Coming Apart 5: Concluding Thoughts

One of my frustrations as I read through the book was that it felt like Murray was too easily falling into the equation, Fishtown=Bad, Belmont=Fine. Why this worried me is that even if in Belmont the revolutions of the past 50 years have left the population relatively unscathed (at least compared to Fishtown), that still doesn’t mean that they are a good thing and that even if their effect cannot be measured in statistics about divorce rates, might they have deeper-seeded implications?

In the last chapter Murray addresses precisely this concern. He calls this new elite, the Belmontians, hollow. They have the husks of the old traditions, but no longer can articulate why they are valuable. He accuses Belmont of walking the walk but being afraid, lest they for a moment appear judgmental (our nation’s only remaining sin), of talking the talk. In other words, Belmont marries well and enjoys their successes, social, financial, cultural, etc., but cultural relativism proscribes the ability for them to suggest that perhaps Fisthtown could stand to learn something from the way they operate. While it is clear by all sociological measures that children raised in loving, two parent homes turn out better than children raised any other way (again, this is statistically speaking, we all know incredible single moms), preaching this message to our country would come off as cold and unfeeling. While people who work hard at a job that is meaningful to them have higher rates of happiness than someone who squeaks by paycheck to paycheck but drinks a lot of beer on the weekend, it would be wrong to point this out. Some of these people claim to be happy after all. Some probably are. But the weight of the numbers doesn’t lie.

I am an old soul and a skeptic. I have fought both of these tendencies for some time, but I remain this way. The old soul in me laments the loss of the Greek view of life (adjusted in my own case as for so many with a Christian spin). For the Greeks life was about the good life, wholly conceived. A life of responsibility, hard work, learning, virtue, etc. Today the good life is about what comes easily. Sex, drinking, a job that you endure because you must. And this ethos is not leaving many people very satisfied in the end.

I was trail running in the mountains a few weeks ago while back in Colorado with an old friend and we talked about the strategic decisions we have made in our lives to live differently from those around us. We’re not out till 3 a.m. drinking on Friday nights because we are up at 6 doing long runs. We want to accomplish a lot with our physical/athletic lives but we also want to be more concerned with others than with ourselves. And of course these things come with a cost. Having stayed out until 3 a.m. drinking I can tell you that it is a good deal more fun (and immensely easier) than waking up at 6 a.m. for a long trail run. But we make the sacrifice in the hope of something greater. And there are precious few feelings better than outkicking someone in the last quarter mile of a race or completing an ultramarathon at all. What we talked about was how we deal with all of the pain on the front end—sore quads and calves and feet and an occasional headfirst dive into tree roots—but those in our generation who live differently deal with the pain on the backend—fractured relationships, broken hearts, loneliness, lack of purpose. And this carries into more areas of our lives than the way we run. We both have made great sacrifices to have families not because it is easy or fun but because it is still better. And many other areas of life as well.

I am not commending myself as an example. At least not much. I am a bastard mostly. An endless source of confusion to myself. But the trajectory of my life is toward the Greek view. I want the good life. Not the easy life. Not the cheap life. And despite my wanderings, I will always come back to that view.

I am a skeptic about this ever getting better. In my half-hearted commendation of myself, it must be noted that I am Belmont. Not, mind you, in the sense that I am in the top 20% of income earners in this country (ha!), but certainly in my habits and tastes. I have been sheltered, mercifully, from so much pain by the way I was raised—two parents who not only love but like each other, father living out the American Dream, mother staying home with the kids and making us breakfast and dinner every day, a dinner that we ate at the table and not in front of the television—how quaint it seems even now. Murray tries not to be a skeptic. He gives a hopeful spin to this situation in the concluding chapter, hoping for a renewal of civic virtue and a reimagination of the American Dream that will sweep our country back toward our ideal of equality. I don’t mean to oversimplify Murray’s position, but the only thing I could think about as I read this section was an Onion article from a number of years ago titled “800,000 Privileged Youths Enlist to Fight in Iraq.” The article mocks many features of the affluent life, but one thing it nails is that not many Belmontians are going to be lining up anytime soon to move to Fishtown or whatever other social scheme Murray imagines would arrest this decline. And I don’t see this changing. We are a nation of individualists, and sometimes that is wonderful and sometimes it is not.

Maybe America will change. Maybe our fall will be arrested and our ship righted. Or maybe, as Morris Berman asserts, America has already failed and we are merely in the death throes of empire right now, subsisting on bread and circuses, hollow to the core. Though Murray seems unable in the end to provide a roadmap out of this crisis (if one even exists), he is useful in advancing the conversation that beyond politics, beyond race or ethnicity, America is fractured and fracturing in very real ways along class lines. For a nation that likes to pretend we do not have classes, perhaps at the very least this can serve as a wakeup call.

Coming Apart 4: The Cognitive Elite

My engagement with this book is now officially completely out of order. This will be the next to last post in this series and focus on the idea of the stratification in contemporary American society not between the rich and the poor but between what Murray calls the “cognitive elite” (the really smart people) and everyone else.

This is a rather simple story, but one that had not occurred to me before. There was an era in America not too long ago when people married someone they had grown up with or around, the high school sweetheart if you will. My own grandparents went to school together from kindergarten on and were married shortly after high school graduation. No one, apparently, told them how limiting this was and they have been forced to enjoy 55 years of marriage with one another, raise five successful children, and are tormented with a retirement of carpentry, gardening, travel, and church service. But I am not making a point about my own generation’s hesitancy to marry before 30, but rather the manner in which who it is that we marry has changed.

Most of my professors for the past two years in graduate school have been married to other professors. It is not uncommon, as Murray points out, for two high-powered lawyers to be married to one another; likewise a law professor and a business professor; a stockbroker and a famous artist, etc. Rarely do we see a CEO marry his secretary or a sociology professor marry a construction worker. In other words, the cognitive elite marry other members of the cognitive elite in a way that they did not do in previous generations. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but the practice of marrying across class divides was far more common in the past than it is today. This is exemplified by the sequestering of the cognitive elites in the SuperZips that I described in an earlier post.

And while I am far from making the claim that people in elite positions—professors, CEOs, lawyers, doctors, artists—are necessarily smarter than construction workers or janitors or TV repair men, most in reality are. The tests bear that out well enough. And even if the street sweeper is smarter than the English professor in terms of IQ, the manner in which they live out their intelligence and the ways in which they will raise their children certainly diverge.

I am really not intending to make gross generalizations here, but the fragmentation between Belmont and Fishtown has to be accounted for in some way. So consider, who is more likely to encourage their children to achieve academic excellence, teach them piano and violin, put them in tennis lessons, pay for a tutor to teach their children French or Mandarin or to help close a gap in some other subject, take them to museums and on trips to Europe, have a well-stocked library in the house: the high-IQ street sweeper or the lower-IQ English professor? There are, of course, exceptions, but the rule seems pretty undeniable. And what this leads to is further stratification and fragmentation. The street sweeper’s children will be smart still, but without the same access to opportunity they start from a disadvantage. This is not to say that they will not in the end reach a position of prominence, but the old American ideal is fading. Expect less farm kids from Iowa to in the future break through the ranks of the elite. If anyone from Iowa makes the jump it will most likely be the children of professors from Iowa City, not from the cornfields around the state. That is the new reality of this country.

And it seems to me the element in Murray’s work least likely to change. As urban, educated whites continue to delay marriage into their late 20s and early 30s they will continue to marry people in the same social strata. To use a common term, they might “slum” it from time to time but actually settling down with someone from a different station of life would be frowned upon by their friends and most would not seriously consider doing so anyway. So as lawyers continue to marry lawyers and professors wed other professors, settling down at night to read Balzac and Dostoevsky over glasses of white wine while listening to violin concertos by Bach, the fragmentation and stratification of the cognitive elite is only likely to grow. And, again, to the detriment of Fishtown.

Coming Apart 3: Religion

I briefly mentioned in the last post that religiosity in Fishtown does not fit the stereotype of the poor fundamentalist clinging to God and voting against his economic interests in blind support of the GOP. I want to focus in a bit more on this issue in this post.

Murray is not a religious man and really has no axe to grind here. But what he does acknowledge—and is hard to deny—is that religion, until very recently, served a great role in our society not merely in terms of spiritual devotion or confirmation classes for youth but also in the way it spurred on other forms of civic engagement.

Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, a book examining the collapse in meaningful interpersonal relationships in the United States notes that apart from directly religious activities (church sponsored philanthropy, membership, or volunteering), religious people are also more involved across the board outside of the church. They entertain people in their homes more often, join more service organizations, sports teams, study groups, hobby clubs. In other words, religious involvement seems to correlate quite distinctively with a broad array of social engagement that engenders social capital to adherents (of course this is speaking only in generalizations).

As to religious fundamentalism, Murray found that while more of the already religious members of Fishtown identify as fundamentalist today—there was a rise in identification as fundamentalist from 34% in the 1970s to 46% today—when accounting for the rise in secularism in Fishtown in the preceding three decades the overall population (nonreligious included) of Fishtown is only slightly more fundamentalist than it was in the past (32% as a percentage of the total in the 1970s and 34% today). The rise, then, in religious believers in Fishtown identifying as fundamentalist does not necessarily denote a rise in fundamentalism in Fishtown over the period. As more Fishtown residents dropped religion altogether the ones who were least susceptible to secularization were probably already fundamentalist and remained so. Another plausible explanation, of course, is that of the decline in mainline Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. As the mass exodus from the Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations shows, most people felt these denominations were no longer meeting the needs of average people. Surely some of the rise of fundamentalism can be attributed to this exodus.

What really struck me about Murray’s findings in this area is certainly not that our country is becoming more secularized; I have heard pastors and authors handwringing over this tragedy my whole life. Thinking about this sociologically, and not as a Christian, the striking thing is that as secularization has increased there has been nothing to step in and fill the void left by the lack of church. Questions of theology aside, religious involvement can be extremely important in terms of socialization and community building. As Putnam shows, it also leads to broad engagement in other arenas outside of the church.

And I think people are starting to notice. Today we have the vanguards of the New Atheism talking about how there need to be atheist churches for the unbelieving to get together in community over their unbelief. What is as important to the average person as peace with God is community and ritual. Whether or not this is right, I do believe it to be true on a practical level. So when we lose religion we do not simply lose the former, but we tend to lose the latter as well. And, unsurprisingly, the upper classes and elites seem to be sheltered from this loss of faith (indeed Murray points out that the wealthy are still more functionally religious than the poor in every indicator), while the brunt of the social sea change is borne by Fishtown. Given Murray’s other findings this is unsurprising, but it certainly does not bode well for the future of the new lower class. 

Coming Apart 2: SuperZips

I began this miniseries on Charles Murray’s new book a bit out of order. I jumped ahead to the sociological information that seemed closest to my own heart—the manner in which the changes in social policies and the social contract over the past 50 years have left the upper class elites relatively unaffected while tearing apart the lower classes. While this constitutes the core of Murray’s analysis of the past 50 years, he begins with a much simpler tale: the lack of interaction between classes that prevails today and allows for this fragmentation to go almost unnoticed by the elites.

Murray identifies what he calls SuperZips, which are zip codes meeting specific socioeconomic criteria concerning income and education levels (again, none of this is predicated on political affiliation). Essentially, the criteria for SuperZip status amounts to nearly 2/3 of adults in the zip code having a college education with a median income level of $141,400 in the zip. In other words, they constitute the top 5% of zip codes in America. There are 882 such zip codes in our country containing 9.1 million people. They are substantially whiter and more Asian than the rest of the country. Crime is lower, the inhabitants are more likely to be married, and unemployment is extremely low.

The amazing thing about these SuperZips is that they all seem to butt up against one another. Murray gives the example of Washington, D.C. The D.C. area is a contiguous region of SuperZips abutted by zip codes in the 90th-94^th centiles of all zip codes. I don’t have the space to lay out all of the data, but essentially, and as Murray’s chapter title asserts, what the isolation of SuperZips spells out is a new kind of segregation. Those who live in the SuperZips rarely have any interaction with those from poorer zips and even less often have significant interaction.

The problem here, as Murray is quick to note, is that the residents of the SuperZips are the power brokers in this country, the politicians, businessmen, high-power lawyers, and artists. The major decisions—politically, economically, artistically, socially—are made by a cohort of individuals who for all meaningful purposes are entirely isolated from the majority of the population. And, as I argued in the first post, it is this majority that reaps the (ill) fruit of their decisions.

We all chuckle at the politician in the $5,000 Brooks Brothers suit who claims to be a “man of the people,” but this is the reality of the current sociopolitical situation in America, on both sides of the political aisle. The social upheavals and economic policies that leave the wealthy elite relatively untouched have ravaged “Middle America” in the past 50 years in ways we are just now able to take measure of. And as the availability of blue collar jobs and the pay for such work (not to mention the social capital inherent in such positions) continues to decline the situation only appears as if it will get worse. It truly is a case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

But there is more than economics at stake here. Another part of what has been undone is any sense of social cohesion. Those who speak for the poor have no idea about the lived realities of the poor; the poor on the other hand are taught to despise the rich for their wealth (and given the growing disparity this often seems justified). America is fragmented in a very real way along class lines in nearly every significant metric. Surprisingly (this is perhaps for another post), against the stereotype of President Obama’s infamous comment about poor hillbillies clinging to “guns and religion,” the reality of religiosity in this country has been felt most prevalently in the lower classes, with people leaving organized religion in droves from Fishtown. Religiosity in Belmont holds strong.

More to come.

Coming Apart I

During one’s final semester of graduate school there is precious spare time for leisure reading. Especially when you do it look I did—three classes taken, one taught, and essentially my entire thesis written all in 16 weeks, on top, of course, of taking care of an infant for two nights a week and various other time-fillers—something I do not recommend. I did read two books extracurricularly: Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos and Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. This post concerns the latter of those two. I plan on doing a series of posts on this work (at this point I am not entirely sure how many that will entail), because I think it is extremely important to understand and the statistics it gives are something that must be grappled with moving forward.

Murray is a libertarian and a born provocateur. He co-wrote a book in the early 90s called The Bell Curve that was widely excoriated by nearly everyone (most of whom I don’t imagine made it past the introduction or, hell, the cover flap) for essentially stating the fact of intelligence differences between racial groups. Murray and co-author Richard Hernstein were not dogmatic about the nature of this difference, attributing it to both genetic and environmental factors, acknowledging that the system is unfair and privileges certain groups. In reality, they had bigger fish to fry in their work. But the damage was done. To grab a slightly more contemporary example, you might remember the furor over former Harvard president Larry Summers’ comments about the fact of male and female distribution in the hard sciences. Mr. Summers was run out of Cambridge on a rail for that nasty bit of intellectual enquiry. . Our tolerant society has little room for fact-staters; better to simply hold the right opinion and not ask questions.

Murray’s succeeding work, then, has the taint of the blatant racism unfortunate fact-telling that makes people deeply uncomfortable. Enter his new book, this time on the growing class differences in this country. Coming Apart concerns the ways in which the culture of white America has changed between 1960 and 2010. In short, the sexual revolution, the loss of civic religion, free and easy divorce, and other social upheavals that have taken place in the past 50 years have had a disproportionate effect on the lower classes.

To give an extended example, marriage now has an entirely different function amongst the lower class than it does in the upper class cohort. Murray breaks down the country into two fictitious towns, called Belmont and Fishtown. Belmont consists of the top 20% of income earners while Fishtown contains the bottom 30%. The divergence between the two in the past two generations is staggering. Divorce in Fishtown is rampant: 35% of the residents of Fishtown who have previously been married are divorced; in Belmont that number is somewhere around 5%. In 1960, when Murray started looking at data, Belmont and Fishtown were statistically similar on this score (Belmont: 2%; Fishtown: less than 5%). In Fishtown, nearly 25% of children live with a single parent; in Belmont, around 3% (again, both groups were similar just 50 years ago). Nonmarital births amongst whites are nearly entirely predicated on the educational level of the mother: more than 60% of births where the mother has less than a high school diploma are outside of wedlock; when the mother has at least a bachelor’s degree, the number is 2%. In 1960 nearly 95% of Fishtown’s children grew up with both biological parents, with the number slightly higher for Belmont. Today, 90% of Belmont children grow up in two parent households, while only 30% of Fishtown children have the same situation. Of the Belmont residents who are married, over 60% report very happy marriages; among Fishtown residents, that number plunges below 25%.

Now, obviously this is only data and does not factor in other considerations. The rise in birth control (“the pill” was first approved for use in 1960) and abortion since 1960 surely explains some of this divergence in terms of birthrates; simply put the wealthy have more access to medical technology than the poor. Our wrongheaded War on Drugs has also had a disproportionate effect on the lower classes—can you imagine someone with a Master’s degree going to jail for being found with weed on them?—and the rise of incarceration surely informs some of these gloomy numbers. But the numbers are still real, and Murray’s point in this section is still valid: “The pessimistic title of this section [It’s Even Worse Than It Looks] springs from my belief that families with children are the core around which American communities must be organized—must, because families with children have always been, and still are, the engine that makes American communities work—and from my conclusion that the family in Fishtown is approaching a point of no return” (165).

What all of this goes to show, and what I feel like I have intuited for a long time now, is that most of the social upheavals of the previous generations have benefited or at least not severely harmed the upper classes. As revolutionary as our time may seem, most of the wealthy in this country, whether liberal or conservative, are functioning with at least the framework of 1960 morality. The same simply cannot be said for the poor in this country, a full third of our nation that has been ravaged by these upheavals and made poorer as the wealthy sequester themselves into ever more homogenous communities. I will look at this idea and the burgeoning of what Murray calls SuperZips in the next post.