Coming Apart—The State Of White America

Charles Murray has written an important book with the above title. This book has received 3 top level reviews lately, 2 in the Wall Street Journal and 1 in the New York Times.

The book describes the development of two, here to fore, new classes of people in White America, i.e., the new upper class and the new lower class. I’ll make some comments on the new upper class in this blog post.

The new upper class is a group of people who were selected out of the upper middle class by their superior intelligence and by their elite educations at premier universities, such as Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, etc. These people are the upper level of our present day movers and shakers in government, business, communications, and education. They are the drivers of the new and important cultural, financial, and social changes we see in our country. They were raised in homes of very affluent parents and born into the baby boom generation.

One characteristic of this new class of people is their isolation from mainstream America. They do not participate in the activities of ordinary Americans to a great extent. They make much more money; they live in their own residential compounds, mostly in the neighborhood of New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Los Angeles; they maintain stable families; they do not smoke; they take different vacations from ordinary Americans; they exercise a lot; they are not overweight; etc., etc.

We have a lot of things in our lives for which we can thank this new upper class. They are the innovators of most of the good material things we have in our lives, e.g., advances in technology and medicine. While the author accurately describes this new upper class of Americans, he fails to assess the value of spiritual life they manifest.

I would imagine that when God looks at this group of overeducated, elitist, snobs, He might not have a very rosy appreciation of them. Nevertheless, they are with us; and we had better understand them—they control our lives more than we, perhaps, know.