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Perhaps what everyone wants is my account of last
night's speech by Charles Murray.
The gist of Murray's presentation is that in the
past, and up until around 1960, there was a unitary "civic culture"
in America, that unity is what distinguished America from Western Europe, that
starting in 1960 that civic culture began to stratify, and that now there is an
elite that doesn't know or care about the cultural mainstream, which has gotten
much worse off since 1960 not because people in the mainstream have become
poorer but because they have lost access to the four things that make life worth
living:
-industriousness
-honesty
-marital morality
-religiosity
These four values were upheld unanimously by the
founding fathers and by the unified culture that prevailed from the American
origin to 1960. They are still enjoyed by the elite but not by the mainstream.
Where to begin?
First of all, we're only talking about white
people. Murray said that doing so is "a way to concentrate the mind,"
that if he included the entire population he would confound the story, and that
stipulating we're only talking about white people has allowed the commentary to
be more frank. He said the left would be "walking on eggshells" were
non-whites to be involved in the discussion.
Second, throughout the presentation he declared
that he was not going to offer a causal story; he was merely going to address
"facts." Nonetheless, he concluded in part by saying that although
the trend he describes was initiated by "economic causes" in the
1960s, it cannot be reversed through "merely" economic policies
because what he's talking about are changes in social mores. My interpretation
of this pablum is that Murray believes the Great Society caused the trends he's
talking about, but that he won't be tied down to policy recommendations
because, at base, he simply doesn't know what he's talking about and would be
utterly destroyed were he to enter that arena rather than dealing in
unsupported and cliched narratives.
Third, as he went through his narrative of
moral-religious decline and disattachment from the labor force by working class
white men that he believes results therefrom, it became obvious that he doesn't
think women entering the workforce and thus having bargaining power within
relationships/marriage is a Good Thing. He stated outright that young men are
emasculated by the decline in the expectation that they will get a job that
supports a wife and children, though he said elsewhere, incoherently, that the
idea of a working class wage that supported single-earning households has
always been a myth. Presumably this latter point is a swipe at the presumed
union-originating argument that a unionized unskilled manufacturing wage was
once sufficient for stability and now isn't. But his point was that young men
are sitting around doing drugs and playing video games and not getting jobs
because they are unmanned by competing with women rather than dominating them.
(As an aside, he made the preposterous claim that
women have always "chosen their husbands" in America by way of
contrast with Western European society, which was oppressive. Yet he clearly is
deeply uncomfortable with the decline in patriarchy. I would say that his very
clear, specific anti-feminism was the most surprising aspect of the talk for
me, though in retrospect it shouldn't have been. After all, the point of the Bell
Curve is that we screwed up when we started treating black people as people; in
the book about white people, it's not surprising his main point is that we
screwed up when we started treating women as people.)
Fourth, the largest portion of his talk was a
portrait of the "new elite," which consists of older, stable married
couples, both with degrees and living in homogeneous neighborhoods, with a
healthy but culturally foreign diet and exercise regimen and admirable
pre-natal healthcare and habits. This contrasts with the socio-economic elite
of the 1960s, which shared its origin in the mainstream (as it was then). He
offered essentially no evidence for this characterization of the ex-ante elite,
except that among married couples in wealthy zipcodes in 1960 and before, both
partners tended not to have college degrees, which made them similar to the
non-higher-educated mainstream. The fact that this particular contrast is quite
obviously the result of widespread higher education among women--and the marriage
competition that it is both caused by and causes--went unmentioned. He also
said that among the ex-ante elite, corporate executives chose to drive Buicks
rather than Cadillacs (as the latter was perceived as unacceptable flaunting of
wealth), whereas now there is no such compunction about conspicuous consumption
among the ex-post elite.
Fifth, his prognosis for America is bad. He says
that the likely (with probability=0.7) outcome is that the US becomes
indistinguishable from Western Europe (whereas, recall, American exceptionalism
as-was took the form of a unitary society rather than the European
class-stratified one). With P=0.3, America will be warned off the European fate
by the utter failure of that model in the near future, as well as by the growing
body of social-scientific research that he says vindicates traditional morality
on utilitarian lines, and thus promptly reverse the trends he identifies. As a
final minor aside, one way he specifically mentions of avoiding the European
fate is for the contemporary elite to get comfortable judging the immoral
behavior of the poor: out-of-wedlock births, irreligiosity, disattachment from
the labor market, etc.
My conclusion:
The whole idea is obviously incoherent. On the
one hand we have an elite that's reprehensible for being culturally distinct,
and on the other an elite with morally (and thus economically) superior
lifestyle choices. Furthermore, he stated outright that the increase in income
inequality was due to "crony capitalism"--the belief on the part of
the elite that they "don't have to play by the rules that other people
play by"--his words, not mine. Yet because they get divorced less and
never have children out of wedlock, they are (and should see themselves and be
seen by others as) the moral beacons for society.
Moreover, this strikes me as a contraption
cobbled together to explain the class-stratification and inequality in a way
that carefully avoids assigning responsibility where it belongs. The whole point of his lengthy
shtick castigating the elite is to locate the self-criticism where it will, in
fact, be harmless to the interests of the incumbent wealthy and powerful. He
wants the elite to feel self-conscious eating sushi and organic cereal and
visiting a personal trainer; he doesn't want them to feel self-conscious when
they pass laws mandating that their investment portfolio will not decline below
a certain value and that food stamps and unions must be eliminated as part of
any responsible macroeconomic policy. A key tell here was that in the question
period, he rejected the notion of mandatory national service as a possibly
unifying policy proposal on the ground that since it will most certainly not
involve the Uniform Code of Military Justice, it will be more like the Peace
Corps than the draft. Apparently actually requiring the elite to do anything
just wouldn't work due to slacking off, whereas a society that doesn't expect
or require non-elite men to work is destined for failure.
He closed by saying "every successful
civilization had confidence in the rightness of what it was doing."
Ignoring the oddness of anthropomorphizing a "civilization," that
surely doesn't actually mean that "what it was doing" was right, does
it??
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