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.