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.