Another look at America, “The State of White America” and Charles Murray

The following is from realclearbooks:

Charles Murray’s Book of Virtues

By Heather Wilhelm

Charles Murray, the prominent political scientist, doesn’t shy away from awkward subjects — he’s best known for The Bell Curve, which stirred up a progressive hornet’s nest in the mid-1990s — and he tackles the charged issue of class in his new and important book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. America, Murray writes, “is coming apart at the seams — not ethnic seams, but the seams of class.” Culture, not money, divides the new upper and lower classes, which live in increasingly different worlds: one rarefied, walled-off, and at the helm of the country; the other dysfunctional, adrift, and hapless when it comes to the game of life.

Tracking white Americans to avoid blurring trends with race and ethnicity, the numbers Murray presents are startling: In the new upper class, which amounts to about 20 percent of the country, out-of-wedlock births are rare: around 6-8 percent. For the more dysfunctional working class, which accounts for around 30 percent of the country, the number is mind-boggling: 42-48 percent. The numbers also turn a few stereotypes on their heads: In the lower working class, for instance, the rate of church attendance has dropped at nearly double the rate as that of the supposedly secularized elite.

America’s working class, Coming Apart argues, has increasingly forsaken traditional values like marriage, religion, industriousness, and honesty — and, as a result, it is rotting from within. Happiness levels are down; participation in the labor force is down; television watching (an average of 35 hours a week) is up.

Elites, meanwhile, have quietly embraced traditional values, segregated into upper-class residential enclaves, and largely lost touch with the realities of those who haven’t. Murray sees this as ominous, particularly for public policy. “This growing isolation” of the elites, he writes, “has been accompanied by growing ignorance about the country over which they have so much power.”

While he declines to rate the rug in your living room, Murray does include a quiz to determine your upper-class street cred: “How Thick Is Your Bubble?” It’s rather entertaining, delving into your NASCAR knowledge, hard-knocks childhood stories, and more, but I actually think it could be shortened into one question: Do you become horrified when you enter a Wal-Mart, not just because of an alarming selection of T-shirts with dramatic white wolves howling in a lightning storm airbrushed on them (also a staple at truck stops), but because of America’s raging obesity problem? Done, done, and done. (If you have never entered a Wal-Mart, well then, we’re also done.)
And here we get to an odd anthropological trait of the new upper class: a rather contradictory mix of high-level snobbery and quasi-religious “nonjudgmentalism.” Your typical elite enjoys saying snooty things about cultural middle America (Obama’s infamous “clinging to guns and religion” comment, for instance, or David Carr of the New York Times spouting off about “low-sloping foreheads” in “the middle places” of America). But when it comes to judging things like, say, rampant divorce, or having children out of wedlock, or being on welfare while also having children out of wedlock (just writing that, by the way, feels terribly judgmental) the new upper-classers tend to bite their tongues.

“Nonjudgmentalism is one of the more baffling features of the new-upper-class culture,” Murray writes. “If you are of a conspiratorial cast of mind, nonjudgmentalism looks suspiciously like the new upper class keeping the good stuff to itself. The new upper class knows the secret to maximizing the chances of leading a happy life, but it refuses to let anyone else in on the secret.” Ultimately, he argues, the key to American success will be the willingness of the upper class to preach what they practice when it comes to marriage, children, religion, work, and more. But first, members of the upper class have to believe that their values actually matter — and to understand why they do.

Coming Apart is a must-read for many reasons, but its main value comes from its insistence on drilling down beyond materialism. In a book ostensibly about class, Murray spends much of his time exploring the things that really matter in life, fighting against the presumption that we’re here to merely pass our days as pleasantly as possible.

“If we ask what are the domains through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life — achieve happiness,” Murray writes, “the answer is that there are just four: Family, vocation, community, and faith.” The advancement of the welfare state, he argues, results in the slow gutting of these domains, as well as personal responsibility, which are “the institutions through which people live satisfying lives.” This cultural disintegration has had a disastrous human cost for the working class. It’s a cost that many in the new upper class don’t experience or understand.

Unfortunately, in today’s political landscape, the idea that government “help” can sap human virtue is a radical concept. “Those in the new upper class who don’t care about politics don’t mind the drift toward the European model,” Murray points out, “because paying taxes is a cheap price for a quiet conscience — much cheaper than actually having to get involved in the lives of their fellow citizens.”

Even the American political right, often caricatured as welfare-bashers, can fall into this trap: Republican front-runner and much-maligned rich guy Mitt Romney recently stepped in it by declaring he wasn’t worried about the very poor, because, well, “we have a very ample safety net.” Ah, then! Nothing to worry about. Everything’s fine!
Murray ends his book with a bit of optimism, confident that “the more we learn about how human beings work at the deepest genetic and neural levels, the more that many age-old ways of thinking about human nature will be vindicated.” A more accurate understanding of human nature, he argues, would lead to an understanding of the importance of traditional values and virtues — for everyone, not just the new upper class — and a restoration of the American experiment.

I hope he’s right, but I’m a bit skeptical. In the pages of Coming Apart, we often find Murray bending over backward to explain obvious points, either to avoid offending his more sensitive readers (or to make sure no one thinks he’s a racist). But certain facts — say, that some people are smarter than other people, or that smart people who marry each other tend to have smart children — tend to infuriate a certain sector of the population, polite explanation or no.

In another instance, Murray points out that children clearly do the best with two married, biological parents, but also acknowledges that “I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties.”

Some of this stems from good intentions: People don’t want to make struggling single moms or divorced parents feel worse than they already do. Much of this comes, as do many of the building blocks of hyper-progressive politics, from plain old wishful thinking. And some of it stems from a subtle hostility toward the idea of universal virtues existing at all.

“Discussing solutions is secondary to this book, just as understanding causes is secondary,” Murray writes. “The important thing is to look unblinkingly at the problem.” That task alone, it seems, is more than a big enough challenge for today.

Heather Wilhelm is a writer based in Chicago. http://www.heatherwilhelm.com/

Comment:   Today’s America is a place of high crime, drugs, significant beastiality and degradation woven into its day to day social habits, family disorder, sexual and moral confusion, cherished educational ignorance, politically engineered black racism, and a bunch of other  assortments of  newly cherished freedoms.  

It has managed to rid  itself of the nation’s traditional Christian teachings which had  sculpted  a civilized, productive and hard working, God-fearing community based on human decency and  pursuit  of happiness.

America is still reeling from the agonies of  its Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s when its teenie-bopper druggy revolutionaries opened their Pandora’s box to contaminate the world and thought HOPE was just another four letter word to curse with.

The boppers never grew up, but grew older and empty of matter other than selfish pleasure.    They had lousy teachers.

However, for a more accurate review of this Charles Murray mastepiece of study, please click the CSpan video below and listen to the author of    “Coming Apart”, himself  explain his thesis:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/ApartT

More Gossip about the Wealthy………I wonder Why?

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Culture     at PowerLine:

The New Class: Profiting From Decline

I haven’t yet read Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, but fellow Minnesotan Eric Falkenstein has. The self-described son of Beatnik parents, he pens not so much a review as an appreciation, and couples it with a nice skewering of the New Class:

Murray argues the well-off should set a better example by not apologizing for their squareness, but rather, by advocating their lifestyle and scorning those who fail to live up to it—we need more of what is usually called ‘blaming the victim’. Murray singles out the modern welfare state as the key instigator for our moral squalor, but I rather think our lack of faith in bourgeois values in general was the first mover here. Surely enlarging the dole increases the size of its patronage pool, but I still think policy is more symptomatic than causal. …

Scribes have always been jealous of the wealthy and powerful, thinking that an elite set of navel-gazing intellectuals such as themselves would be more efficient, as if they wouldn’t turn into illiberal tyrants in short order (see what became of young intellectuals Trotsky, Mao, Ho Chi Min, and Mugabe). They convince themselves prior attempts along these lines were co-opted, but that’s purely self-serving confabulation. Unfortunately, these same people dominate the media and academia by their very nature (wordsmiths), so it will be hard for modern mores to change because people wise enough to see it’s wrong will tend to simply succeed off the grid, without reconciling their success theoretically in a treatise.

Currently there existis a dominant coalition of the lumpen-proletariat and their patronizing, indulgent, but highly status-oriented advocates who aspire to lead the new reverse dominance hierarchy. The leaders will argue that we should expropriate if not imprison the rich and their like because 1) mass redistribution will always win a referendum and 2) such a process needs leaders, and who better than those most articulate and faithful to the hive? …

Currently, [the lower classes] simply hear about how great it is to be a victim, how noble it is to be poor, powerless, or discriminated [against]; to be wronged is the ultimate in righteousness. This simply isn’t true and the poor know it. Suffering does have meaning when it cannot be controlled, and in such times a stoic attitude is truly heroic, often taken out of a higher duty to one’s neighbors and family. But simply suffering low status because one does not have a job, stopped paying their mortgage, is in jail, or did not learn a trade, is usually the result of simple sloth and shortsightedness, and all their friends and family know it.

Alas, successful people are ashamed to assert they have better genetics, values, and habits–even though they quietly believe it to be true–and so are content to let the media and intellectuals push the delusional idea that success is like when Paris Hilton had sex on a digital camera and built a career out of it: luck, connections, and chutzpah, but no discipline, ingenuity, and perseverence. With such examples it becomes defensible to suggest most of the rich are like that–mere lucky hacks in the game of life. The flip side is that those who are unsuccessful are suffering for no fault of their own.

Thus, every day we see people championing the pathetic in journalistic essays: a scared mother of four on food stamps, or her selfless Community Activist advocate. No one champions the simple strivers, those who take care of themselves and in the process alleviate society of one more charity case, and along the way create wealth via ‘gains from trade’ implicit in market transactions. A simple prosperous mensch who does not hypocritically claim he primarily works for others is off the radar, implicitly insulting to any intellectual making considerably less than him.

Bracing stuff. Falkenstein even invokes Horatio Alger, whom I also praised in a speech last weekend–about which I intend to write when my day job allows me a few moments.

Mark Steyn’s Complaints about Mitt

 

Throughout media-America the mouths and brains are carping about the Republican’s best choice to beat Obama this coming November, Mitt Romney.   “What is Wrong with This Guy?” asks Mark Steyn in the article below.  The more likely Mitt appears to be Obamafoe, the louder the whines.I wonder which month Mark Steyn and the rest of the complainers are going to figure out that there are only four guys left in the contest.    Does one have to be born a normal American of adult age to figure out Mitt is by far the best qualified for the job of any of the five major candidates competing for it?  With the exception of Ronald Reagan, Governor Romney is by far the best Republican qualified to become the nation’s president since General Eisenhower.    Although he  entered politics in 2002, his background training and experience  was in business.  He has not been programmed yet to become   an actor in the trade, to match his success in life.  What is Wrong with This Guy? By Mark Steyn       at   the National Review OnLine   Jonah, I agree with you on the general tin-ear of Romney. He’s extremely un-nimble on the stump, which means that Republicans will be gambling that he can be sufficiently insulated and managed across the finish line without offering up any campaign-detonating hostage to fortune. But, beyond that, I’m less sanguine about the underlying worldview that “I’m not concerned about the very poor” betrays. Romney: We will hear from the Democrat party, “the plight of the poor,” and there’s no question, it’s not good being poor. . . . We have a very ample safety net and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it, but we have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor. The Pundette responds: I know Romney gives generously to charity but what a cold fish he is… A conservative candidate would talk about increasing opportunity for the very poor, about lessening the need for food stamps and housing vouchers by reducing government and invigorating the economy, rather than touting the awesomeness of our massive, dependency-inducing welfare state and suggesting it might need some beefing up. Romney’s is a benevolent patrician’s view of society: The poor are incorrigible, but let’s add a couple more groats to their food stamps and housing vouchers, and they’ll stay quiet. Aside from the fact that that kind of thinking has led the western world to near terminal insolvency, for a candidate whose platitudinous balderdash of a stump speech purports to believe in the most Americanly American America that any American has ever Americanized over, it’s as dismal a vision of permanent trans-generational poverty as any Marxist community organizer with a cozy sinecure on the Acorn board would come up with. After half-a-century of evidence, what sort of “conservative” offers the poor the Even Greater Society? I don’t know how “electable” Mitt is, but, even if he is, the greater danger, given the emptiness of his campaign to date, is that he’ll be elected with no real mandate for the course correction the Brokest Nation in History urgently needs. In last Monday’s debate, Newt said he wasn’t interested in going to Washington to “manage the decline”. Mitt’s just told us that he’s happy to “manage the decline” for the poor – but who knows who else?” Comment:   Calm down, good conservative, Mark Steyn……Mitt will do just fine winning over the people.

Cold Devestates Eastern Europe (Is Al Gore still around?)

EUROPE DEATH TOLL RISES IN BIG FREEZE

 

“London (CNN) — Sub-zero temperatures continued to keep eastern Europe in their grip Wednesday, leading to the deaths of 31 people in Ukraine so far, emergency officials there said.

For several days, unusually cold weather and snow have slammed Eastern Europe, as well as other parts of Europe and central and western Turkey.

CNN meteorologist Brandon Miller said the heart of the cold air was still centered over Eastern Europe Wednesday, including Russia, Romania, Belarus and Poland as well as Ukraine, with temperatures generally a couple of degrees lower Wednesday than the day before.

The Romanian capital, Bucharest, saw a low of -23 degrees Celsius (-9.4 degrees Fahrenheit) early Wednesday, compared with an average low of -4 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit) at this time of year.

Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, was shivering at -22 degrees Celsius (-7.6 degree Fahrenheit), with the mercury expected to drop to -31 degrees Celsius (-23.8 degree Fahrenheit) during the night.

Most of the dead in Ukraine were homeless but some people died in their homes, the country’s Emergencies Ministry said.

The death toll has risen sharply since two days ago, the ministry said. Almost 700 people have also been hospitalized with injuries related to the freeze.

In several regions of Ukraine, including Kiev, entire housing complexes have been left without electricity or heating because of power failures. Schools are likely to close Thursday as temperatures are expected to drop below -24 degrees Celsius (-11.2 degrees Fahrenheit), officials said.

The Emergencies Ministry is doing everything possible to combat the weather and has set up 1,600 heating centers across the country to assist people without power or heating, it said.

Temperatures could drop at the weekend to -30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit) in the daytime, the ministry warned.

The health ministry said most of the deaths had occurred in eastern Ukraine, in the city of Donetsk and adjacent towns and villages.

In Poland, five people died overnight, taking the total number of deaths to 15 since the icy weather rolled in Friday, the publicly-funded Polish Radio’s news website reported Wednesday. Most of those who died were homeless.

Elsewhere, the bad weather was blamed for the sinking of a cargo ship carrying scrap metal off Turkey’s Black Sea coast late Tuesday.

Divers, helicopters and coast guard ships have been scrambled in an effort to find eight missing crew members from the Cambodian-flagged ship Vera.

In Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, the municipality mobilized nearly 2,600 personnel and more than 870 vehicles to try to keep roads open, as snow reached depths of up to 38 centimeters (1.2 feet).

The unusual snowfall forced the cancellation and delay of scores of flights, as visibility was occasionally reduced to less than 50 meters (164 feet) mid-morning Wednesday.

Istanbul also suspended its high-speed sea bus service, which ferries passengers up and down the Bosphorus Strait and stretches of the Marmara Sea.

According to the Istanbul municipality’s website, at least 378 homeless citizens have been brought to shelters and hotels to escape the freezing temperatures.

One man died when he fell in a well that was covered by snow moments after having his photo taken in the record snow, the mayor’s office said.

More snow and bitter cold temperatures are expected Thursday from Edirne to Istanbul, with the heaviest snowfall expected in the Marmara region. Turkey’s cold spell is forecast to ease Friday.

The cold air also pushed westward Wednesday, with Paris dipping to -5 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit). The French capital may not top the freezing mark until the middle of next week, said Miller.

In Italy, several professional soccer matches have been canceled or postponed due to the icy weather, according to Italy’s ANSA news agency.”