After establishing in Parts I and II of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 that a new upper class -- a "cognitive elite" -- was coming to dominate the culture, politics, and the economy, and a new lower class that didn't work much and didn't marry much was causing a cratering of lower-income America, Charles Murray now turns to the question: What do we do about it?
As he says:
The trends of the last half century... signify damage to the heart of American community and the ways in which the great majority of Americans pursue satisfying lives.
So, something has to change. Social democrats may call for a "distribution of wealth." Social conservatives "may see a compelling case for government policies that support marriage, religion, and traditional values." Murray, a libertarian, sees "a compelling case for returning to the founders' conception of limited government."
Central to his argument is the difference between the Italian town of Montegrano in the 1950s, where nobody did anything for anyone that wasn't family. Compare this to St. George, Utah, where, on one day in the 1950s, the town newspaper reported a blizzard of volunteer organization meetings and accomplishments -- in a town of 4,462 people.
Or take the 112 Protestant churches in Manhattan and the Bronx at the turn of the 20th century and their 38 industrial schools, 45 libraries, 44 sewing schools, 40 kindergartens, and so on. Then there were the secular fraternal organizations: Elks, Moose, Odd Fellows.
They drew their membership from across the social classes, and ensured regular, close interaction among people of different classes.
To get these organizations to work, their leaders had to "mobilize and interact with others from a wide range of backgrounds or they were not successful."
Whatabout today? Well the data seems to indicate that the new upper class is doing fine, with attendance at city council meetings and parent associations in the schools. It is pretty clear that social and civic interaction has declined drastically in the new lower class.
This is reflected in estimations of other peoples' trustworthiness: high in Belmont and declining in Fishtown. Ethnic diversity erodes social trust, even within an ethnic community.
All of which leads to deep unhappiness. Wanna be happy, in the Aristotelian sense of "lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole?" Then you need to practice the four virtues, because
Happiness = Baseline happiness + satisfying work + happy marriage + high social trust + strong religion
In other words, happiness is a combination, of success in the four "sources of deep satisfactions: family, vocation, community, and faith." They are entwined and go together. In the welfare state all these activities are separated and enfeebled and run or supervised by government.
A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life... If that same man lives under a system that says the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then the status goes away... Taking the trouble out of life strips people of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say "I made a difference."
Report of people being "very happy" has gone down a bit in Belmont, from 50 percent to 40 percent. But in Fishtown from 35 percent to 15 percent.
The new upper class practices the four virtues, but issues a "set of mushy injunctions to be nice" to the rest of society. The upper class practices the old virtues, with hard work, stable families, civic work and higher religious membership, but "we have to respect everyone else's way of doing things, regardless of gender, race, sexual preference, cultural practices, or national origin". "No derogatory labels for anyone" except for "people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites." The new upper class practices the old virtues, "but it no longer preaches them."
What of the future? Murray has "four predictions" that are really prophecies.
First, what happens in Europe will not be pretty as their welfare state implodes.
Second, science will undermine the moral underpinnings of the welfare state, because human nature cannot be changed.
Third, there will be an increasing understanding that there is a fairly simple alternative to the entire apparatus of the welfare state, a basic income proposed by Murray in his In Our Hands.
Fourth, Americans will prove their allegiance to the American project, in some kind of Great Awakening.
America's new upper class must "once again fall in love with what makes American different." It needs something more than piecemeal legislation or Supreme Court decisions. We need to talk about how America is exceptional and why it should stay exceptional.
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