Do all and there is a 2% poverty rate. Do none, 76%. Leftists make the mistake of thinking poverty is a financial problem. It is a BEHAVIOR problem. Leftists think if we give the poor college funds, they will act middle class. If we give them health care, they will act middle class. It is about choices, and not making bad choices. There is nothing in those four behaviors that cost a dime.
Source: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/events/2009/1027_opportunity_society/1027_opportunity_society_presentation.pdf
Agreed it is a behavior problem. Brookings has a lot of good s**t out there that is well worth the read.
Now, the question is – how to fix it? Can it be fixed? Is it something that can be fixed at the Federal level, since that’s worked so well so far, or can the individual states handle it? Is it too much for the states to handle? Should we go down the libertarian path, let these people make their poor choices, and make sure they live with the results?
So what happened that 41% of Americans are now below the poverty line? Granted, the line is drawn pretty loosely, but that’s still a massive shift.
Zane/
Obama’s new definition of “poverty” is a blatantly false one that no longer measures “absolute” deprivation but which places the dividing line at the median income level. It really should be labeled a measure of “inequality.” What it cunningly does by expanding the definition is assure that 40-50 % of America will ALWAYS meet the definition of “poverty” even if that cohort’s incomes doubled, tripled or quintupled overnight, thus assuring an ever increasing (in line w. pop. growth) contingent ALWAYS eligible for govt largess to be doled out by DC.
Zane – not questioning you, but where did you see that? What I recall was the the high dudgeon over the rate going to 15% in 2011, highest since ’93.
Scott, you are correct. I confused the number, 46.3 million, with the rate, which was 15%.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/poverty-in-america-a-special-report
Murray is right. The middle class was always the great bastion of virtue. They enjoyed a degree of comfort and prosperity…subject to good behavior. The upper class could buy their way out of the consequences of most misbehavior, the lower classes had nowhere lower to descend to.
It used to be that the lower middle class might have lacked money, but they maintained the manners of the middle class. Work hard, get married, stay out of trouble, deal honestly with your neighbor. Beginning in the 1960s, this started to crack…and in the 1970s, it really came apart. The behaviors of the lower class become more and more tolerated by polite society, and more and more prevalent. With predictable consequences.
We’ve got to go back to the old morality. I fear that it will take serious Government action to do so, though. Social pressure may not be enough.
And what, exactly, do you mean by old morality? And where does it state in the Constitution that this should be forced on all of us at a Federal level? Um, no, wrong answer.
Mike M … I agree. We should go back to the old morality if we want to remain a mostly stable society. But it won’t be easy. Experts on the sociology of our country almost universally say “You can’t go home again,” as the saying goes. But I think we’ve got to try. We reached a tipping point of change back in the 1960s, when the restless descendents of the soldiers of the Second World War became unwilling to listen to the wisdom of their elders. They began to want instant gratification in everything and cast aside any wisdom of their elders as boring and wrong. I had the thought not long ago, that if society in the 1930s had been as dismissive of moral standards as today’s society, the Great Depression would have been far more violent and destructive and slow to recover from. We were fortunate back then that our country’s moral structure was still based on Judeo-Christian principles. Men who had lost their homes and their jobs roamed the countryside, but they didn’t regularly break in to houses and murder the occupants for whatever they owned. The basic structure of society was still sound. What these homeless wanderers did was develop a scribbled code of signals for their fellow down-on-their-luck people. The code told the others that the people in this house were kind folks and would give you a meal if you asked nicely. This was basic do-unto-others kindness, which many of us today are afraid to give. The churches still do serve food to the homeless. But the government doesn’t like it because the churches insist on doing it their way. And the Administration wants to keep the power of giving in their own hands, so they can exact proper tribute in votes and power in return for food and a place to sleep.
Marianne
The answer to this problem is to stop believing that compassion can only be measured by the amount of money spent, and for those doing the lavishing (either with their own dollars or those they’ve confiscated from others) to be shamed when they bring up the topic.
Instead we are taught that people are not responsible for their actions, that we are beneath contempt when we expect good behavior from others, that society is to blame (that’s us) because others fail, and since we’re not failures we must pay to help those who are.
Worse, we’re told this little demand for morality of ours is too restrictive, too oppressive, that we simply don’t understand or are obviously racist/sexist/bigoted because of our privileged upbringing.
Don’t know about you, but I never knew behaving responsibly and not understanding those who did not made me a bigot.
Apparently this is not a new problem. Joshua 24:15. Choose who you will serve, who you will obey, and who you will tell to get stuffed high and hard with a left-hand twist.
– Max
Ever look at pictures from the Great Depression? Ever notice people dressed as best they could? Even a man selling apples or pencils from a tin cup wore a suit and tie, and always had a hat.
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2010/07/26/captured-america-in-color-from-1939-1943/2363/
People back then had pride. Used to be a man wouldn’t take a hand-out unless there were no other options, and a man wouldn’t give a hand-out except for work done for fear of offending.
Today half the country doesn’t actually pay anything in taxes and expects a regular check in the mail.
In the words of Michael Moore, and probably not in the way he imagined, “Dude? What happened to my country?”
I wonder what a fat filmmaker wearing a stained sweatshirt and baseball cap would make of those pictures.
– Max
As a societal failure, I feel like I am an anomaly; Failed to select as a Chief, retired Navy E-6. Sailed my paid off 43 foot sailboat across the Atlantic and returned home without any gubmint pay, and without any prior sailing experience. Oh, and I never graduated High School.
Am I missing something?
Illiteracy is increasing because schools are failing. Schools are failing for several reasons, among which are the nonsense to which prospective teachers are exposed while in training–summarized in http://www.education.com/reference/article/child-development-changing-theories/
Then there are the merits of parental involvement in education. My understanding of this is merely anecdotal. Mom was a teacher, but when I was age 5 she stopped working and stayed home full-time to enhance my public-school education and my brother’s. We are both much more successful than our equally-bright peers who did not enjoy such attention. Mom’s involvement in our education did NOT include harassing our teachers, but rather she reaffirmed their requirements. My discussions with teachers today reveal that destructive interference from parents is their principal source of dissatisfaction.
I think Murray got a bad rap from some comments on this blog regarding his stance on “non-judgmentalism.” Here’s what he actually said: “There remains a core of civic virtue and involvement in working-class America that could make headway against its problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need—not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold. The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending “non-judgmentalism.” Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn’t hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.” Validation of values and standards–like marriage before kids, like one-worker households and lots of attention to child-rearing like Mom gave me. I think Murray is saying that the media mock the un-sexy, workaday practices that actually lead to social stability, economic prosperity and shared values.