Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

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The new upper-class culture is different from mainstream American culture in all sorts of ways. — Charles Murray, Coming Apart

And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? — Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

Charles Murray
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
New York: Crown Forum, 2012

There may well be “lies, damned lies, and statistics,” but if you are a good statistician who happens to be looking in the wrong areas, in the current climate it will be you who are damned. Charles Murray is certainly very good in the field of statistics. Educated at Harvard and MIT, Murray has published several books on various aspects of American society, including the welfare system in Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, but it was the book he co-authored with Richard Herrnstein (who died a few weeks before its release in 1994) which became the hottest of potatoes. This book was The Bell Curve.

In the ensuing debate over the book’s conclusions, two camps emerged. One defended Murray and Herrnstein on the grounds that their research was exhaustive and their data thoroughly researched, which are presumably entry-level requirements in the field. Critical voices had the same pitch of hysteria we are now used to, and the two men were denounced as eugenicists and worse, despite Murray’s pointing out that “Herrnstein and I did not make nearly as aggressive a case for genetic differences as the evidence permits.”

The evidence in this case concerned the correlations between IQ and race, now a combination all but verboten in contemporary research in the field of differences in cognitive ability. Initial reaction to the book was positive. The New York Times reviewed it favorably, as did ex-VDARE editor Peter Brimelow in Forbes, a review Murray calls “still the best published synopsis of The Bell Curve.” Then everything suddenly changed. A critical and vitriolic tidal wave smeared Murray and Herrnstein as racists, eugenicists, and Nazis, which in turn drew far more attention to the book than might otherwise have been the case. Murray suspects that “The Bell Curve will be one of the most written-about and talked about works of social science since the Kinsey Report 50 years ago.” Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) commented that, “Never has such a moderate book attracted such an immoderate response.” We are now thoroughly used to the caustic and hyperbolic response of many on the Left to data and its extrapolation which does not tally with their ideological requirements, and there are no prizes for guessing which aspect of The Bell Curve agitated so many of its critical readers. In an article for the AEI, Murray wearily points out the reason for “all the hysteria”:

The obvious answer is race, the looming backdrop to all discussions of social policy in the United States. Ever since the first wave of attacks on the book, I have had an image of The Bell Curve as a sort of literary Rorschach test. I do not know how to explain the extraordinary discrepancy between what The Bell Curve actually says about race and what most commentators have said that the book says, except as the result of some sort of psychological projection onto our text.

Having experienced the fury of the mob over The Bell Curve, Murray may have deemed the topic of black and white IQ too toxic to handle again, and with his 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 (henceforth CA), Murray steers away from the rocky and treacherous coastline of racial comparison, blacks being mentioned only a handful of times. Instead, his focus is on the changing social stratification of American whites over the half century noted, and the main drivers for a concentration of cognitively-enhanced white Americans into a new elite are clearly laid out.

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Murray uses the Kennedy assassination, and Walter Cronkite’s famous and emotionally-strained announcement of the killing, as his dramatic point of entry into his timeframe, and fixes it as a time at which “[no one] had any way of knowing how much America was about to change, in everything — its politics, economy, technology, high culture, popular culture, and civic culture.”

The assassination of JFK is not used simply for dramatic effect. Kennedy was not an especially popular President at the time and was wary of radical change, but “[i]t is surely impossible that anything resembling the legislative juggernaut that Lyndon Johnson commanded would have happened if Kennedy had been in the Oval Office.” The drastic drop in social capital during the 1960s sets up a polarization resulting in a highly empowered and new upper class, along with a concomitant lower class which, although curves and graphs say the two groups behaved in not dissimilar ways according to many social indicators, drifted still further apart socioeconomically.

The resultant disconnect of an insular ruling class creates and sustains a new class of what Murray calls, in a term borrowed from Robert Reich, “symbolic analysts” — those with the cognitive ability to manipulate and control the new tools of a knowledge economy. In The Bell Curve, Murray and Herrnstein termed the new class “the cognitive elite.” The inevitable result of a segregation in cognitive ability and the wealth it creates for the individual is physical segregation, and the inevitable knock-on effects of the creation of a new upper class which automatically creates a concomitant new lower class. While “[r]acial segregation was still substantial, the bad news was that socioeconomic segregation had been increasing.” Robert Reich called this shift “the secession of the successful.” However, rather than this new elite moving to the Florida coast or Hollywood, what happened was a change in demographics in terms of occupation: “In different ways, Austin, Manhattan, and Newton all experienced the secession of the successful. But the essence of the change was not geographical separation.”

Instead, the “density and resources within neighborhoods that had been ‘the best part of town’ for decades” increased, and certain already desirable places to live became enclaves of the new class, which was both cognitively enhanced and working within the growth sectors of the burgeoning knowledge economy. Thus, while in 1960 40% of jobs in Manhattan were in the industrial sector, that figure was just 5% by 2000. This concentration of these symbolic analysts and their peers led to the creation of what Murray calls “SuperZips.” These are not isolated high-IQ islands in the middle of regular America, but tend to be the epicenter of a cluster of zip codes which already had high socioeconomic status and which now combined to form a virtuous circle. SuperZips border other affluent zip codes, an average of four each, and “even when a bordering zip code is not a SuperZip, it is likely to be nearly as affluent and highly educated.”

Class had always existed in America, Murray writes, albeit limited to the dynasties of northeastern America, and very different from the dynastic upper class in England, the country which tends to set the paradigm for Western hereditary class systems. But the new American elites don’t work in the old economic categories of the primary or extractive industries, secondary manufacturing, or the tertiary service industry. These cognitively-enhanced gauleiters are not farmers or restaurateurs or mill owners. They are techies, money people, and CEOs of marketing concerns.

Clark isolates four driving factors in the formation of this new privileged class:

Four developments took us from a set of people who ran the nation but were culturally diverse to a new upper class that increasingly lives in a world of its own. The culprits are the increasing market value of brains, wealth, the college sorting machine, and homogamy.

Thus, a small, cognitively-enhanced group of wealthy people streamed by the college system, and intermixing and breeding exclusively with others just like them, is the result of the technological great leap forward. The homogamy hasn’t changed significantly from the time of old familial money, but the skills and the streaming effects of college selection have replaced the old cotton barons and steel tycoons.

So much for the new upper class. What of the other end of the social spectrum, the new lower class? In the 1960s, the poor were not even seen sociologically as a class, but have become an obvious polar adjunct in today’s economically hyper-stratified American society. In order to assess the causal differences, Murray again takes four key factors, this time those on which “the feasibility of the American project has always been based.” These are industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity.

Collectively, these are seen by Murray as virtues, and the attempt to define virtue goes back not to the Founding Fathers of America — although it occupied their thought to a far greater extent than is likely today — but back to ancient Greece and the founding fathers of Western philosophy. The necessity of such a bedrock, however, is not simply a concern for philosophers. In a pragmatic country such as America, it is a foundation stone for its people as well as its rulers. Murray quotes James Madison at the Virginia ratifying convention: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”

Appropriately, Murray refers to his working quadrivium as “the founding virtues.”

Industriousness is, or certainly was, synonymous with the American project. The “can do” attitude of Americans is famous, and it is no coincidence that America was known philosophically primarily for its pragmatic school. Modern Americans have tended to increase their newfound leisure time not by working with their hands or organizing community functions, however, but by watching even more television. Honesty as a virtue would seem to be a given in the West, although if you have ever lived in a low-trust society, you will be aware that this is cultural. A change in the attitude of the American project to crime is an indicator, and Murray quotes de Tocqueville in a way that can be unfavorably compared with the United States’ criminal justice system of today: “I believe that in no country does crime more rarely elude punishment.”

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That admiring assessment would not stand up in court today, or rather it has bifurcated, with those sympathetic to one side of a political divide treated far more harshly than their opponents.

Marriage was once seen as a necessary condition for the raising of a family, and with the West’s neo-Leninist war on that institution not seriously in doubt today, America’s reverence for marriage has waned, as it has across the West. Religious belief or observance was already threatened by the secular tendencies of the European Enlightenment, in full when America was founded. The Founding Fathers, Murray suggests, were religious in outlook if not necessarily in observance. Now, of course, the new internal enemies of America have made the white religious Right the target of their most vehement attacks.

How these founding virtues play out in Murray’s timeframe is examined in the book in a long section comparing the prosperous area of Belmont, exemplary of Murray’s new upper class, and somewhere called Fishtown, which is not an eerie conurbation from an H. P. Lovecraft tale, but a place in northeast Philadelphia which was traditionally working class and a town in which just 8% of its inhabitants had college degrees in 2000. Murray closely observes similarities and discrepancies between the two communities in the terms of his founding virtues, and this exact crystallization of the current polarization of decline becomes Murray’s comparative model.

Murray is a self-confessed libertarian, and he sees “a compelling case for returning to the founders’ conception of limited government.” This is a reminder that libertarianism is not social libertinism, obsessed with “freedom to,” but ultimately a defense mechanism based on “freedom from.” There is no sign that the American government will be curtailed in its reach into the lives of ordinary people any time soon. Over half of those people now work for that government. Murray’s four domains that constitute anything like “the pursuit of happiness” — family, vocation, faith, and community — are all treated with a toxic disdain by those who currently govern America, whoever they may ultimately be.

Statistics, unfortunately, tend to make me glaze over, but Murray’s are interwoven into his argument just sufficiently to illustrate rather than dominate. Measuring the decline of American society seems a very desiccated operation when it is statistically framed. It’s like performing a clinical autopsy on a loved one: It won’t bring them back. Murray ends on a cautiously optimistic note, however, and wishes precisely for that return of the component virtues of a once-great nation and the world’s primary experiment in democracy.

Murray’s work involves asking questions, as many fields of research do, but his questions relate to quantifiable data, and reaction to it may be all the more vociferous due to the underlying tendency of some on the Left to react more radically in opposing fact than they do opinion. He had seen the reaction of a liberal elite, many of them fellow academics, to the modest proposals he and Herrnstein put forward in The Bell Curve. But casting him as a malevolent racist is just going through the motions. It is to be hoped that one day the intellectual Left will gain — or perhaps regain — the ability to weigh arguments against one another rather than to automatically denounce with all the visceral fury of Torquemada’s Inquisitors.

But, as noted, the question of racial difference appears only in a few asides in Coming Apart, meaning simplistically that few on the Left will bother to read something which does not guarantee them the continuance of the adrenaline-like rush of righteous anger which sustains them. Should they do so, however, they would still find something to hate in the book. Murray is, when all the graphs and stats and curves are put away, a patriotic American who wishes for the preservation of a country which was, for a while, truly the world’s greatest nation. It all depends on a question America’s new upper class needs to ask of itself:

And so I am hoping for a Great Civic Awakening among the new upper class. It starts with a question I hope they will take to heart: How much do you value what has made America exceptional, and what are you willing to do to preserve it?