From the bestselling author of "The Bell Curve" comes a harrowing portrait of the haves and have nots in white America. A startling long-lens view, "Coming Apart" shows how class--not race or ethnicity--is putting the great tensions on the seams of American society.
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From the bestselling author of "The Bell Curve" comes a harrowing portrait of the haves and have nots in white America. A startling long-lens view, "Coming Apart" shows how class--not race or ethnicity--is putting the great tensions on the seams of American society.
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Charles Murray's recent book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 -- 2010" (2012) describes what he terms in a Wall Street Journal essay, "The New American Divide". The divide is an America based upon class. It has, for Murray, resulted in a nation which has forgotten itself. Murray believes that the United States was founded on a distinctive set of values, which he calls the "American project". He describes the project and the "exceptionalism" it created early in the book as follows:
"The American project... consists of the continuing effort, begun with the founding, to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals and families to live their lives as they see fit, coming together voluntarily to solve their joint problems. The polity based on that idea led to a civic culture that was seen as exceptional by all the world. That culture was so widely shared among Americans that it amounted to a civil religion. To be an American was to be different from other nationalities, in ways that Americans treasured. That culture is unravelling."
Murray is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and an idiosyncratic and provocative writer who describes himself as a libertarian. The divide he sees is between a new American upper class of highly educated, intelligent, and influential individuals in the fields of law, science, medicine, executives, and shapers of opinion on the one hand and almost everyone else on the other hand. The dividing line for creation of class is, he argues, the early 1960s, or more precisely the date of the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22,1963. The assassination led to the "Great Society", the expansion of the role of government, and the transformation of American life in ways that, for Murray, were not always for the better.
With the transformation, Murray argues, the United States began to find a way to utilize its intellectual talent and to put smart people in high positions. But the elite members of the society have turned in upon themselves. They tend to socialize and work in a closed group, live in the same expensive communities, and separate themselves from everyone else. They have little understanding of or personal relationships with the majority of their fellow citizens.
Murray contrasts what he argues is an American elite with the people at the opposite end of the culture who have, at best, a high school education. The people in this group, high school graduates or below, were once a large majority but their numbers have dwindled. Murray claims that beyond the elite,most Americans suffer from a loss of the cardinal American virtues which he says are industriousness, marriage, religiosity, and honesty. His presentation makes great use of statistics together with argument and interpretation.
Murray takes two ideal types: a community called Belmont, consisting of the top twenty percent of Americans in terms of education and work (in the high prestige professions) an a community called Fishtown, consisting of people with a high school education or less who work in service jobs, either blue or white collar. While Belmont has retained a substantial degree of consistency from 1960 to the present in terms of the four American virtues, Fishtown has deteriorated markedly. The deterioration results in part from the breakdown of families, single parent households, lack of stable remunerative employment for the men, reduced community spirit and more. The factors Murray identifies apply outside of Fishtown to a greater or lesser degree, creating a continuuum between that community and the more elite community of Belmont. The deterioration of community, for Murray, is creating a divided, dispirited United States with an increasing number of lonely, unhappy, isolated people.
Murray's account draws on extensive statistical analysis and on writers ranging from Aristotle to de Tocqueville to Robert Putnam's book, "Bowling Alone". To some extent, the book also asks its readers, who are presumed to be from the highly educated class, to examine their own experiences. The limitation of the subtitle of the book to "white" Americans remains confusing. Murray claims that the limitation is intended to show that the determinative divisions in the United States are class rather than race based. In any event, in a late chapter of the book, Murray expands the statistical base of his book to cover Americans regardless of race. This broadening does not change Murray's statistics significantly or his conclusions.
Although Murray claims he is primarily interested in describing a serious problem rather than proposing a solution, in the final section of the book he offers some possibilities for change. He points out that his description of the problem could (and has) been accepted by people at different points of the political spectrum who would each see the possible solutions differently. Murray distinguishes between the possible approaches of social democrats, social conservatives, and libertarians. Murray's own brief comments are libertarian with what seems to me a substantial amount of social conservatism. Broadly speaking Murray argues that since the 1960's the growth of the welfare state has deprived individuals of the opportunity to make choices with their lives and to reap the rewards of their decisions. He is critical of the European welfare states and points to their current economic woes. For Murray, the solution to the growing problems of class and deterioration of values will require many decisions by individual people to reverse a trend, particularly among the educated class, rather than a large-scale government program.
Murray has written a lively, thoughtful, and troubling book. I found it valuable to engage with the problem he identifies. This book is highly worth reading even for those readers who do not share Murray's libertarian approach.
Robin Friedman
Carolyn P
Jun 7, 2012
Today's World
This book tells about the real world. What is happening in our neighborhoods, especially the trophy generation, tells how families are facing challenges never before faced.
