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A Response to Charles Murray —Majestyk
I want to start this post out by trying to establish my bona fides regarding the subject that I am about to talk about. I have seen a reasonably broad swath of socioeconomic status in my life. My parents started out as fairly typical, middle-class people. My mother’s family (from rural Green Bay, Wisconsin) were almost uniformly blue-collar (my grandfather failed to finish high school) while my father’s family (mostly college-educated) were landowners and timber barons in Idaho … but they ultimately lost it all.
Thus I certainly didn’t come from money, despite the fact that improvements in my father’s employment allowed him to purchase many nicer things for my younger sister than I had when I was her age. This is the nature of things. There was a little bit of Fishtown and a little bit of Belmont in my upbringing. But there was never a hint of the negative stereotypes of Fishtown.
I married a girl who was most certainly from Fishtown, despite my increasingly Belmont-ish young life. This was an unmitigated disaster. Ultimately, our values were simply incongruous on any of the major fronts of marriage (Emotional, Sexual and Financial) – and it caused me to have an unintentional tour of some of the more Fishtown-ish aspects of life.
In the depths of despair, financial ruin, and cuckoldry, I sued for divorce. After finally untying myself (and my children) from the millstone of Fishtown, I feel like my life has shot up from the muck of the slough of despond like a bubble released from a hot bottle of soda.
I’m certainly not rich now, but I’m much better off than I was previously and I’m on a trajectory that I couldn’t have anticipated. I feel fortunate; despite my own foolishness, my life is now on firmly on the road to Belmont.
Great, you say, but what does this all have to do with Dr. Murray?
Something that Dr. Murray said during the most recent Ricochet Podcast stuck out at me like a sore thumb: “The fact of being American [used to transcend] class.”
Did it really? When was that true? What has changed? Dr. Murray speaks of it as if at some point that fact stopped being real. But was it ever real in the first place?
My awful marriage to the Millstone of Fishtown drove home to me just how different of a world we live in from one class to another. The simple fact is: Being American no longer has the same meaning to people who live in different classes, if it ever did. One class views being American as an opportunity, and the other seems to view it as an opportunity to prey upon their fellow Americans.
I don’t share the values of those people in Fishtown – and I don’t want to have anything to do with them either. Their influence is toxic. Their values are foreign, alien, and repugnant to me.
This quotation by Dr. Murray from de Tocqueville struck me as well: “The more opulent members of America take great care not to separate themselves from the lower classes – they talk to them every day.” I find this to be highly suspect.
Did James Pierpont Morgan talk to dirt poor people on a daily basis? Did John D. Rockefeller? How about Andrew Carnegie? I doubt it. If you’re familiar with a place called “the Breakers,” you’ll realize that highly successful, even hyper-rich people like Cornelius Vanderbilt were not interested in mucking about with people from the lower classes. They wanted to get as far away from them as possible — and they built walls and barriers to keep the Fishtownians out of Belmont.
In a time more contemporary with de Tocqueville, you might argue that Thomas Jefferson spoke on a daily basis to dirt poor people, but I’m not sure that talking to people you owned really counts.
To be fair, most of the 19th century industrialists certainly did have the experience of coming from grinding poverty, but they didn’t live their lives as though they still did. Those guys demonstrate to me that Fishtown, poverty, and malaise are not merely places and class distinctions. They are attitudes, lifestyles, and outlooks.
In a country such as ours, a person has to be actively trying to sabotage themselves to end up in a position where they’re broke, helpless, unemployed and starving. Is that the fault and the moral responsibility of the people who sometimes fall into the trap of poverty? Perhaps it is. The other part of that is: Fishtown isn’t forever, except for a select few who are extraordinarily resistant to the incentives and signals that the economy is trying to transmit to them. Failure is actually a more clear economic signal than success is, and a far less pleasant one at that.
The simplest rules for having a successful life in America are the same as they ever have been: Finish school, don’t get pregnant as a teenager, work hard, save, and take care of your family.
That these simple values aren’t being successfully transmitted outside of the confines of Belmont seems not only unlikely, but impossible to me. Something else is at work here. I think it’s demonstrable that wrongheaded economic incentives delivered via government welfare programs led to entrenching a class of people who self-selected for dependency.
We’ll never be rid of Fishtown. Conservatives realize this because of our differing outlook on life, the universe, and human nature. Liberals and their policies guarantee not only that will we never be rid of Fishtown, but that it will perpetually grow on the outskirts of Belmont, feeding on the scraps and demanding an ever-growing portion of the pie.
Intermarriage and cultural exchange between Belmont and Fishtown can’t fix this problem; the cultural DNA of one is inherently rejected by the other. So why doesn’t one subsume the other? The DNA of one side of the equation is reinforced by the financial might of the other. The signaling is broken.
I don’t want to echo John Derbyshire and claim that we’re doomed, but we are certainly going to continue to do the same thing over and over again until we fix the problem of rewarding behavior that guarantees your perpetual economic ruin.
Published in General
I was going to say the same thing, but I knew that wasn’t where Majestyk was going. :) Religion has a lot to do with it, but even for the non-religious, attitudes do tend to carry over.
I would suggest that the divide exists not only in economics or morality, but in values and dreams: Values such as whether you believe in an honest day’s work vs. waiting for a govt. check; whether you are devoted to the ideals of courage, drive, reliability, and whatever else makes you a contributing member of society. And if you don’t have dreams and a plan for achieving them, then how will you ever hope to overcome whatever bad luck/bad circumstances/bad karma has dealt you.
I’ve never understood the viewpoints expressed in this thread. First of all, they completely disregard people who are accepting poverty rather than hurt other people such as their children or their disabled dependents. To say they are all immoral is wildly inaccurate. Many of the poor are in fact trapped in a box of moral constraints.
If we take away the helping programs, what is the alternative for them?
I see mass suffering. I see a lot of suicide.
I guess what conservatives predict would happen is that “these people” would take two or three minimum-wage jobs to pay their rent and personal expenses.
I’ve spent a lot of my lifetime in the company of the poor, and wow, I don’t see the people you see.
In “Coming Apart”, Murray is describing the differential change in the two economic groups over the past 50 years. He is noting that 50 years ago both groups married, went to church, worked at full time jobs, and participated in civic organizations (PTA, Elks, etc.) at nearly the same rates. However now the groups are growing apart. Belmont follows nearly the form it did in the past, Fishtown has drifted into single parenthood, unmarried couples, work as an option, absent civic participation and church attendance. He also notes that at one time people often had careers which took them from one economic group to another, and one often married the girl or guy next door, now Belmont life is more cloistered. One can be raised in a “Super Zip” go to a top university and there meet a mate from a similar background and never mix with another economic class of folks. Murray notes that in the past there were more shared experiences between the groups, where as now the cultural divide is greater. He laments that the leaders in Belmont do not preach what they practice.
I think this article from today’s American Thinker, ties into this discussion.
http://americanthinker.com/blog/2014/04/chicago_program_to_put_poor_people_into_subsidized_luxury_apartments_encounters_flak.html
“The fact of being American [used to transcend] class.” Murray is right. When you compare Americans to the rest of the world, Americans are as class free as it gets. And when you go to sports, movies, or other social events, no one can tell the rich guy from the poor guy. Chances are they’re talking to each other about last weeks game or the weather.
It’s not whether you talk with people from Fishtown, it’s how you talk to people from Fishtown. And as Murray said, you don’t talk about your wealth. You don’t show it off. It’s not polite. Especially if you came from Fishtown. But more, it’s because those Fishtown folks got you where you are today.
Fishtown people aren’t bad people. They just live in Fishtown. Please re-examine what Murray is saying.
I do agree with that depiction, actually. I’ve seen it too, that the rich–actually, not the superrich, but the nouveau riche–say one thing but do another. They also tell the lower echelons that everyone hates the poor, the minorities, the women, ad finitum. You hear that often enough and you believe it. And your belief that everyone hates you creates a society in your mind that you don’t even want to be part of.
I blame the public schools for a lot of the poverty I see. Many of today’s teachers see their students as inferior human beings, children who are ruled by their genetically endowed, unchangeable IQ.
Really? Being “trapped in a box” implies some outside force is preventing the poor from getting somewhere. As a conservative, I reject that mentality. The individuals, perhaps, trap themselves with self-‘I can’t do this talk’. Liberals give the poor verbal rope; the poor don’t have to hang themselves with it.
As for assistance programs, they create dependency and poor life habits. This is no secret. Would there be suffering? Sure, for a short time, but people adapt. We are a robust breed. Those who can’t take care of themselves will have support.
F.G. I absolutely agree with you that it is through the grace of God that we even breathe. Without God there is nothing.
I quoted my friend exactly although there is context missing. Sometimes 200 word limits are very limiting. He was, as best as I could tell, agnostic. His quote might be more rightly interpreted as a reference to bad luck and how some seem to be mired in it.
There is another expression that may also apply. “God helps those who help themselves.” Which puts us back to the attitudes of Fishtown.
I think the huge problem in our society that Dr Murray alludes to is that the working class used to have solid family values like the upper class and they no longer do. Most Belmont folks still get married and have intact families – not so in poor fishtown where shacking up and having kids out of wedlock has become the norm. The problem is that the working class is the bedrock of our society and once that bedrock crumbles – look out below!
That and the fact that millenials are pampered, lazy ne’er do wells, but that’s a subject for a different post…
If we could rebuild what has been taken apart, as a group of conservatives where should we place the point of the spear? Instead of homes for unwed mothers and adoption we created AFDC, schools which were once at least serviceable platforms for learning are, especially inner city schools, almost worthless, our culture does not promote the good, our churches have become more interested in the political ills and less interested in warning us about our sins and our need for personal moral direction. From our families to the government we have lacked an understanding of how to model a moral approach to life. However, there is a growth in home schooling, a growth in various Evangelical churches, also folks watch the history channel and read and make popular oodles of history books like O’Reilly’s and Rush’s, so there are many folks who are interested in a return to balance of rights and responsibilities. I am tempted to think that schools are the most important part, however with a government so large that it corrupts everything perhaps the most critical thing is to reduce the size of the government.
Jim Makes my point much better than I do. Well said!
I think Yeah… OK hit on something earlier – he says that Murray chose the seemingly arbitrary date of 1963 as his baseline for when things began to fall apart. There’s nothing random or arbitrary about that date at all.
This argument is really a chicken/egg thing. Some people have (I think) rightly pointed out that what we’re seeing is that the lower classes aren’t maintaining the same values that they used to. I might argue that they were more or less required to do so in 1963. What happened after that?
In 1964 Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Great Society reforms into law.
Whatever decay already existed (I would argue there was plenty) only accelerated once the requirement that people bear economic responsibility for their decisions was alleviated.
This development was the ur-chicken that laid this egg.
50 years ago both Fish Town and Belmont were more mixed. A factory worker was much more likely to be neighbors with an attorney. There wasn’t as much income discrepancy between college educated and people with blue collar jobs. Now college educated people or book learned people as some like to call them earn much more than those with blue collar jobs. There’s not just an income and morals gap between Fish Town and Belmont there’s now a huge education gap between the two. Is one of the problems with Fish Town the brain drain that’s been going on in their community for the last 50 years?
I kindof agree with Majestyk. I’ve felt this way for a long time; we are going through another period of extreme lower-class moral dysfunction. There have been periods when the lower class in America was morally healthy enough that friendship between classes was possible, but I don’t think that is the case today (though there are the occasional oddball exceptions).
I agree with many of your conclusions in the original post. I just had to insert my 2 cents that I think we were once “together”. I think the end of the draft also hastened the coming apart. I think the 1% at each end of the curve never interact with the rest of society.
I think Jim Beck gave a good snapshot of the book. I also think Murray’s statistics only apply to non-hispanic whites.
I assert that I believe there was once a time when we transcended class. From my distorted recollection of the 50s and 60s I was in the lower class. What I consider evidence of this togetherness happened at church and work. When I reached my peak and through today my interactions with strangers of other income/wealth usually happen at church or at their place of employment.
Lot less people working or going to church these days.
You say “Brain Drain” and I say “social mobility.”
It’s no surprise to me that people who are able to propel themselves out of Fishtown have very little interest in hanging around – it’s depressing.
It’s interesting in that this phenomenon is a feature of the American system where there are no built-in class barriers, title of nobility or other forces which would cause an otherwise productive person to have to drag his friends and neighbors up with him in order to elevate his social standing.
I say it’s a feature – it clearly is in my mind – but in some sense it is a tragedy for the Fishtownians, who unwittingly see their social capital fleeing.
Social capital, just like financial capital is free to vote with its feet in our society.
I agree there’s a huge education gap between the two. And the gap seems to persist even when the book-learned people earn less than those with blue-collar jobs. A plumber or garbageman can easily make more than an adjunct professor.
Credentialism and awful public schools are among the usual suspects, I’m sure.
This has been a terrific thread – so many good points. A couple of observations: schools – for most people, the quality of the school district is related to where you live. I’d argue that a lot of the economic/racial/cultural segregation we’re witnessing( that’s different from those 1963 days) is due to this. Those with the means will move to those ‘Belmont’ schools. Why fight the Fish Town school district, be called a racist (and open yourself up to litigation/career suicide as a business owner/professional or manager). Organized religion – it only makes sense that those upscale school districts are served by upscale churches, that segregation deepens & continues. Culture: intact families, working adults, home owners (‘keeping up with the Jones’ fosters aspiration) – so many small positive role models & examples that most of us don’t even consider day in and day out. Like I stated earlier, I’ve been working in the Section 8 Apartment building for the past couple weeks and that culture, those examples: daily/constant litter, cigarette & pot smoking, people not dressing for success in any way – I know I’m not moving to Fish Town.
This is the essence of what’s wrong. If the negative consequences for your choices are nil, or blunted in some way (because someone else picks up the tab for your rent/food after getting fired for showing up drunk on the job 8 too many times), then there’s a screamingly good chance that you’ll engage in the same behavior again.
This is a great description of what the net effects have been. The only difference is that “Fishtown” in its many forms is not bordered by federally-described lines of demarcation. It’s a bit of an untold story, but if you want to see the real effects of gov’t “help”, take a walk on the rez.
I grew up in Fishttown, in one of those families where you usually customarily say, “we were poor, but didn’t see ourselves that way.” Actually we did, and commented about money regularly, but so did everyone we knew. But the big important distinction was from the other poor people who spent the paycheck on booze and ran around at night neglecting their kids. And we associated with our kind of people and stayed out of the bars, and talked sotto voce about the difference. I think we were reminding ourselves what was important. We didn’t have a name for the other kind and I never heard a noun for them, but they were the people Who Do This or That. It was all important that we stay the kind we were. As for the others, when the consequences came home, one or two might give up their ways and join us, but either way we felt reassured. We weren’t superior, but our way of life was. We stayed with those people. The other kind were bad luck. Call it primitive, but it’s how we felt and how we lived, and it paid off.
I thought of this thread when I saw this, too- and thought about the great ‘projects’ experiments (Watts, etc.)
Along with a major cause being too many undeserved handout programs is the fact that the majority of our real poor are addicts and the mentally ill. I read this fun Reddit blog where foreigners were saying how they can tell somebody is American and several commented about how many very poor people they saw when visiting. Obviously these were the street people. In a ‘free’ country it is a hard question to know what to do with them (lock them up? shoo them away? do their ‘rights’ exceed everyone else’s not to be harassed?)
I agree with everyone else that it’s a social mess out there.
But I disagree that the problems are inside the people who are behaving badly. I don’t think human beings have changed all that much over the course of time.
The situation could be greatly improved with the right public policies.
My mom grew up in rural Arkansas in the 40’s. Rural meaning pretty much subsistence during and after the depression. Her family was one of the few that insisted their kids go to school and finish. It was more usual that kids didn’t, dropped out, married and there was a high percentage of worthlessness. This area is still the same- except not nearly as bad.
All this to say this is not a new thing and we know what it takes to get out of it.This topic is the American story and what we are fighting to keep. Personal responsibility, equal opportunity with an added dose of help for those who really need it.
As an aside the Right has forgotten the huge change of the political South. It was always totally for Democrats and while it’s a fight, is considered largely Republican (or Conservative), now.
After posting on The Mugwumps article ‘Fishtown on the Rio Grande’ it occurred to me that, once again, we are starting to approach issues from some of (wrong) premises of the Left. Group Rights lend themselves to ‘saving the world’ in huge swoops, appealing to ‘society’ and ‘rich people’, etc. when part of individual rights and responsibilities (and Christianity) lends itself more to…
What I see is that over time, generally starting with the ‘Great Society’ programs, we have diverged into two towns, Fishtown and Belmont. Whereas before we were in Middletown that had a working class side and a white collar side. Fishtown has slowly become a dysfunctional trap, a negative feedback loop where welfare checks and food stamps are a drug. Belmont has positive feedback loop where people are more and more educated, almost to a fault. But Belmont needs the working class folks of Middletown, and vise versa, but all they can find is Fishtown dystopians. Middletown can’t make a comeback because our liberal know-it-alls keep reinforcing bad behavior and kicking culture, social norms and religion in the crotch.
Majestyk, wonderful article…I also like Murray; sometimes, no matter how hard they try, people just can’t get to “escape velocity”. My 5 years of “9-to-5” – plus 3 years of OJT were blissful (and made having to come back into the benefits system – although on my own record this time – even harder).
I grew up somewhere *between* Fishtown and Belmont, by the way, in Middletown (h/t JimGoneWild).