Our attention has been drawn to
these changes by a recent book by Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America. R. R. Reno has also
pointed out the same thing in an opening article in First Things for
August/September 2013, which he titled War on
the Weak.
These writers and others are pointing
out to us that there is a developing division among our people between the
educated, socially prominent, administratively powerful, and (resultantly)
wealthy on the one hand. And…on the other hand are the uneducated, the working
class disenfranchised, the socially weak and administratively impotent. The
first group is becoming richer while being able to avoid the pitfalls of social
deterioration. The second group is falling victim to high-school dropout,
single-parent homes, drugs, smoking, crime, and poverty. The first group lives
in gated communities; the second group lives in inner-city ghettos and run down
housing projects. The first group includes the politicians, university
professors, and the media programmers. The second group can hardly find any
kind of work.
The second class of people, whom I
will call the underclass, used to be able to keep their life in order because
of fixed social norms that told them how to behave. Examples: Boys play with
toy guns; girls play with dolls. Clean up your plate. Don’t spend more money
than you have in the bank. Always tell the truth. Working hard will get you ahead
in life. Boys open doors for girls—etc., etc. Those simple rules have given way
to relativeness, inclusiveness, diversity, affirmative action, and other
varieties of political correctness.
The more fortunate, whom I will
call the upper-class, have been able to keep these norms intact for the most
part in their social lives; but they have come to espouse liberalized, “progressive,”
allowances that disavow the old-fashioned admonitions. Now, so they say, “anything
goes;” but…they still teach their own children to avoid these destructive ways
of thinking and living. Out-of-wedlock pregnancies are rare in the upper-class;
drug use is slight; and dropping out of high school is anathema.
This upper-class of citizens is
the one that determines the mores of the society via their control of the
media, the universities, and the judiciary. This class has developed an “enhanced
morality” that can promulgate a free-living life style for anyone who wants it
while, at the same time, preserving a chaste and self-controlled mystique for
themselves. This class is the “strong,” as named by Reno.
The underclass, i.e., the “weak,”
in the words of Reno, needs social and moral structure in order to avoid chaos
in their personal and social lives. But…that structure is missing from our
politically correct society. Our dominant culture refuses to meet this need.
Indeed, it rejects it root-and-branch, consistently treating clear moral
strictures with suspicion, seeing them as dangerous regressions back into Middle
Ages morality.
I believe we will never get out of
this conundrum until we get back to Christian principles as a society. Only
Christ has the answer. Other religions fail to produce the goods that Christ
can offer. Islam produces violence. Eastern religions fail the give personal significance,
which is the source of human dignity. Atheism and western-style philosophy only
lead to nihilism and its complete lack of human fulfillment. Christ is the
answer.
Our way out of this morass of
cultural relativeness is not better politicians, academics, economists, and
other people planners. Our only hope is that our people (and especially our
young people) will not retreat into a materialistic, self-seeking, behavior
pattern, that idolizes sex and selfishness. We need real cultural and
religious leaders who put Christ at the forefront of their life efforts. These
kinds of people will never come out of our present “progressive” culture that
only sees quick fixes to our social and cultural problems. We must get at the root causes of our social deterioration before any
lasting correction can be obtained. The cure can only be found in Christ.
It must be noted that there is a
subset of young people in America who come from the upper-class, but who have
co-opted the morals and values of the under-class. You can read about these
young people in an article in Imprimis about Sex at Harvard and in a book by
Christian Smith, Souls in Transition. I wrote a review of this book on
4/10/2012; and if you are interested in this subject, you can access that
review in the list of my blog posts.
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