Every now and then (and it is a rare event) a book is
published which contains such insight and is of such importance that it is must
reading for anyone concerned with the Big Question “How Should Man Organize
Society?” I am most pleased to announce
that 2012 did see such a book. Thus,
you, The Reader, should read it.
The Book: Coming
Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, by Charles Murray
This book is Murray’s magnum opus. One can view all of Murray’s career as
leading straight to this book. From Losing
Ground to In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government to the
much-maligned The Bell Curve to Human Accomplishment to Real Education
there is a trajectory leading here.
The thesis: the American
Experiment is blowing apart as the society divides into two distinct classes which
not only have very little in common, but also have very little interaction with
each other. There is one class which consists
of everyone who would read this blog or Murray’s book. They are professionals, attended good colleges,
and live in relatively wealthy neighborhoods.
They buy similar products, shop at similar stores, and eat at similar restaurants. Then there is that Other America. Nobody from that other America will read this
book. They did not attend college, they
eat at completely different restaurants, and they live in completely different neighborhoods.
The differences between these two groups shows up starkly in
what Murray identifies as the Founding Virtues, the things that made America
what it has been. The four founding virtues: Industriousness, Honesty, Marriage, and
Religiosity. On all four virtues there
is a sharp difference between the two segments of American society. On one side—the side on which the readers of
this blog fall—there are still high levels of a work ethic, honesty, marriage
rates and religious belief. In the Other
America, all four things have disintegrated.
Murray’s book thus raises the troubling question: Can the American Experiment survive. Not will it survive, but can it
survive?
This is, in other words, a book which will make you think
long and hard about the nature of society.
It may be too mired in contemporary events to become Great Book, but it
wrestles with the issues raised in the Great Books in a very compelling
manner. I am of mixed mind about the
conclusion of this analysis—and so, incidentally, is Murray. It’s hard to see how one could not be of
mixed mind after reading the evidence Murray marshals.
The book also has one terribly amusing side if you are amused
by academic political posturing. The Left,
in particular the Marxist Left, has long been obsessed with the existence of Class
Division in society. And here we have the
libertarian Murray, someone with solid conservative credentials, arguing that
the class divide in America is important and tearing society apart. So, will the Academic Left rush to embrace
this book? If you laughed at that question,
then you understand academic politics.
Murray is anathema in academic circles. Just drop his name at a faculty cocktail
party if you want to be left alone. The
Left hated Losing Ground because it dared suggest that maybe the
Welfare State was hurting the poor.
The argument wasn’t that we shouldn’t care about the poor and so we shouldn’t
have welfare (which is what liberals know conservatives really believe
in the darkest recesses of their dark hearts).
The argument was that because we care about the poor, we really shouldn’t
put in place programs which make them worse off. So, Murray, ever the imp in policy
discussions, started off as a villain.
Then along came The Bell Curve, easily the most reviled and least
read book which has been published in the last 30 years. The book argued that the American Experiment
was being torn apart by intellectual segregation. Smart people were marrying other smart people and moving to places
where only other smart people lived and not interacting with not-so-smart people. There is, in other words a class system developing
in America. How many factory workers or
sales clerks or minimum wage workers did you have over at your last backyard
barbecue? (College students working at
such a job do not count.) Indeed, how many
non-professional class people do you even know?
And if you know any, how many of them do you only know because you attend
an evangelical church? (The evangelical churches
are the last remaining bastion of interactions between people in different social
classes—and even they may be at the outset of the same segregation which has happened
in the rest of society.) The Bell
Curve documents all this, all things which the Academic Left has been arguing
for years, but since they knew Murray was a Conservative and (thus) Evil and they
know that all conservatives are racists (by definition), the “debate” about The
Bell Curve centered entirely on the existence of the two chapters (in a
very long book) discussing the implications of the overall argument to the
matter of race. (The chapters on race
were, by the way, far and away the least interesting chapters in the whole
book.) It was readily obvious that
nobody vilifying Murray (and, technically his co-author Herrnstein) had actually
read the book, let alone the chapters being attacked. But, why let evidence get in the way of a chance
to call a conservative a racist even if the conservative is actually arguing exactly
what you have been arguing for years? (Well,
to be charitable (always a good thing), the Academic Left does not like the idea
that there may be a genetic component to intelligence—and since Murray and Herrnstein
note that almost every researcher on intelligence thinks that genetics plays at
least some role in determining intelligence, there is an element of the argument
which runs against the pieties of the Left.
Also, the argument implicitly lumps university faculty into the same
group as Wall Street bankers, and that is particularly annoying to academics.) The furor over The Bell Curve explains
the oddity of the subtitle of Murray’s new book, by the way. By limiting the book to a study of “White
America,” and documenting the collapse of the founding virtues within “White
America,” it is hard to spin this as a racist tract. (Of course, I am sure that some enterprising academic
has already figure out a way to call the book “racist.” After all, repeat after me: Conservatives are
Inherently Racists.)
The book has already had one conversational benefit. Not too long ago, I was talking with one of
my colleagues who argued that conservatives simply don’t care about or even
acknowledge class. So, I said, “What
about Charles Murray’s most recent book?”
He looked it up and later sheepishly admitted later that well maybe some
conservatives do care about class. Academics
are funny.
But, all the academic politics are an aside. If you are going to read one contemporary work
of social science this year, this is the one to read. And you should read at least one contemporary
work of social science this year.
