Charles Murray on Coming Apart

This week on Uncommon Knowledge, longtime American Enterprise Institute fellow Charles Murray discusses his controversial new book, Coming Apart, about what American was, is, and will become. He also reveals his personal score on his now famous “bubble quiz.” Take the quiz here http://www.scribd.com/doc/77349055/Co…

24:48
let’s talk about the functioning of a
free society because that’s what I go
back to the founders were unanimous in
saying this Constitution will not work
with just any kind of population the
population must possess certain virtues
and this virtue virtue chef this is not
just one or two founders who said this
they all did and they also focused on
four that were crucial all of them agree
there were others that they had in the
list but these four were central the

  1. integrity of marriage
  2. industriousness
  3. religiosity and up
  4. plain american
    honesty

and they said you know without
those you cannot have a self-governing
population the trends that i described
in Fishtown
are in effect saying that the virtues
required to be a self-governing
community are slipping toward a tipping
point beyond return and at that point we
will have a permanent lower class that
is different in kind from a lower class
that the united states has had before
in
that it is both sizeable and it is no
longer participating in american
institutions so you will have you will
have an upper class that will still be
living a fine life and the middle class
will be doing fairly well but something
very fundamental to the common the
universality of being an American let
the embrace that it that it intended to
have of all people that’ll be gone and
that is going to be a huge loss it’s
also going to
induce the creation of an extensive
welfare state far beyond the one we have
now from coming apart a few statistics
Charles I’ll just run through a few of
those you present voted in the
presidential election down 22 percent
from 1960 to 1996 attended a public
meeting on town or school affairs down
35 percent from 1973 to 1994 served as
26:47
an officer of some club or organization
26:50
you talk about the Elks and rotary and
26:53
so forth local organization 42 percent
26:56
from 73 to 94 percentage of parents with
26:59
children under age 18 who were members
27:01
of the PTA down 61% from 1960 to 1997
27:08
and these statistics tell us what well
27:12
these come by the way from Bowling Alone
27:15
the excellent book written by Robert
27:18
Putnam about a decade ago they are
27:21
represent across the American population
27:23
those reductions the native question
27:26
that arises well were these evenly split
27:28
across right they were not so that these
27:32
reductions are concentrated in Fishtown
27:34
in the working-class community and it’s
27:36
and what difference does that make
27:38
well the social capital because that’s
27:42
the social scientists phrase for it is
27:45
another word for what has been the glue
27:48
of American community which has been the
27:51
spirit and the vitality of American
27:52
community and that goes away and it’s
27:56
all linked up with the other trends that
27:58
we’ve discussed in previous segments
28:00
religiosity who accounts for these
28:03
wonderful kinds of social capital Robert
28:06
Putnam says about half of all social
28:08
capital comes directly from the
28:10
religious population and even more comes
28:12
from it because religious people are
28:14
more likely to be engaged in secular
28:16
forms of social capital than
28:18
non-religious people so you’re looking
28:20
at a real mess focused on Fishtown not
28:24
in belmont coming apart quote the big
28:27
question is whether the remaining levels
28:29
of social trust in Fishtown are enough
28:31
to sustain anything approaching the
28:34
traditional expectations of a
28:36
American neighborliness and local
28:37
problem solving it is hard for me

The Who-Can-Beat Trump Test Leads to Kamala Harris

Bringing the energy and hope to stare down Trump and his movement.

Nations, like people, may change somewhat, but not in their essential characteristics. The United States is defined by space and hope. It is an optimistic country of can-do strivers. They took the risk of coming to a new land. They are suspicious of government, inclined to self-reliance. Europeans ask where you came from. Americans ask what you can do.

The Declaration of Independence posited a universal idea, that human beings are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Americans, then, embraced an idea, however flawed in execution, when they became a nation. Their government, whatever else it does, exists to safeguard and further that idea, in the United States and beyond.

President Trump, in the name of making American great again, has trampled on America’s essence. He is angry, a stranger to happiness, angrier still for not knowing the source of his rage. He is less interested in liberty than the cash of his autocratic cronies. As for life, he views it as a selective right, to which the white Christian male has priority access, with women, people of color and the rest of humanity trailing along behind for scraps.

Adherents to an agenda of “national conservatism” held a conference last month in Washington dedicated, as my colleague Jennifer Schuessler put it, “to wresting a coherent ideology out of the chaos of the Trumpist moment.”

Good luck with that. One of the meeting’s leading lights was Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review. Lowry’s forthcoming book is called “The Case for Nationalism.” Enough said. The endpoint of that “case” is on display at military cemeteries across Europe.

Nationalism, self-pitying and aggressive, seeks to change the present in the name of an illusory past in order to create a future vague in all respects except its glory. Trump is a self-styled nationalist. The “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” chants at his rallies have chilling echoes.

Lowry holds that “America is not an idea” and to call it so is a “lazy cliché.” This argument denies the essence of the country — an essence palpable at every naturalization ceremony across the United States. Becoming American is a process that involves the inner absorption of the nation’s founding idea.

The gravest thing Trump has done is to empty this idea of meaning. His has been an assault on honesty, decency, dignity, tolerance and civility. On this president’s wish list, every right is alienable. He leads a movement more than he does a nation, and so depends on fear to mobilize people. Any victorious Democratic Party candidate in 2020 has to counter that negative energy with a positive energy that lifts Americans from Trump’s web.

I watched the Democratic Party debates among presidential contenders through a single prism: Who can beat Trump? In the end, nothing else matters because another five and a half years of this will drag Americans into an abyss of moral collapse.

Yes, how far left, how moderate that candidate may be is of some significance, but can he or she bring the heat and the hope to stare Trump down and topple him is all I care about. That’s the bouncing ball all eyes should be on, with no illusions as to how vicious and devious Trump will be between now and November 2020.

With reluctance, because he is a good and honorable man of great personal courage, I do not believe that Joe Biden has the needed energy, mental agility and nimbleness. Nor do I believe that the nation of can-do strivers I described above is ready for Bernie Sanders’s “democratic socialism.” Forms of socialism work in Europe, and the word is widely misunderstood in America, but socialism and America’s essence are incompatible.

Elizabeth Warren’s couching of a campaign for radical change as “economic patriotism” is a much smarter way to go, and her energetic advocacy of ideas to redress the growing injustices in American life has been powerful. Still, I am not convinced that enough Americans are ready to move as far left as she proposes or that she passes the critical commander in chief test.

Kamala Harris does that for me. The California senator is a work in progress, with

  • uneven debate performances, and policies, notably health care, that she has zigzagged toward defining. But she’s
  • tough, broadly of the center,
  • has a great American story, is passionate on issues including immigrants, African-Americans and women, and has
  • proved she is not averse to risk. She
  • has a former prosecutor’s toughness and the ability to slice through Trump’s self-important bluster.

Last month Harris said Trump was a “predator.” She continued: “The thing about predators you should know, is that they prey on the vulnerable. They prey on those who they do not believe are strong. And the thing you must importantly know, predators are cowards.”

Those were important words. It’s early days, but Trump’s biggest electoral vulnerability is to women. They have seen through his misogyny at last, and they know just where the testosterone of nationalism leads.

Richard Rohr Meditation: Connecting to the Eternal

[While] European mystics and contemplatives often lived in community, they tended to focus on the individual experience of encountering the divine presence. African American contemplatives turned the “inward journey” into a communal experience. . . . The word contemplation includes but does not require silence or solitude. Instead, contemplative practices can be identified in public prayers, meditative dance movements, and musical cues that move the entire congregation toward a communal listening and entry into communion with a living God. . . .

.. This is how Howard Thurman describes the embodied locus of contemplation:

There is in every person an inward sea, and in that sea is an island and on that island there is an altar and standing guard before that altar is the “angel with the flaming sword.” Nothing can get by that angel to be placed upon that altar unless it has the mark of your inner authority. Nothing passes . . . unless it be a part of the “fluid area of your consent.” This is your crucial link with the Eternal. [1]

 . . As I see it, the human task is threefold.

  1. First, the human spirit must connect to the Eternal by turning toward God’s immanence and ineffability with yearning.
  2. Second, each person must explore the inner reality of his or her humanity, facing unmet potential and catastrophic failure with unmitigated honesty and grace.
  3. Finally, each one of us must face the unlovable neighbor, the enemy outside of our embrace, and the shadow skulking in the recesses of our own hearts.

Only then can we declare God’s perplexing and unlikely peace on earth. These tasks require a knowledge of self and others that only comes from the centering down that Thurman advocates. It is not an escape from the din of daily life; rather, it requires full entry into the fray but on different terms. . . . Always, contemplation requires attentiveness to the Spirit of God. .