Coming Apart

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.