Fishtown vs. Belmont
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010
by Charles Murray
Crown Forum, 2012
(416 pages, $27.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Denyse O'Leary
The American working class, according to Charles Murray's recent book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, is letting go of everything that distinguished it decades ago, including work, marriage, volunteering, and churchgoing. But the middle class, for the most part, isn't.
His thesis, that the United States is dividing starkly into an upper and a lower class, hit the talk shops at the end of January as a surprise for many. Famously—well, infamously, really—the working class in the 2000s has been described as clinging bitterly to guns and religion. Actually, if sociologist Charles Murray is right, they may be clinging to guns but surely not to religion.
The critics' reaction has been curious. Many don't trouble to offer a convincing case against his thesis; they simply imply that virtuous people should not accept it. That's not much of a counter-argument against masses of data. Hostile reviews tend to nitpick, settle scores, or assign blame, which Murray refuses to do. Such tactics focus attention away from the big picture, which he describes as follows.
Letting Go of Marriage
In working-class neighborhoods like Murray's statistically emblematic "Fishtown," nonmarital births as of 2008 were around 43 to 48 percent of all births. In nearby middle-class neighborhoods like his emblematic "Belmont," they were around 6 to 8 percent (p. 163).
One outcome is that when Belmonters defend the mass lone-motherhood lifestyle in the media, they are usually talking about something with which they have no personal experience. Primatologist Sarah Hrdy, discussing what we can learn from apes, conceded to a Scientific American reviewer that children thrive best in two-parent families. Then she challenged:
But we don't know, for example, that those children are better off than they would be if they were in a family with a mother and a father and a grandmother and nieces and nephews in the family, or if they were better off with a grandmother, an aunt, and a mother. (Interview with Eric Michael Johnson, March 16, 2012)
The whiff from the groves of academe is rather pungent here. A parent group consisting of a grandmother, an aunt, and a mother is likely a product of three failed relationships with men. In a decaying neighborhood, it is probably also poor, fragile, and vulnerable. Put another way, some research projects really aren't worth doing.
Commentator Mark Steyn provides this snapshot of lone motherhood:
Denyse O'Leary is a columnist for Salvo magazine, and co-author, with Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain (HarperOne).
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