Coming Apart

Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 is a timely analysis of the growing divide in White America. What type of divide, we may ask? The rich vs. poor? The have against the have not? Not quite. A rehashed declamation of the upper-class does not make up the content of this book; rather, the discussion that Murray brought up was the categorical changes that occurred among the very poor and the “narrow elite”. In the past, the upper-class came from old money and privilege. Their native capacities were sometimes great, sometimes average, and sometimes below average.

However, their money and class kept them in a privileged place for at least a few generations until the money ran out. Murray termed the new upper-class the “narrow cognitive elite.” This class is not as remarkable for its status or privilege at birth –although that still is a factor – as much as their cognitive ability. The new cognitive elite are increasingly separated from the lower class by several changes. The “College Sorting Machine” and “Homogamy” serve to make people of similar class and cognitive ability marry people of like capacity.

The new lower class is a particularly depressing part of this book. The working poor used to be a strong component of church, family, and social life. They married consistently, attended church weekly, and joined civil associations with great regularity. The lower class of today has families more broken, less religious, and less associated than ever before.

The tragic irony is that while the avant garde has convinced more of the people to reject bourgeois morality and social norms, they themselves have largely ignored their own advice. Take a trip to upper-class suburbia and a poor white community. Which place has more broken families, degraded spirits, and which the most anomie? Even when the snobbish distain for the nuclear family and traditional morality is loudest in the months of our elite, their conformity to its beneficial society persevering values far outstrips the lower class. Their social experiment of the last 40 years has been watched with curiosity and dismay from inside the ivy covered walls, within the echoing halls of power, and atop glass-plated news desks. If the Jacobin enterprise of our progressive elite is so liberating, why do they not practice what they preach? Because deep-down they know that it is self-immolating. They can only hope that the flames of the suffering lower classes will not reach the top of their ivory towers.