American Society Coming Apart
– By Howard Sierer –
Charles Murray’s widely-acclaimed book “Coming Apart” describes how new American upper and lower classes emerged from 1960 to 2010 with dramatically changed behaviors and values. As a result, he argues that American culture is unraveling.
Murray specifically studied the “state of white America” to show that what has happened to our society is not dependent on race or ethnicity. He focuses on what has happened, not why.
While we’ve always had our Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, Murray describes a “new upper class,” one that began to emerge in the 1960s. As technology and medical advances started to change American lives – think computers, fax machines and the “pill” – society was transformed by the increasing market value of brains, what sociologists call “cognitive ability.”
In the 1950s, Harvard and Yale students had IQ profiles that were similar to most universities around the country. Thirty years later, the nation’s elite universities were repositories of the nation’s best and brightest with their professors forming a new academic elite.
Literature, movies and the media spawned their own elites, addressing more controversial topics: “Ozzie and Harriet” gave way to the Emmy-award winning television series “thirtysomething.”
As these phenomena blossomed, increasing numbers of these new elites began to flock together in neighborhoods filled with “their kind of people.” They became physically and socially isolated from our vast middle and lower classes.
In parallel, a new white lower class emerged. Murray observes that four virtues – industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion – that had distinguished American society from its beginnings in the 1700s began to decline in the 1960s.
The country’s lowest-paid workers in the 1950s lived in neighborhoods that valued these virtues. Anyone out of work in the 1950s, unless he was disabled in some way, was looked down upon by his neighbors. Many of these neighborhoods were self-regulating: if a thief was identified, he would be called to account by neighborhood gangs and restitution exacted.
Relatively few members of the 1950s lower class were divorced and surveys showed a high percentage of couples who were “very happy.” Most members of the lower class considered themselves religious. From a purely secular perspective, this characteristic played an important social role in their communities.
Murray notes that “various studies have found that active involvement in church service results a kind of training ground for important civic skills, a major contributor to civic involvement and what sociologists call “social capital.”
Robert Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone” observed: “Religious worshippers and people who say religion is very important to them are much more likely than other persons to visit friends, to entertain at home, to attend club meetings, and to belong to sports groups, professional and academic societies, school and service groups, youth groups, service clubs, etc.”
Murray documents in detail the measurable decline of the four virtues in the white lower class starting in the 1970s.
In the resulting decline of neighborhood cohesiveness, the stigma of being out of work disappeared and abuse of disability benefits skyrocketed despite the fewer number of more dangerous industrial jobs.
Crime took off in the 1970s as neighborliness declined along with trust in one’s community to help in time of need.
The percentage of white lower class “very happy” marriages dropped dramatically and divorce took off along with its social acceptability. Despite the pill’s wide availability, non-marital births jumped up, most noticeably for the least educated.
Murray cites the extensive body of research on family structure’s impact on children. Outcomes are best for children living with two, married biological parents. Divorced parents are well behind while never-married women raising children have the worst outcomes.
He is unequivocal: “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 the major newspapers, and politicians of both major parties.”
After reading Murray’s book, I trace the rise of many of the ills plaguing the white lower class to the 1960s “Great Society” social experiment. At its core, the Great Society is based on the premise that throwing money at the disadvantaged lower class will overcome its problems.
The new upper class, out of touch with the lower class and the underlying causes of its dysfunction, believed and still believes that government programs can somehow replace industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion in people’s lives.
Experimenting with one new social theory after another over the last 50+ years, the new upper-class elite has actively undermined these social virtues. Ever-increasing welfare benefits have suppressed motivation to work. Increasing tolerance of crime – not holding individuals responsible but blaming societal ills – has eaten away at community honesty. Marriage is denigrated, cohabitation glamorized and sexual liberation is celebrated. Disdain for religion and the religious has flourished.
Interestingly, Murray shows that the new upper class – the intellectual source of these social experiments and the government programs that implement them – continues to embrace these four virtues. They often work far more than 40 hours per week; their honesty has not deteriorated measurably; they marry and stay married; and they claim measures of religiosity that have changed little over the decades.
These upper-class elites who control government, education, business and popular culture could do a lot more to encourage the core American values that they themselves continue to live by.
Formulating government programs that encourage rather than diminish Murray’s four virtues is our best hope to avoid “coming apart.” As James Madison wrote: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”
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