I take my text this week from the Book of Charles Murray,
Coming Apart, Chapter 17, “Alternative Futures,” page 286,
where he invokes the great historian Arnold Toynbee in analyzing
the decline of civilizations.
Murray, as you may know by now, thinks we are in big
trouble because the “single-mother” culture that has so dominated
and handicapped African Americans over the last several decades is
now spreading to the white working class, where marriage is no
longer the norm and up to 50 percent of children are now being born
out of wedlock. (I review this book in the upcoming April issue of
The American Spectator.)
After laying out his case from social statistics in
appallingly complete detail, Murray pauses toward the end of his
book to make a few broader observations. The puzzle he poses is
this. If anybody in American society is good at preaching “cultural
relativism,” a lack of standards and the idea that if anybody wants
to do anything we should just go ahead and let them do it. Thus
it’s a rare person in the educated upper middle class who’ll be
willing to tell anyone in the lower middle class that their best
route to prosperity would be to stay in school, get a job, and wait
until they’re married before having children. Yet the amazing thing
is that upper-middle-class people do these things themselves. The
first third of his book is dedicated to showing how people in
communities where almost everyone has a college education are
working harder than they did twenty years ago, getting married
later, divorcing far less than the rest of society, and living
practically free of crime. So why won’t they preach this road to
success to everyone else?
In his last chapter, Murray believes he finds the answer
in Arnold Toynbee’s great work of the 1930s, A Study of
History. Particularly from Chapter 18, “A Schism in the Soul,”
Murray summarizes Toynbee as follows:
The growth phase of a civilization is led by a creative minority
with a strong, self-confident sense of style, virtue and purpose.
The uncreative minority follows along. Then, at some point in every
civilization’s journey, the creative minority degenerates into a
dominant minority. Its members still run the show but they are no
longer confident and no longer set an example. Among other
reactions are a “lapse into truancy” — a rejection of the
obligations of citizenship — and “surrender to a sense of
promiscuity” — vulgarization of manners, the arts, and language —
that “are apt to appear first in the ranks of the proletariat and
to spread from there to the ranks of the dominant minority, which
usually succumbs to the sickness of proletariatization.
That’s certainly not a bad description of what is happening to
American culture right now.
Perhaps the most notable trend in the arts over the last
20 years has been the rise of pointless vulgarity. We haven’t quite
gotten to the point of full frontal nudity or open sexual
intercourse on daytime television yet, but we’re getting awfully
close. And if and when it happens, you can be sure there will arise
a chorus from the liberal intelligentsia saying it’s just “freedom
of speech” and anyone who is opposed to it is either “prudish” at
one extreme or “fascist” at the other.
I’ve heard things chanted on rap radio stations that I
would be embarrassed to read on bathroom walls. And this is music
that can be recited line-for-line by 13-year-olds. Now anybody who
ever hung around a black neighborhood or a working-class
neighborhood knows that there has always been a level of vulgarity
that was not native to middle-class neighborhoods — at least not
20 years ago. American culture had a level of decorum that was
expressed on television and in newspaper headlines and in political
speech. What happened was that upper middle-class people decided
that they weren’t tough enough or didn’t sound black enough or hip
enough and so the way to sound real and authentic was to adopt the
vulgarity of people poorer than themselves. And it was often people
poorer than themselves who were embarrassed by all this, but
nevertheless it has all now been done.
Unfortunately, I think Rush Limbaugh succumbed to this
himself in his recent outburst with the Georgetown law student. It
certainly is ridiculous that she wants the college to subsidize her
sexual adventures and Rush is right for calling her down on it. But
it’s not an excuse for vulgarity. And of course in calling her a
“slut” and so forth, he only defeated his own cause and embarrassed
the Republican Party as well. And it should be noted that Limbaugh
is not alone in making this mistake. The New York Post is
probably the worst offender in the land. Sometimes it seems it is
impossible for them to write a headline without making a juvenile
allusion to some swearword or body part.
But does all this really make any difference? Is it really
necessary to risk being prudish in order to restore American
values? Does public vulgarity really have an impact in fostering
the culture of welfarism and social irresponsibility?
I think it does and for this it is only necessary to
invoke a dear departed member of the pantheon who died only last
week, the great James Q. Wilson. It was Wilson and his colleague
Richard Herrnstein, you will recall, who finally broke through the
liberal smokescreen about “victimless crimes” and the supposed
uselessness of “wasting police time” on activities such as
prostitution and drug dealing that ultimately led to the end of
America’s long crime wave, initiated in the 1960s by the fatuous
morals imposed on the country by the U.S. Supreme Court. Wilson and
Herrnstein made a simple observation: public perceptions matter. If
people sense an atmosphere of lawlessness in “broken windows,” to
use their apt metaphor, or graffiti or public drunkenness or
generally antisocial behavior that goes unchecked, then they are
tempted to lawlessness themselves. Who would have ever been able to
persuade an academic — particularly of the tribe of criminologist,
who all believe that punishment has no deterrence and that crime
waves are controlled by demographic patterns alone — that cracking
down on turnstile jumpers or squeegee men could be the first step
in lowering crime rates in New York City and ultimately the entire
country by more than half?
So it is with public vulgarity and the constant open
discussion of sex and pregnancy and abortion and what have you on
soap operas and daytime television eventually leads young people to
believe that there is nothing private about sex and no act of moral
omission that can’t be talked out with Dr. Phil or argued before
Judge Judy. And so if you get your girlfriend pregnant and decide
you don’t want to marry her or she doesn’t want to marry you, how
does that differ from any of the tawdriness and indecencies that
parade before you on the screen every afternoon and evening
anyway?
The reason I say all this is because it appears the
Republicans are about to nominate a candidate for President who is
going to be hectored and ridiculed throughout the campaign as a
“straight arrow.” And indeed he is. And there isn’t anything to be
embarrassed about in that. When countries like ours find themselves
in such straits, it is very common to reach back to some
fundamentalist group that has maintained standards no longer
supported by the mainstream. The Mormons are such a subculture.
Ever since giving up their detour into polygamy in the 19th
century, they have reformed themselves into a highly moral and
family oriented religious denomination that is a bastion of
traditional values. (If you want to trace your own genealogy, ask
the Mormons.) As someone said on a blog the other day, “Mitt Romney
doesn’t preach traditional morality. He’s lived it.”
And that’s going to be part of this election. Economics
and gas prices are going to be an issue but moral values are going
to play a part as well. Liberals will hate it. Janeane Garofalo
will spew every known obscenity over the radio and produce positive
proof that all Mormons are secret pederasts or libertines — just
like us! It’s going to be important not to stoop to their level.
There’s going to be a lot at stake.
