by NPR STAFF
Coming Apart:The State of White America, 1960-2010
by Charles Murray
Hardcover, 407 pages | purchase
nonfiction
history & society
February 6, 2012
According to the libertarian social scientist Charles Murray, America is "coming apart at the seams." Class strain has cleaved society into two groups, he argues in his new bookComing Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010: an upper class, defined by educational attainment, and a new lower class, characterized by the lack of it. Murray also posits that the new "lower class" is less industrious, less likely to marry and raise children in a two-parent household, and more politically and socially disengaged
By focusing solely on whites, Murray says, he is trying to correct the assumption that these are markers of the American racial divide. The class divisions transcend race.
By Murray's calculations, the upper class is 20 percent of the white population. The working class is 30 percent. Over the past 50 years the two groups have branched away from each other culturally and geographically. The "educated class," Murray tells NPR's Robert Siegel, has developed distinctive tastes and preferences in a way that is new in America, evinced in everything from the alcohol they drink and the cars they buy to how they raise their children and take care of themselves physically.
Added to that, spatial segregation has resulted in "ZIP codes that have levels of affluence and education that are so much higher than the rest of the population that they constitute a different kind of world," he says.
The economic and social balkanization is potentially very pernicious.
"The people who run the country have enormous influence over the culture, politics, and the economics of the country. And increasingly, they haven't a clue about how most of America lives. They have never experienced it. They don't watch the same movies, they don't watch the same television shows — they don't watch television at all, in many cases — and when that happens, you get some policies that are pretty far out of whack."
Murray's findings proved counterintuitive, at least to the political narrative that characterizes the affluent classes as liberal and secular. It turns out that they are actually the group most likely to get and stay married. They go to church and synagogue more often and feel more strongly affiliated with their religion than the white working class. They are the keepers of "traditional" American values.
Peter Holden
Charles Murray is the author of Real Education and The Bell Curve, co-authored with the late Richard Herrnstein, among other books. He lives in Maryland.
Nor are they overwhelmingly liberal. The upper middle class in Murray's findings only "tilt" leftward, no more than that.
There used to be many more points of connection between the upper and lower classes, Murray maintains. Consider the lodges, so important in the late 19th and early 20th century. "The Elks and the Moose took people in from all social classes, and people were proud of that," he says.
"And also you have the 1800s, and Alexis de Tocqueville saying that the funny thing about America is that the opulent classes take great care in talking to the members of the lower classes every day and keep in close touch with them."
Even in 1923, a time of great social and religious division, there was still more class intermingling, for the simple reason that most successful people had working- or middle-class roots.
"When you get to Eisenhower's Cabinet in 1952, it was called nine millionaires and a plumber in the popular press," he says. "But those nine millionaires were the sons of farmers and merchants."
Murray calls for more interaction between the classes; specifically, he'd like upper-middle-class Americans to "drop their nonjudgmentalism and start preaching what they're practicing."
They "are getting married and staying married. They work like crazy. They do better going to church. [They should] just say that, 'These are not choices we've made for ourselves. ... These are rich, rewarding ways of living.' "Excerpt:
Note: Book excerpts are provided by the publisher and may contain language some find offensive.
Excerpt: Coming Apart
How Thick Is Your Bubble?
A new upper class that makes decisions affecting the lives of everyone else but increasingly doesn't know much about how everybody else lives is vulnerable to making mistakes. How vulnerable are you?
NO VICE OF the human heart is so acceptable to [a despot] as egotism," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville. "A despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love each other." That couldn't happen in the United States, Tocqueville argued, because of the genius of the founders in devolving power:
Local freedom ... perpetually brings men together, and forces them to help one another, in spite of the propensities which sever them. In the United States, the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people. On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every day.1
That's not true anymore. As the new upper class increasingly consists of people who were born into upper- middle- class families and have never lived outside the upper- middle- class bubble, the danger increases that the people who have so much influence on the course of the nation have little direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans, and make their judgments about what's good for other people based on their own highly atypical lives.
In one sense, there is no such thing as an "ordinary American." The United States comprises a patchwork of many subcultures, and the members of any one of them is ignorant about and isolated from the others to some degree. The white fifth- grade teacher from South Boston doesn't understand many things about the life of the black insurance agent in Los Angeles, who in turn doesn't understand many things about the life of the Latino truck driver in Oklahoma City. But there are a variety of things that all three do understand about the commonalities in their lives— simple things that you have no choice but to understand if you have to send your kids to the local public school, you live in a part of town where people make their living in a hundred different ways instead of a dozen, and you always eat out at places where you and your companion won't spend more than $50 tops, including tip.
Those specifications embrace an extremely large part of the American population. Tack on a few other specifications—that you watch at least twenty- four hours of commercial television a week (still well below the national average of thirty- five hours) and that you see most of the most popular new movies, either in theaters or on DVDs — and you have guaranteed a substantial degree of common familiarity about the culture as well. So while there is no such thing as an ordinary American, it is not the case that most Americans are balkanized into enclaves where they know little of what life is like for most other Americans. "The American mainstream" may be hard to specify in detail, but it exists.
Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers. It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.
To my knowledge, sociologists haven't gotten around to asking upper- middle- class Americans how much they know about their fellow citizens, so once again I must ask you to serve as a source of evidence by comparing your own experience to my generalizations. This time, I have a twenty-five question quiz for you to take.2 I hope it will serve two purposes: first, to calibrate the extent of your own ignorance (if any); second, to give you a framework for thinking about the ignorance that may be common in your professional or personal circles, even if it doesn't apply to you.
The questions you should take most seriously are the opening ones that ask about the places you have lived and the variation in conditions of life that you have experienced. The ignorance they imply is certain. If you have never lived or worked in a small town, you must be ignorant about day- to- day life in a small town, no matter how many movies set in rural Georgia you've seen. If you have never held a job that caused a body part to hurt by the end of the day, you don't know what that's like — period.
When I move to informational questions about sports, popular culture, and some American institutions, you are free to complain that some of them aren't fair. Some questions have a gender bias (though I've tried to balance those). Some are sneaky and several poke fun. In no case does an inability to answer reflect on your intelligence, character, or all- around goodness of heart.
Some of the questions are ones that whites will get right more often than minorities, and that people who do not live in metropolises will get right more often than people who do. That's because I am writing about the problems of the new upper class, the new upper class is overwhelmingly white and urban, and the readers of this book are overwhelmingly white and urban. Note, however, that had I included questions that would be more easily answered by minorities in working- class urban neighborhoods, your score would probably be even worse.
Unless I specify an age range, the questions apply to experiences that occurred at any point in your life.
Please take out your no. 2 pencil and begin
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