Charles Murray on America’s Coming Apart | Culture and Causation, Ep 5

welcome to culture and causation my name is aaron briley and my guest today is dr charles murray now i began reading dr murray's books over a decade ago in graduate school they're thought-provoking carefully reasoned and courageous forays into important but taboo issues or maybe they're important because they're taboo in any event i'm honored to have him on the show dr murray holds a fa hayek emeritus chair in cultural studies at the american enterprise institute dr murray received his ba in history from harvard and his phd in political science from mit he is a prolific writer of both articles and books some of his books include losing ground american social policy from 1950 to 1980 which has been credited as the intellectual foundation for the welfare reform act of 1996 the bell curve which discusses the role of iq in shaping america's class structure coming apart the state of white america from 1960 to 2010 which discusses the increased cultural polarization in the us his latest book human diversity the biology of gender race and class came out earlier this year and describes the recent developments in genetics and neuroscience that are transforming the social sciences now there are many other books and even more articles but i'd love to get to some questions so i'll end here dr murray welcome to the show i'm delighted to be here great okay so i'd like to discuss your book coming apart the state of white america from 1960 to 2010 which was written a decade ago but seems to be even more relevant now given the social unrest that we've had in recent months and it seems to me when i read it that coming apart is really it's a cautionary tale of two cities and these two cities represent two americas or maybe two types of americans that are becoming more and more dissimilar and therefore they they threaten our society so to start things off i just like the audience to get a general message of the book so this is a quote this is a quote from coming apart i'll read it and uh and then i'll get your your thoughts your very brief thoughts on this one i think so quote this is you speaking my primary goal is to induce recognition of the ways in which america is coming apart at the seams not seems of race or ethnicity but of class unquote so i take this to be the thesis of the book is that right that's correct and the reason i the reason i made it the state of white america was because i wanted to have my readers not to have the option of saying oh he's really talking about the black inner city i'm saying no i'm just talking about non-latino whites here and i think you know aaron the book got a pretty good reception unlike some of my other books uh in terms of controversy didn't there wasn't much controversy there were lots of people who liked it and i think partly it was that the divorcing of this class antagonism from race right i think so i think it's absolutely right i think when you add in race and certain political parties people for some reason their their entire their entire brain and intellectual honesty just shuts down um okay so now the neighborhoods you use to illustrate this to illustrate this class polarization are belmont and fishtown um can you explain why these neighborhoods and what they represent sure belmont i picked that name because it was where my co-author for the bell curve dick kernstein lived it's an affluent upper middle class suburb of boston mitt romney used to live there it's filled with highly educated people professional people fishtown is a neighborhood in philadelphia working class neighborhood one of the few overwhelmingly white working class neighborhoods that's left in in large cities although by the way it's gentrified since i wrote the book so it's pretty much gone and it's it was filled with you know cops and firefighters and construction workers and uh you know a lot of catholic churches it was a very tight-knit community in that regard and it had a history of being extremely proud as a community and yeah they were poor but they loved their community and took great satisfaction in it i bet some of those who were listening who live in black inner city communities can remember neighborhoods exactly like that and i think the deterioration i talked about that's going on in fishtown as far as i can tell it's probably gone on in in black and latino communities as well and with that has come an enormous antagonism toward the people at the top and uh i think that explains donald trump to a large degree that people are really really tired of these folks at the top of the ladder who think they know better and who have arranged the world in ways which are very congenial to them um but make life difficult for ordinary people so that was that's the main the it was actually my audience for this book was the members of the new upper class it's the it's the people in belmont and i'm trying to get them to recognize the degree to which they are isolated from and ignorant of the lives of ordinary americans i think okay okay great so then um so i have another quote here and then i'll i'll give you and i think you touched on this um just now but maybe we can we can elaborate um so this is a quote from from coming apart quote it is not the existence of classes that is new but the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values classes that barely recognize their underlying american kinship unquote so given this quote like i said i think you touched on this just a second ago why are these current differences in class so unique because i mean i can hear someone saying well we've had classes or they haven't been de jure classes but you know de facto there have been there have been these separations in society for a long time why is it so unique now you've had a couple of things that have gone on that are fundamental talk about institutions let's talk about marriage if you go back to 1980 i'm sorry 1960 you could take the working class i'm talking about the white working class now and the white upper middle class everybody was married you know 90 plus percent of people 30 to 50 in the white working class were married by 2010 when i was getting the numbers for the book that was down to about half from from 90 to about half the same thing has gone on in the black community it went on a little bit sooner it accelerated sooner but you go back to the 1950s and you had very high proportions of black working-class people who were married and that has deteriorated well when you have marriage um kind of collapse the way that it did it fundamentally changes the way a community works uh it's you know what i sometimes the way i sometimes put it is that unmarried fathers don't coach little league teams now i know they're exceptions but but the the idea that all sorts of social capital in a community is is made possible by the two-parent family and i'm not saying this is a moralistic thing i'm saying this is the community's wrong another is an example is what has gone on with uh uh with the work ethic and again remember i'm talking about whites okay back everything i'm saying i could then go to the black community and i could talk about parallel trends okay if you go back to 1960 if you were a guy a white guy in the working class and you were of working age and you didn't have a job you were a bum and people were completely open and free in saying you were a bum your parents would say it your siblings would say it your girlfriend would say it and all the rest and and not only that you did not have status with other guys you know you were you were a bum that changed so you now have a substantial number of white working-class guys who are not even in the labor force they aren't looking for work they don't want to work and this is not some conservative talking point about welfare people living this is a statement of fact about a huge change in a basic institution that uh that the working class has has fallen away from okay and so and i also want to talk about maybe on the upper end for the upper middle class and how they're becoming more more dissimilar so let me read a quote and then i'll get your get your thoughts on this so this is from coming apart page 61. you say quote sociologists christine schwartz and robert mayer examine trends in assortative marriage as as it is known in the jargon from 1940 to 2003 and they found that homogamy had increased at both ends of the educational scale college graduates grew more likely to marry college graduates and high school dropouts grew more likely to marry other high school dropouts further you you say but increased educational homogeny had other consequence had another consequence that the academic literature on homogamy avoids mentioning increased educational homogamy inevitably leads to increased cognitive homogeny unquote so so so you're saying that the educational system and marriage are responsible for the increased in social segregation or is that right in these upper classes what happened in the in the 1950s and into the 1960s was that elite colleges fundamentally changed their role you know in 1952 the entering class at harvard university was filled with a lot of rich kids some of whom were smart by 1960 just eight years later the entering class at harvard was filled with really really smart kids some of whom were rich but a lot of them weren't that was going on at uh good schools throughout the country and you know in one sense it's great you know giving you're giving kids look i came from a small town in iowa uh in 1920 it would never have occurred to me to apply to harvard all right so it's good that kids got a chance to fulfill their potential but what it also did was it brought them all together and it took them out of their hometowns and and then what happened over a period of decades was you've got this incredible isolation geographic isolation it's it's not even so much racial anymore as it is cognitive so i'll give you an example you you go to northwest tc washington dc an elite neighborhood you will have on the block living next to each other graduates of the ivy league colleges people with advanced degrees all concentrated together they create a culture of their own they have their own ways of child rearing their own the television shows and radio shows that they listen to aren't the same ones that ordinary americans listen to i call it a bubble and i have in the book a bubble quiz where i'm asking my readers to take the quiz and see how much they are inside this bubble but what it means aaron is you have a whole bunch of people who are rising to positions of great influence in this country who grew up going to really good schools in upper middle class neighborhoods they went from there to really good colleges and they have gone from there into really good jobs they've they may have never have met and had as a close friend somebody who's in the working class uh they may never have encountered the kinds of american life that most people take for granted it's not just the working class that is irritated at all this it goes way up into the middle class who look at this very different culture of the people at the top and don't recognize them as people who understand what they're about but also realize that these people have enormous influence over their lives the way i like to summarize it is uh there's an imbalance are our people in the working class and middle class are they in their own bubbles sure uh is are people in black inner city in their own bubble sure the difference is this you know if i'm a truck driver in tulsa oklahoma in a working-class neighborhood i may not understand the culture and the lifestyle of the secretary of commerce but that didn't really make any difference to the secretary of commerce if the secretary as secretary of commerce doesn't understand the life of a truck driver he or she is going to do all sorts of things can really screw up my life and that's that's a major problem okay so that was my next question i think you answered it because i can see i can hear someone saying you know just to give the devil is due so to speak right i mean this is a pluralistic society i mean of course we've always been this there are different tastes and interests if a group of people want to see wagner's ring cycle on the weekend and someone else wants to go to a nascar event on the weekend um you can have these two fundamentally different activities and still have a country but i think you're saying that this it's um it's that this power balance also people who are at the top or making decisions if they don't understand the the you know the rest of the country then they can make very poor and destructive choices yeah there's also the contempt that is increasingly openly displayed by the new upper class and boy has that come out in the trump years where they don't even make a pretense the new upper class is very meticulous about avoiding racial slurs or ethics orders of any kind but aaron i'll tell you a story you can still use in a dinner party in georgetown or any other league enclave you can call people rednecks and get away with it with no pushback whatsoever you can make comments about these idiots i have a friend i'll just give you an anecdote who bought a summer weekend house up in west virginia and he lives in georgetown very elite neighborhood in washington dc and when he told his friends he would gotten this place his friends openly said well basically you're going to be around people like the ones in deliverance you know the movie the snaggletooth inbred these stupid vicious people and and he says there was no there was no subtly about this at all it was just open contempt well we aren't stupid to have been referring toward it's very easy to see that yeah so okay so then so yeah i definitely want to talk about how you how this book relates to what's happening now um and i'll get to that maybe in a couple questions but before that i'm just curious about your your thoughts about the future um so given this inevitability of class segregation you know the sorting that happens in school and in marriage and the problems that it has and people are becoming more and more in their own bubbles and there's this contempt do you think there's any hope for a more unified country i mean given the sorting mechanism that's already in place i've become extremely pessimistic because i don't see i don't see what the impulse is going to be for this to change now there's one possibility and that is that i got a lot of resonance from this book i got people in the new upper class who said to me you know actually i don't want my kids to grow up surrounded only by people like them with the same social economic status and all the rest of that and i have even had somebody who said told me that because of the book they sold their house in greenwich connecticut and moved to a small town in connecticut at which point i wanted to say to him it was just a book you know it was scared but then it's wonderful that the truth is you lead a much richer life if you are living in a community where people are engaged in the stuff of life and if you are in a very elite community it's pretty sterile in lots of ways so if that's the truth if it's a richer life then maybe there's some chance of people taking proactive steps to get out of it uh however i think that's mostly wishful thinking because it's pretty comfortable in the bubble yeah these are nice these are nice places and and and here's the irony also these people in the new upper class that i'm being so critical of are nice people they're very good parents they are obsessively concerned about raising their parents right and uh they are pleasant and cheerful and good humor a lot of times it's it is just that they are in that bubble and they have so much influence and they no longer remember what you said we've always had classes we have but it used to be that the successful people usually came from sons or daughters or farmers or of small store owners or factory workers and so they could still remember in their own parents another america and if not their own parents then certainly their own grandparents they could connect with that that's gone you now have lots of people in the upper middle class who all the way back to great grandparents have have been living in that very exclusive world okay um so how do we begin now this was touched on a bit but um it's i'm curious now to know what these working class communities can do and i think it would apply as you said earlier you know we can extrapolate this to black inner city communities so sort of any working-class communities it seems like would have the same kind of solution or remedy but so i want to read two quotes and then maybe get your opinion on what you think um even if you're pessimistic about um this social you know polarization um i i'm curious to know if you have any optimism about how individual communities how these working classes working class communities themselves can possibly improve so let me read two quotes and then i'll ask a question um so this is from this is from coming apart quote i have chosen to present class divergence in marriage first because it is so elemental over the last half century marriage has become a fault line dividing american classes and you also say uh in a different part of coming apart you say quote let me put it formally if we ask what are the domains through which human beings achieve deep satisfaction in life achieve happiness the answer is that there are just four family vocation community and faith unquote so so once again my question is what do you think um what can inner city communities uh both black inner city communities or other working-class communities what can they do to help remedy these their their predicament for one thing they need some validation from the larger society you know why was it and this is just as true of black communities in white communities why was it that 40 years ago almost all kids were born to married couples the reason was because if if you got the girl pregnant and you were a guy you married her i mean when i was growing up i'm i'm old you know but when i was growing up i just knew if i got my girlfriend pregnant there was no choice and well part of becoming a man in that regard was to form a family what you have now is an elite that is scared stiff to say that out loud and i will be right there especially scared to say it to black audiences um because that's being judgmental and instead there is the oh we have to realize the family has evolved it's it's not the same as it used to be in the old ozzie and harriet days uh and not no one way is not better than another way well you don't have to be morally judgmental and say so-and-so is a bad person but you do have to say you know what kids need two parents just as a statement of fact about the way the children develop best this is not some religious uh exhortation this is just the way it works marriage is really important the elites will not say that so there has to be some way that people i mean i live in a small town in western maryland which is a combination of working class and farmers and a few oddballs like my wife and me and and and it would be really nice if they were living in a society where it was valued to work hard get married raise your family and in the act of doing that you gained respect and status um i think that that has to be in the air in in the book i had a phrase that the new upper class refuses to preach what it practices because they actually they do get married they do raise their kids they do work hard but they won't say that that what works for them is something would work for everybody else i don't mean when i say preach what you practice that they should get bullhorns and go down to the inner city white or black i'm saying that the way they talk if they write sitcoms the way they write the sitcoms should reflect those underlying values if they are in the news business their choices of stories and the ways they write them up should reflect this respect and status that you give to certain kinds of things used to be taken for granted right now we have an elite culture which absolutely refuses to validate the people who are trying hard in the white inner city and in the white uh working class okay and and i when i read this book and i said i read this book years ago um when i was in graduate school but i was able to reread it recently and what struck me is is how how much it relates to what's happening now in 2020. so my question is i guess it's a two-part question the first is what do you make of the protests and riots that we've had over the past few months and is this kind of social deterioration what you had in mind when you wrote the book i have been as stunned as everyone else by what's happened in the last several months and i guess well it's hard to talk about this in a few words let me just give a couple of reactions one is that if there is one population that needs really good police protection it is the black inner city because like it or not that's where a lot of the crime goes on the violent crime and so you need really good policing so do you have should should the cops who do bad things be punished for it absolutely the cries to defund the police as far as i'm concerned must be coming from people who haven't the least idea what it's like to live without police they live in it i'm probably being unfair to a lot of the whites who are making the case but i'm not a lot of them grew up in gated communities okay a gated community where you couldn't even get into the place unless you're granted armed guard all right uh so and i've also wanted to hear more from the black community uh push back to a lot of the things that's going on with the black lives matter which which says yeah well black lives matter and black kids lives matter too or getting shot and you got to do something about that so i have been you know it's it's been there's been an unreality to the last summer it has been as if people are just going through a morality play that's kind of detached from the real problems we have to work on yeah and and i think this also relates to what you said about this new upper class not having the courage or the moral confidence to criticize what's happening because you have i mean as you've seen as everyone seen i mean just outright violence and looting and smashing stores um so this is also what you're talking about right not being able to criticize and not saying this is wrong yeah no it's uh there are so many reasons to look at what's going on parker when you're my age and it's just mainly kind of a i can't believe this is happening kind of thing and look i grew up i was uh in my 20s during the 1960s so i am familiar with with past periods of real turmoil including racial turmoil this is uh on another level as far as i can tell it is okay um and do you see this getting better this i mean this immediate kind of frenzied reaction in the streets um or do you think the election since you brought up trump do you think i mean how do you think that's going to affect um affect these protests um i don't see any healing anytime soon i'm assuming biden will win um there's still going to be a lot of anger left after that you know what we need and this is the problem you can't plan for this there is the potential for a common feeling among the latinos and blacks and white working class and middle class where in effect they all have complaints about the new upper class and if you had the right leader they could that person could i think bring a lot of people together and also draw in a lot of sympathetic people from the upper class that this history this country has a history of all sorts of problems but let me put it this way despite all of the hostility at a macro level my interactions with blacks latinos working-class whites and the rest of it have never been better at the micro level just in the people that i encounter every day uh and if you had the right leader they could tap into that you can't manufacture the right leader uh yeah we can only hope that the historical situation brings such a person out yeah well uh dr mary and that on that sober note we'll we'll uh we'll conclude but i just had one final question um and that is where can people find you online or is there anywhere that that you would like to direct people to find your latest articles and books well uh i don't have a website of my own if you go to the aei website americanenterpriseinstitute.aei.com and so i have a page on there which has all of my articles freely available online there so if people want to read more there's an awful lot of stuff there okay great well dr murray thank you so much for taking the time to discuss these important issues i really enjoyed it and i'm sure my audience did too it was a good conversation thank you

Channel: Objective Standard Institute

Views: 1,205

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: cultureandcausation, aaronbriley, charlesmurray, america, comingapart

Id: dIg-2P9IVfY

Length: 30min 20sec (1820 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020