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.