Abstract
To dismiss Coming Apart, Murray’s latest misadventure in social science and humanism, as bogus scholarship and pernicious ideology, misses its importance. Coming Apart expresses common beliefs about the causes and the solutions of America’s social problems. It is like a tedious Grade B movie with a message of sin and flawed character written by the American people but directed by Charles Murray. The resolution of the nation’s problems depends on large changes in the values of the American people.
Murray writes that [Coming Apart] is about an evolution in American society that has taken place since November 21, 1963, leading to the formation of classes that are different in kind and in their degree of separation from anything that the nation has ever known. [It] will argue that the divergence into these separate classes, if it continues, will end what has made America America. (p. 11)
The cause of Murray’s apocalyptic vision is moral decline, the rejection of the putative founding virtues of the United States—marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity—by the nation’s lower classes, about 30% of the population. Murray argues that these virtues are embedded in the higher classes, largely the upper middle class that comprise about 20% of the population and account for their personal, social, and economic success. The higher and lower classes are becoming increasingly isolated from each other depriving the sinful of the corrective mentorship of the virtuous.
To illuminate the situation, Murray constructs two communities, Belmont and Fishtown. These Weberian ideals depict polar opposites. Belmont is successful in all regards and is populated by people who work hard, worship sincerely, are devoted spouses and parents, and are forthright, honest, and true. Belmont honors John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. To the detriment of all, Fishtown residents have children outside of marriage, avoid work, overindulge in drink and the products of forbidden plants, and in other ways discredit themselves as parents, spouses, citizens, and human beings; they are what God had in mind when she created eternal damnation and inspired Dante to write about the tortures of Hell. The subject matter of Fishtown and Belmont is character and just desserts: virtue rewarded, vice punished.
Having taken a cold bath in the winter of his many critics for suggesting in The Bell Curve that Blacks are a genetically inferior subspecies of homo sapiens, Murray only discusses Whites in Coming Apart. Still, his appetite for genetics, evolutionary psychology, and Darwinian breeding emerge in discussing the inferior choices of lower class Americans. There are genetic reasons, rooted in the mechanisms of human evolution, why little boys who grow up in neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach adolescence not socialized to the norms of behaviors that they will need to stay out of prison and to hold jobs. (p. 298)
For Murray, IQ is still determinative of social outcomes and apparently inherited. The higher classes breed well and protect their superior genes; the lower classes do not. But more than a direct reliance on breeding as an explanation for social outcomes, Murray seems more motivated to sidestep the determinative influence of social structures—neglectful families, poor education, deficient communities, the absence of jobs, and poverty itself—in explaining social outcomes. He far prefers the moral argument; the lower classes, above all else, lacks good character, and thus their depravity leads to their many problems and the earned punishments of poverty.
Murray’s solution to lower class depravity follows from his assumption of flawed character and his youthful years in the Peace Corps. The deserving classes should follow his lead and mount missions to the sinful Fishtowns, relocating there in the spirit of leadership by example to convert the improvident to the true path of American salvation by leading lives of blameless virtue. The very limited successes, if any, of the Peace Corps and the imperialist harms of evangelicals deeply, deeply concerned with human salvation do not diminish his ardor for spreading the American gospel of the founding virtues.
Coming Apart is the final expression of thoughts that were planted by my experiences in the villages of northeast Thailand in the 1960s. They germinated through the 1970s as I evaluated American social programs to help the disadvantaged. Then in 1980, events in my personal life led me to reflect on how little success and money have to do with happiness. (p. 307) …[M]y family has lived for more than twenty years in a blue-collar and agricultural region of Maryland [Burkittsville] where all the problems of Fishtown have been visibly increasing . . .. But there remains a core of civic virtue and involvement that could make headway against those problems if people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need—not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold. (p. 304)
True to his epiphany, Coming Apart offers no monetary plan to distribute happiness to America’s lower classes but only the successes of the deserving who would live as lights unto Israel among the undeserving in pursuit of a “Fourth Great Awakening.” Indeed, Murrary continues to argue that public welfare reinforces the very problems it was intended to resolve. Instead of the moral hazards of pubic welfare, he wishes to carry “the American project,” his term, to the American people. He derives from Jefferson the American project as a state “that shall restrain men from injuring one another [and] shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement” (Murray quoting Jefferson on p. 279). The sentiment is particularly rich coming from a slave owner whose long liaison with Sally Hemmings, a portion of his household property, probably anchored him emotionally but did not move him to recant slavery nor publicly acknowledge its evils and his children with Ms Hemmings.
Yet, the hypocrisy is also Murray’s, leading him to ignore considerations that cut against his argument and notably the possibility that America’s upper crusties are about as morally tainted as America’s burnt crusties. To begin with, Fishtown and Belmont do not exist. They are concoctions that violate Weber’s intent to act as stereotypes more than functional generalizations. Murray nurtures prejudicial discrimination by cramping human experience into narrow caricatures.
Murray conveniently ignores the greed and self-importance of the wealthy and the harms of white-collar crime, notably the complicity of the higher classes in the long and deep recession that began in 2008. It is worth considering that the physical violence of the poor criminal causes far less harm than the sociopathic behavior of the wealthy, notably the Skrushys (HealthSouth), the Madoffs (Mr. Ponzi’s avatar), and the Lays (Enron), as well as the variety of commercial debacles perpetrated routinely by weakly regulated American business—AIG, Lehman Brothers, Massey Energy Company, and the pharmaceuticals in general are only a few instances among many. Public regulation of business to protect the public was necessitated by the flagrant, common, and tragic crimes of business. The notion is laughable that left on its own without public oversight and regulation the commercial sector would somehow revert to decency out of conscience and good citizenship. Open markets would more likely precipitate the brutal state of nature captured in Lord of the Flies.
As a group, the upper classes and the wealthy hardly constitute a Camelot of family sanctity and loyalty. The illicit drug trade flourishes because wealthier Americans can afford to fund their appetite for cocaine, marijuana, and the opiates. As with illicit drugs, wealthier Americans may finance much of human trafficking in labor, sex, and adult fiction. The great profit in these enterprises cannot come from people without financial resources. The poor cannot afford expensive drug habits or keep paramours or purchase the gentle stimulations of well-educated escorts. Money may tempt the virtuous to stray but the enticement is offered by those with bait. Then again, perhaps the drug trade and human trafficking is largely funded by the 50% of Americans in the middle, who escape Murray’s consideration but Murray is not about to demonize 80% of the nation. Or perhaps, immorality is a rare instance of American equality; however, the fact of universal corruption would destroy Murray’s argument. There is no innocence in this game and the sermonizing prig is hardly a model of rectitude.
Business itself, the most fertile province in the nation of the successful, is largely conducted with a fiduciary responsibility for profit rather than motivated by a philanthropic regard for social contribution. Perhaps, the Squire of Burkittsville might start the Fourth Great Awakening in the boardrooms of American corporations. He might also acknowledge the universality of sin and its disproportionate harm as it taints the powerful and the influential.
Cutting against Murray’s boney blue finger of Puritanism (paraphrasing Robertson Davies), American conditions—unemployment due to the absence of jobs, underemployment and low wages, poverty, inadequate families and communities, and so forth—may explain the problems of poorer Americans better than promiscuity, intemperance, laziness, and base cunning. As one illustration, unmarried and noncohabitating women may have children for a variety of reasons that have little to do with impaired virtue: motherhood may be more salient for them than alternative roles that are obviated by structural deprivations of education, family, community, and so forth.
How in fact are people terribly frustrated by poverty and unemployment expected to get on with life and make a living? Job training is hardly a solution when there are no jobs and when the nation staunchly refuses to sustain either a large stimulus package to create them in the private sector or the role of the federal government as employer of last resort? Wealthier people head for their doctors’ prescription pads to handle their anxieties and depressions; poorer people smoke a bit of weed and drink cheap patriotic beverages. In fact, the reliance of the law abiding, notably including the residents of Belmont, on prescribed mood changing drugs dwarfs the illicit drug trade although both frequently have the same effects of lowering work productivity, deferring adult maturity, and posing risks to pedestrians, marriage, and the conduct of civic life. Indeed, the immense amount of the nation’s annual income allocated to the flight from American reality should have given Murray some pause before creating spectral proofs of moral superiority and indulging in the sentimental chauvinism of founding virtues.
A basic flaw in Murray’s interpretive logic overshadows Coming Apart’s factual errors and omissions. Even if Murray’s data were both complete and accurate, they provide not a smidgeon of reason to assume their cause. The identification of cause requires experimental designs; correlation does not imply cause. Sensitive to this dictum, Murray writes in his introduction that he focuses “on what happened, not why” (p. 12). But on the very next page he is looking “unblinkingly at the nature of the problem” (p. 13), pulling another Jefferson that continues throughout the remainder of the book.
Murray’s reliance on failed character to explain America’s social problems is only ideological, counting on national pride and ignorance to paper over problems of historical accuracy and relevance. The founding virtues may not have been as prevalent nor as important as enacted greed and depravity (e.g., slavery, discrimination, imperialism, aggression, and frank theft), a virgin continent of vast natural resources, large immigration of the gifted and ambitious, and the absence of a feudal underclass in explaining American wealth and prosperity. As an alternative, to the extent that Marray’s founding virtues exist, they may more the product of America’s good fortune than its cause. Still and all, both good fortune and the founding virtues may in the manner of the dispute over Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism be products of other more powerful factors. Yet, Murray continues the brutal and vicious tradition of justifying the nation’s wealth and its economic inequalities in terms of virtue and sin, adding a bit of genetic determination to further degrade those in need and cheapen their claims on relief.
Lamentably, Americans seem to accept existing class divides and the huge and growing disparities of economic stratification. The largest political movements over the past few decades have pulled the nation to the right; there have been few if any angry protests on the left; the nation remains quiescent if not actually sedated in the face of the largest economic peril it has faced in eight decades. Thus, rather than a statement of social conditions and proof of their cause, Coming Apart expresses the national mood and its sense of the socially and economically appropriate.
More to the current condition of social work: its practitioners, its students and not least of all its academics have psychologized social problems and devised interventions that largely mirror Murray’s assumptions of individual responsibility. Yet, rather than Murray’s frank moralizing, social work disguises sin as psychological pathology, as though it were a medical condition amenable to parsimonious intervention—a bit of time, a few dollars, and voila, social adjustment that is also empowering, liberating and a tribute to American goodness. Yet, there is hardly any credible evidence that psychological interventions are effective and even less evidence of compassion or generosity in the insufficient resources that the nation allocates for social workers’ care of people who cannot provide for themselves (e.g., foster children and the totally and permanently disabled). Social work remains more a preachy ceremony of American values—notably a distorted and unreasonable sense of individuality and self-reliance—than a substantive response to need. America wills it this way and Coming Apart sanctifies the nation’s choices.
Social work students will take heart from Murray. They will read Coming Apart with a biblical sense of revelation that affirms their calling to reform the character of miscreants. After all they come to the field on a mission to Fishtown albeit with personal ambitions of living in Belmont. They see themselves as evangels of a moral reawakening. But they have ignored as have the field and the nation the premise of personal responsibility: adaptation and acquiescence under duress are not free choices. Sally Hemmings was a slave.