The "Coming Apart" Case for Less Entitlements

And the values we should celebrate

This week on Upstream, I spoke to Sam Harris about populism, popularization, and his beef with the left and the right.

This week on Moment of Zen, we spoke with Mike Solana about Twitter, Open AI, and the culture war.

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Charles Murray wrote a book called “Coming Apart” which says that the cognitive elite is getting richer and more insular, but not deteriorating on measures of community such as marriage strength, industriousness, religious belief, criminality, and so forth, while the lower classes are doing the opposite: sinking ever further into bad behavior and bad lives.

Murray does see two problems with the cognitive elite, unrelated to their divergence from the lower classes—an immediate problem and a long-term problem. The immediate problem is that the cognitive elite are (geographically, culturally and intellectually) isolated from the rest of America, but they rule the country. And since they have “little direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans,” they “make their judgments about what’s good for other people based on their own highly atypical lives.” This, of course, is the “flyover country” problem.

As we covered in a previous piece, this leads them to have incorrect models of how the rest of the country behaves, which means the policies they set for them do not correspond with their best interest. It also means they don't experience the consequences of the policies they implement.

The bigger problem, as we covered in another piece, is that elites are no longer willing to identify and enforce virtues within their class. Their modesty is selective though: They’re willing to enact policies to protect poor people, but not willing to encourage norms that would prevent them from needing the policies in the first place. They don’t preach what they practice. 

Murray covers the wide array of inequalities that have emerged: marriage, religion, economics, and community. There’s an increasing number of lower class people who aren’t married. They aren’t working. They’ve fallen away from religion. And they’re living in their communities, isolated from any interaction with other people. The upperclass, however, is doing better on these dimensions.

A common response to the plight of the lower class is often “more government aid!” Charles Murray wrote a whole book outlining his argument called “Losing Ground” which I’ll briefly summarize here. Murray refers to this as the “European model,” and he does not like it. His primary objection is not that the welfare state does not work, though he would say that, but rather that it erodes the self-actualization necessary for a high-functioning community. 

Murray explains that, while economic rewards are important, status rewards are critical as well. It used to be that if you were a low income guy who was holding down a job and supporting a wife and children, you got status in your community as being one of the good guys. When welfare supports the wife even when the man won’t, it removes that status reward.

A character in Chris Arnade’s book “Dignity” describes it well:

““Parents and grandparents took their kids and grandkids; they don’t do that anymore. We used to be self-sufficient here. People wouldn’t take gifts. We had pride. Self-respect. Then we were flooded with gifts from the government; it took people’s pride and self-respect away. The government and internet hurt our churches, and Walmart coming to town closed every mom-and-pop business. Now people only take pride in drugs.”

Universal Basic Income won’t solve the problems of the working class, because jobs aren’t just about economics, they’re also about respect. Neither will government services, since human needs are solved best at the lowest possible level. People need to rely on their spouse, their family, their community, their church — the government is a blunt, extremely inefficient method for dealing with human needs.   

Of course, money is critical but it isn’t everything. We've all known low-income people who have lived very happy lives. They've had families that have been sources of great joy to them. They haven't been rich, but they've never gone hungry. They’ve enjoyed their work. They had self respect about what they did, they could legitimately take pride in themselves. And we also know other people who've had exactly the same level of income who've lived absolutely miserable lives for a variety of reasons. It’s important to be able to realize the differences here, because, while money is essential, it’s not sufficient. As Maslow said about his hierarchy of needs, “Man does not live does live by bread alone”.

A man who is holding down a menial job, and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that and be praised by his community for doing so. 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 that 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

To summarize, Murray believes that if the government steps in, with Tocqueville’s soft totalitarianism of bureaucratic control and consequent enervation, the ability for the lower classes to lead fulfilling lives disappears. His analysis is similar to that in Nisbet in “The Quest For Community,” where Nisbet feared that the disappearance of intermediary institutions that create community leads to the government creating a type of false community, with pernicious results. Robert Putnam also wrote about how all forms of community participation have declined: Voting in local elections, volunteering in local organizations, participating in local activities, etc.  As Murray says, “When the government intervenes to help, whether in the European welfare state or in America’s more diluted version, it enfeebles the institutions through which people live satisfying lives.” Murray’s thesis is that, statistically, the drivers of life satisfaction are simply four—family, vocation, community and faith. When the government enfeebles those things, as it necessarily must if it attempts to replace the organic versions which have disappeared, the poor are harmed yet more, community is utterly destroyed, and the American Project is over.

The new elite response has been to promote policies over values. Murray thinks we should do the opposite, and references four key virtues based on the writings of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and other key figures of that time. (Copied verbatim from Rob Henderson’s excellent blog post):

1. Industriousness. This was a signature characteristic of Americans. It is the deep-seated American assumption that life is meant to be spent getting ahead by working hard to make a better life for oneself and one’s children. American industriousness fascinated citizens of other nations. Francis Grund, son of a German baron and educated in Vienna, wrote that after a decade of living in the United States in 1837, “I have never known a native American to ask for charity. No country in the world has such a small number of persons supported at the public expense.… An American, embarrassed by his pecuniary circumstances, can hardly be prevailed upon to ask or accept the assistance of his own relations; and will, in many instances, scorn to have recourse to his own parents.”

2. Honesty. For Thomas Jefferson, “honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.” Many Americans are familiar with the stories of “Honest Abe Lincoln” and George Washington. This unique trait intrigued European intellectuals, particularly when they noted the willingness of Americans to obey the law. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville described his observations during his journey throughout the U.S. in the late 19th century. In his book, he noted, “In America, the criminal is looked upon as an enemy of the human race.”

3. Marriage. The founders took for granted that marriage was the bedrock institution of American society. In fact, they often used the word “morality” as a synonym for fidelity, meaning to be faithful to one’s spouse. John Adams wrote in his diary in 1778: “The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families.… How is it possible that children can have any just sense of the sacred obligations of morality or religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn their mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their mothers?” John was married to Abigail Adams for fifty-four years before she passed away at age 73. In an essay titled “Of the Natural Rights of Individuals,” written in 1790, U.S. Supreme Court Justice James Wilson wrote, “to the institution of marriage the true origin of society must be traced…To that institution, more than to any other, have mankind been indebted for the share of peace and harmony which has been distributed among them. ‘Prima societas in ipso conjugio est,’ [‘The first bond of society is marriage’] says Cicero in his book of offices; a work which does honor to the human understanding and the human heart.”

4. Religiosity. Interestingly, the founders held relatively progressive views on religion. Thomas Jefferson was a Deist, Benjamin Franklin did not believe in the divinity of Christ, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison were suspected of being relaxed about their devotion to Anglicanism, and George Washington was often evasive about his views on Christianity. However, all of the founders were united in their view that religion was essential to the health of American society. The social institution of religion emphasized self-restraint and self-discipline, which the founders considered essential for civic society. In his farewell address, Washington stated, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable…Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” And John Adams: “Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

The founders were explicit in their belief that the American constitution would only work for moral and virtuous people who adhered to the above four precepts. Granted, these men did not always live up to their own virtues. But the founders promoted them, and most tried to live by them.

Their contemporary, the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke wrote:

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites… Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.”

We need what RR Reno once called “Courageous judgmentalism” to keep us accountable to these virtues.