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Is It Bad to Come Apart?
At one time in my life, Charles Murray’s Coming Apart influenced my thinking quite a bit. That’s not necessarily a gold-star testament to the book (though it’s pretty good) since other authors or books could have acquainted me with the same trends. But since I learned it from Murray, his perspective was disproportionately influential in my early reflections about the sociological trends that are causing so much angst in America today.
I’ve now come to think, though, that Charles Murray has one thing rather wrong. Like so many others, he’s too attached to “together” America.
Murray presents the “coming apart” of America as a kind of crisis. I think most Americans share that feeling, and our politics reflects it: we keep looking for ways to come back together as a country, and regain our sense of purpose and our thriving middle class. What if we’re getting the wrong end of the stick here? What if the goal at this juncture should be more to arrange an amicable divorce?
Americans are still powerfully under the sway of mid-century nostalgia. We feel that our parents’ or grandparents’ time should stand as a model for how the country really needs to be. Truthfully, though, that period was kind of freakish. Our population was mostly native-born, which is an aberration for us historically. Wealth gaps were historically small. The war left us feeling enormous amounts of national solidarity, such as really can’t be maintained continuously across decades of cultural and economic change.
In short, division is more the natural way of things, so the trajectory Murray sketches (from “together” to “apart”) is perhaps deceptive, since it leaves one with the impression that his pre-Great Society starting point is really the natural orientation of American life, which may not be the right way to think.
Now, the plight of Murray’s “Fishtown” is of course genuinely alarming, and I find Murray a bit annoying in that he mostly shares the culturally and metaphysically impoverished views of the elite, and so won’t sign on to the sorts of measures that (in my view) would actually give us a chance at a healthier culture. I wonder what America would look like now if we had done a better job containing the damage of the Great Society and the Sexual Revolution? We could probably argue that both in their way (but especially the former) were the evil fruit of a society that was a little too obsessed with togetherness. One reason “coming apart” is so painful now is that we have whole demographics that are really too dependent on government assistance to function as internally cohesive classes. But for that, we might be able to drift apart without so much rancor.
Even despite those challenges we should realize that, Tocquevillian egalitarianism notwithstanding, most of our history has involved quite a lot of de facto class divergence (ethnic, religious, material and moral). If we work at it, we can find ways to handle those splits without tearing society apart.
Mind you, I’m not suggesting that we should segregate America into a caste system or anything like that. I want everyone to have as much opportunity as we can give them, and I like having an America in which any man can break bread with any other, regardless of the circumstances of their births. That does seem to be in the spirit of our society. What we don’t need is to obsess endlessly about “disparate impacts,” “microaggressions,” “equality of outcome” and other such concerns that mostly just speak to the basic (and really fairly obvious) fact that certain involuntary features of your life will inevitably affect your prospects and the way people respond to you.
The goal now should be, not to come back together in a nationwide American culture, but rather to establish a more workable modus vivendi so we can live more peaceably with our (ethnic, religious, moral and material) diversity. Maybe the ’50s were a golden age, or maybe not. But we can’t have them back again, so perhaps it’s time now for someone to counter Murray with a book called Coming Apart Gracefully.
Published in General
Interesting insight into Murray’s work – I would have to say that the great thing about America pre-Great Society was that we didn’t try to force togetherness and egalitarianism, it happened organically. So while new immigrants in the 19th century may have been divided culturally and economically from mainstream America they never the less flourished because of that divide. They added something new that the rest of the society valued. In attempting to force egalitarianism and inclusion we have ended up with a great deal of neither.
Good article. Are you sure Murray would disagree with you?
I think the point of the book was that while there may have been other times when there were wealth gaps or social barriers, this is the first time the privileged class has a evolved a culture that is not only distinctly different from the rest of the nation it is overtly hostile to it. The rich may have once had a reserved pew but they were attending the same church.
New ruling class hates religion, military service, traditional sexual mores and replaces the whole of traditional Western/American/Judaeo-Christain culture with narcissistic rituals of saving the planet and condemning and severing ties to history.
Much of the bitterness in this year’s politics is a visceral response to the sustained utter contempt shown to “average” Americans by our media and institutional-ruling betters.
I think we do people a great disservice when we try to present our country as being cyclical in nature, i.e. we need to go back to the way things used to be. You are correct that the 1950s were a very unique period in a lot of ways – sociologically and economically.
Our economy especially is always evolving and changing. America dominated 1950s world manufacturing because almost every other major country had their infrastructure destroyed in WWII. That unique period is not coming back. In fact, manufacturing itself has been radically altered by technology and the resultant productivity gains.
I feel for the middle class who have been left behind by the new economy, I really do. But to tell them that it’s China’s fault or free trade’s fault or any of the other lies that Trump and his ilk spout is cruel and untrue. The nature of our economy has evolved and people need to evolve as well to succeed.
Once people come to grips with this the better off we’ll all be.
Hmm. That’s definitely worth some reflection. I agree that the unity forced by a war as epic as WW2 isn’t possible to sustain during peacetime.
But if Americans can’t even basically agree that the Constitution, with its separation and limitation of powers, is a respectable baseline of political freedom, then our current level of cultural diversity might be stretching the alliance awfully thin.
It’s an interesting question how far Murray would disagree with this… but since he’s constantly drawing contrasts from mid-century, it’s hard not to see that as the correct or natural position, with the problems of life today following largely from the rift. He doesn’t talk nearly so much about how things worked prior to mid-century, so it isn’t as clear what he would say about that.
I think there probably are respects in which today’s upper class is uniquely “bubbled”, but I also think that snooty rich people have always been inclined to sneer a little at the common man’s gauche tastes, and this hasn’t necessarily provoked torrents of populist wrath. Often the favor is returned on the other end with snickering about the fripperies and over-wrought etiquette of rich people. All pretty normal. So although Murray’s observations about the role of universities, Super Zips etc, are all interesting, my suspicion is that the loss of an overarching religious/moral culture is far more important. We can’t any longer affirm the Burkian principle that “Man is equal in the sight of God, but only so,” because… well, God is dead, right?
Murray isn’t nearly as interested as he should be in those questions. What really held America together in the period *before* the Great War? How did it work before we were all eating the same foods and listening to the same music in a nation with no Thai food?
Yes, yes, yes! I’ve never agreed with you more, Rachel. This is Bryan Caplan’s conclution from Murray’s book as well. Instead of being overly concerned that so much of the country is unlike us and trying (unsuccessfully) to make it more like us, we should concern ourselves with making “Our Beautiful Bubble,” which I believe Ricochet is an excellent example of.
Why fret about how such a large majority of people won’t be as awesome as we are when we can still make our (much smaller) awesome faction and keep it to ourselves?
I want to agree with all of this, but there are legitimate concerns. There are circumstances where a civilization having a permanent underclass is a serious threat to its long term stability. Namely, when there is a lack of employment opportunities for the underclass.
Rome faced this problem (we’re conservatives, so yes, you have to tolerate another Rome analogy) as the rich used the government to slowly take the farmlands of poor families. Without land of their own, they would normally rely on jobs working those farms…except Rome’s exceptional military success provided them with a nearly unlimited amount of slave labor.
Huge numbers of Romans were simply unemployable, and would starve and riot as a result unless Rome did something. Rome implemented one of the world’s first large scale welfare programs in the form of giving away huge quantities of grain to the poor.
This prevented instability until Rome fell on hard times and couldn’t keep up with their
ransomwelfare payments. When they couldn’t, riots where the order of the day.A permanent underclass of Americans who are slowly made unemployable by automation will be addressed by our government the same way: Even more handouts.
It will work until we can’t afford the handouts one day. Then our cities will burn.
Ideally we find a way to lift the underclass up to a point where they remain employable. Murray’s work is useful in identifying the differences that keep some poor.
Because those outside the bubble really want our money and guns.
EDIT: Frank Soto expressed the problem much better
Yes, Completely agree that this is the preferred goal in theory.
I think the critical question is whether it is possible to have a “Coming Apart” kind of society with numerous little autonomous”beautiful bubble” independant sub-cultures while simultaneously having a government that mandates that each beautiful bubble must conform to the “elite” way of doing things. The example currently stuck in my craw is that the beautiful Catholic bubble must buy contraception and fund Planned Parenthood.
It seems to me that this goal, like so many desirable things, is only possible if the size and scope of government is slashed.
By bet would be there are more guns per capita in Fishtown than Belmont.
Middle class factory jobs aren’t coming back, technology and cheap foreign labor have killed them forever here in the U.S. More robotics are taking jobs every day and replacing some of them with technician jobs that are fewer in number but better paying.
My company has more than 3000 truck drivers making upper 5 figure salaries annually. The drivers fear is the driverless vehicle experiments. They can see the handwriting on the wall. We are putting workers out of jobs with our advancing technology. It’s easy to say to those displaced “retrain to something relevant” but what is that? There is no easy answer to this.
These displaced folks are becoming a growing segment of our society. They are another group alienated from the American Dream.
Frank, I wasn’t meaning to suggest that we’d have no real problems if we could only accept that class division is normal. There are still problems, but I think we can address them more reasonably if we move past the idea that we need a very high level of uniformity in income, lifestyle etc etc in order to be a healthy nation. We don’t all have to live in suburbs, go to college, work at the same job for decades on end without moving companies or re-skilling etc etc. And yet, it’s okay if some people do that! I have no problem with suburbs. The point is to embrace more subsidiarity and get over the idea that everything needs to be done “together”.
Tim, I’m also very tired of the “negotiate to bring back jobs from China” motif. As though they’re hostages. It doesn’t work quite like that, people.
Because France never recovered.
This has been the complaint since the dawn of the industrial revolution, yet somehow people remain employed. If we want to help them get new jobs faster, we need to break the due strangleholds of education credentialing and occupational licensing.
I have a hope and belief that more and more people will understand that it’s wrong to force other people to do something they don’t want to do, even if you disagree with the choices they make otherwise.
Almost everyone already intuitively understands this, but something short circuits one’s thinking when the nebulous government that seems to allow you to just make things happen looks like a viable option.
People need to change their expectations that the other side would do the same thing to them if they were in power and everyone needs to stop doing it.
The bubble is in Belmont. The people having firearms living in Fishtown is not an improvement.
If you want to know what Murray thinks, ask him. I’m sure Peter or someone else associated with Ricochet can forward your article to him.
I see two problems with your analogy, both caused by government. First the government stole the poor’s land in a kind of crony capitalism, and the government also allowed the enslavement of many people. And then the government tries to buy off the poor instead of letting the economy work, so I guess they did three things wrong.
It seems much of the problem could have been avoided if the government avoided theft and disallowed slavery.
Exactly, my point being that the people outside of the bubble are not rich liberals, there are all kinds of people outside of the bubble (or I would argue have bubbles of their own).
Amen.
So you would have the government disallow automation?
Obviously not, but I am unclear how the analogy is bad.
They’ve got more resources to do so now than ever before. If we break the educational credentialing monopolies and occupational licensing monopolies, they’ll have more.
The only other alternative is handouts. We can clear all the obstacles out of their way, but if they won’t help themselves, there’s no helping them.
We tried segregation. It was a disaster.
Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age draws a good picture of what two separate societies look like. One gets richer, one gets poorer.
Even more recent than that were the deplorable conditions in the old Boston City Hospital and Cook County Hospital. The rich live longer and in less pain.
Or perhaps look at life during the Great Depression. Not everyone suffered, but the 30 percent who were suffering suffered greatly.
The social unrest that would come with a society in which people were trapped in Fishtown forever would soon end it anyway, but probably with communism or fascism.
Interesting story I came across in Ordeal by Fire, James McPherson’s textbook about the Civil War. While Karl Marx was writing The Communist Manifesto from his vantage point in grimy industrialized London in the 1850s, Horace Mann was trying to improve the schools in Boston and Massachusetts through his work as head of the Department of Education. Both men were looking at the same thing: terrible living conditions for the poor and children running through the streets unattended because their parents were working in the factories.
There were public schools in Massachusetts and education was compulsory. But the schools were terrible, and the wealthy people had private schools or tutors for their children (just as they also avoided public hospitals). Horace Mann visited every single city and town in Massachusetts over a three-year period to argue for the schools’ improvement.
The reason we cannot live more peaceably with our diversity is that the other side uses it as a tool to foster resentment. Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example, is a public intellectual (and I use that term loosely) who actually favors racial reparations – a concept that is corrosive, unfair, and almost certainly unworkable.
I am in favor, though, of reparations with a slight twist: net reparations. Let’s tally up the many billions of dollars of expenditures made since the Great Society onward that benefited people of color. Then, tally up the proportion of those expenditures that were funded by taxes collected from people of pallor. Call that number “X”. Then, let’s declare a reparations number that just happens to be exactly equal to X. We can call it even and move on.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if there were an actual “coming apart” along partisan lines. Imagine a United Conservative States of America and a United Progressive States of America, completely separate except that all citizenship would be dual. People could vote with their feet. I suspect that the UPSA’s population would rapidly shrink due to lower fertility rates and migration to the UCSA.
It’s fine to talk about living in a bubble as long as you and your bubble friends can peacefully co-exist with other bubbles. What we have seen is a desire by some bubble dwellers is to “pop” other bubbles. We have a growing group of bubble poppers arriving daily.
You ignored the theft and welfare. While it’s true that if a 100% replacement of human labor is ever created those people will need welfare or charity to survive, I don’t think we’re currently anywhere near the unlimited slave labor of Rome.
Are you talking about immigrants? It would have been more accurate to talk about liberals. I don’t think most immigrants have much interest in poping anyone’s bubble. If you’re bubble requires preventing others from attempting you create their own bubble, you’re no better than the bubble poppers.