1.
The white working class is in horrible decline. The death rate for whites without a college education is increasing markedly; this against a background where the death rates of every other demographic group is decreasing.
The white working class is in horrible decline. The death rate for whites without a college education is increasing markedly; this against a background where the death rates of every other demographic group is decreasing.
What are the causes for the rise in death rates? Not infections. Not war. Not cancer. They are all rooted in dysfunctional behavior--drug addiction, liver failure, suicide. The reason why so many people are dying young can be summed up with one word: despair.
Economics has nothing to do with it. They're dying because they're turning their backs to God. They're dying because they're no longer monogamous. They're dying because they prefer welfare to jobs.
I'm not making this up. This is exactly what many conservatives believe.
A particularly egregious example of right-wing jeremiad against the working class is an article that appeared in the March 28, 2016 edition of The National Review, namely,"Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class's Dysfunction" by Kevin D. Williamson. Summary: the decline of the white working class is solely due to their immorality which is amply demonstrated by their hedonism, by their lack of religious faith, by their lack of commitment to marriage, by obsessive promiscuity and by their refusal to work. All these atrocious habits are enabled by government handouts. Obama might supply them with figurative needles and heroin, that is, welfare and disability checks, which is bad enough, but this isn't the root of the problem. Members of the white-working class are dying because they've made the deliberate decision to shoot themselves up with bad habits.
Again, I'm not making this up. Some quotes from the article: "They failed themselves; they have not been victimized by outside forces." "The problem isn't that Americans cannot sustain families, but that they don't wish to." "The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles." "The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die." His message to those who still live in dystopias: rent a truck and haul your damn ass to wherever jobs are.
Don't founder in Flint; move to Madison. You see, I really wasn't making this up.
2.
I want to make it clear that I believe strongly in personal responsibility. Some, perhaps even a good deal, of the problems in poor communities are caused by poor decisions made by poor people who live in them. But certainly not all. Society has a very powerful effect on us all. The best thing, after condign and loving guidance from friends and family, that can happen to anyone is developing a passion for something in life and pursuing it with every effort one can muster. Second best is to have a job which might be far from perfect, yet pays the bills. Worst of all is to have time on one's hands while one's body and mind lead a meaningless life. To state, as Williamson has, that there have been no outside forces adversely affecting middle-class life is ridiculous. A New Deal-type work program would do much good. To paraphrase Williamson, "The problem isn't that those in power cannot help the middle class, but that they don't want to."
The purpose of this essay is not to detail the neglect of the poor and the undereducated, but to bring to the reader's attention a pernicious and prevalent attitude of so many that are better off, namely the denial of interconnection, the denial of the importance of all citizens, without exception. The economically deprived are dismissed as depraved; they are ignored and considered as "not us" and "the others." The rich socialize and live among the rich; if one is wealthy and doesn't think of the poor, it is as if they do not exist. Am I my bother's keeper? Many conservatives reply with a resounding no.
If you think that members of the white working class are the only ones dismissed as "others,"I would like to quote the far-right Fox News pundit, Bill O'Reilly. When Trump told him that he wanted to bring jobs to poor black communities as well, O'Reilly retorted: "How are you going to bring jobs to people who are unqualified? Many of them are ill-educated and have tattoos on their foreheads!"
No comment.
Williamson is quite specific. The belief that "we're all in this together" is absurd: "One of the worst errors in public life is the common one of mistaking the metaphor for the thing itself. In reality--and reality is not optional--the president is not the national dad and government is neither paternal nor maternal. The nation isn't your family. Your family is your family."
Metaphors, Mr. Williamson, are metaphors; they are not to be taken literally. They are figures of speech which provide either aesthetic pleasure or a greater understanding of our world; the best do both. This specific metaphor uses the strongest bond one has--the family--to help us come to an undeniable truth: everyone and everything is related to everyone and everything else and that this insight should determine how we interact and behave.
Why has it come to this? There must be a balance between commitment to oneself and commitment to others for society to prosper. There is a word for individualism disconnected from concern for others: narcissism. It is as bad as (pseudo)concern for the collective disconnected from the rights of the individual: there are words for this as well, communism, fascism, dictatorship, tyranny. The latter systems of government have brought misery to millions; they have all failed miserably. Democracy is indeed the best form of government; it too begins to fail, however, when all classes don't feel that they are integral parts of a whole. Plutocracy is just as much a threat to democracy from the right as communism is from the left. Communism, however, has been swept away and now is part of the dustbin of history; the threat to democracy from narcissistic plutocrats, however, is very real indeed.
Hillel, as always, is pertinent here. "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" (The importance of the individual.) "If I am only for myself, what am I?" (The importance of working toward liberty and justice for all, with the implication that the individual, without the realization of interconnection, is wasting his life.)
A friend has argued that exploitation of the working class is intrinsic to capitalism; trying to ease the burden of the poor and low-wage earners is mere "tinkering." He paraphrases Reagan: capitalism is not part of the problem, capitalism is the problem. The entire system needs to be replaced, and war is probably the only way to do it.
Such a sanguine attitude to what a twenty-first century world war would be fills me with horror. One shudders to imagine something even worse than World War 11. A nuclear war is needed to solve our problems? No, no, no. I do not believe capitalism is the culprit; the creation of wealth is not a sin. Narcissism, however, is. The best capitalist democratic societies today--Denmark and Canada, for example--are arguably the best societies in the history of the human race. O, do they ever have problems as well; a knowledge of human nature, however, consigns the desire for perfection to the naive. It is quite possible that a regulated--not too much, not too little--capitalist democracy is the best form of government possible, at least at the present time. Ours is very far from the best government possible, and the distance between justice and status quo is widening to an alarming degree. The democracy of the United States is being undermined by narcissistic plutocrats; we need to restore a balance between individuality and justice before it is too late.
3.
The Stone Age ended concomitantly with the end of the last Ice Age, about twelve thousand years ago. Once the period of hunter-gathering ended, civilization advanced rapidly. However, it seems to be a general rule that progress almost always has a downside. Once people settled in communities, individuals had the opportunity to devote themselves to particular tasks. Pottery, poetry, religion and, eventually, philosophy and science; all beacons of light that emerged from the dark. Along with these came priests, pharaohs, kings at the top and peons at the bottom. Along with the beacons of light came the shadows of injustice. Human society became quite hierarchical, and has remained so, in various ways, ever since.
If you don't like any kind of hierarchy and advocate for a thoroughly egalitarian society, you are living in a dreamworld; get your feet back on the ground. The best thing we can do, given human nature and the nature of civilization, is to move-- significantly, why not?--toward a more just society.
How to move in that direction? If one demonizes either the rich or the poor, progress will be fitful at best. An essential modus vivendi entails the conviction that all strata of society are interconnected.
India, with its caste system, is one of the most hierarchical systems on earth. Using the caste system as providing a theoretical framework for a functional society certainly absolves me from the criticism that I would like to remove hierarchy altogether. The following diagram depicts society as a human being, whose various parts (castes) are all essential if society is to move forward:
Traditionally, the brahmins are the thinkers, the kshatriyas are the rulers, the vaisyas are the merchants and the sudras are the laborers. The point I want to make is this: society cannot move forward without its feet! No, Mr. Williamson, I'm not claiming that this metaphor is reality. The value of this metaphor is its illustration of the fact that we cannot move forward if any class is abused, ignored and deemed inessential.
Let us extend the metaphor: if we ignore our feet, treatable wounds can turn gangrenous. Any hope for progress will thus be brought to a standstill. We had better take care of our body politic as well as our bodies; the gross inequality that exists in America today will continue to slow us down, perhaps even cripple us, perhaps even kill us, if we don't. What good is a head if the rest of the body is dead?
Don't founder in Flint; move to Madison. You see, I really wasn't making this up.
2.
I want to make it clear that I believe strongly in personal responsibility. Some, perhaps even a good deal, of the problems in poor communities are caused by poor decisions made by poor people who live in them. But certainly not all. Society has a very powerful effect on us all. The best thing, after condign and loving guidance from friends and family, that can happen to anyone is developing a passion for something in life and pursuing it with every effort one can muster. Second best is to have a job which might be far from perfect, yet pays the bills. Worst of all is to have time on one's hands while one's body and mind lead a meaningless life. To state, as Williamson has, that there have been no outside forces adversely affecting middle-class life is ridiculous. A New Deal-type work program would do much good. To paraphrase Williamson, "The problem isn't that those in power cannot help the middle class, but that they don't want to."
The purpose of this essay is not to detail the neglect of the poor and the undereducated, but to bring to the reader's attention a pernicious and prevalent attitude of so many that are better off, namely the denial of interconnection, the denial of the importance of all citizens, without exception. The economically deprived are dismissed as depraved; they are ignored and considered as "not us" and "the others." The rich socialize and live among the rich; if one is wealthy and doesn't think of the poor, it is as if they do not exist. Am I my bother's keeper? Many conservatives reply with a resounding no.
If you think that members of the white working class are the only ones dismissed as "others,"I would like to quote the far-right Fox News pundit, Bill O'Reilly. When Trump told him that he wanted to bring jobs to poor black communities as well, O'Reilly retorted: "How are you going to bring jobs to people who are unqualified? Many of them are ill-educated and have tattoos on their foreheads!"
No comment.
Williamson is quite specific. The belief that "we're all in this together" is absurd: "One of the worst errors in public life is the common one of mistaking the metaphor for the thing itself. In reality--and reality is not optional--the president is not the national dad and government is neither paternal nor maternal. The nation isn't your family. Your family is your family."
Metaphors, Mr. Williamson, are metaphors; they are not to be taken literally. They are figures of speech which provide either aesthetic pleasure or a greater understanding of our world; the best do both. This specific metaphor uses the strongest bond one has--the family--to help us come to an undeniable truth: everyone and everything is related to everyone and everything else and that this insight should determine how we interact and behave.
Why has it come to this? There must be a balance between commitment to oneself and commitment to others for society to prosper. There is a word for individualism disconnected from concern for others: narcissism. It is as bad as (pseudo)concern for the collective disconnected from the rights of the individual: there are words for this as well, communism, fascism, dictatorship, tyranny. The latter systems of government have brought misery to millions; they have all failed miserably. Democracy is indeed the best form of government; it too begins to fail, however, when all classes don't feel that they are integral parts of a whole. Plutocracy is just as much a threat to democracy from the right as communism is from the left. Communism, however, has been swept away and now is part of the dustbin of history; the threat to democracy from narcissistic plutocrats, however, is very real indeed.
Hillel, as always, is pertinent here. "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" (The importance of the individual.) "If I am only for myself, what am I?" (The importance of working toward liberty and justice for all, with the implication that the individual, without the realization of interconnection, is wasting his life.)
A friend has argued that exploitation of the working class is intrinsic to capitalism; trying to ease the burden of the poor and low-wage earners is mere "tinkering." He paraphrases Reagan: capitalism is not part of the problem, capitalism is the problem. The entire system needs to be replaced, and war is probably the only way to do it.
Such a sanguine attitude to what a twenty-first century world war would be fills me with horror. One shudders to imagine something even worse than World War 11. A nuclear war is needed to solve our problems? No, no, no. I do not believe capitalism is the culprit; the creation of wealth is not a sin. Narcissism, however, is. The best capitalist democratic societies today--Denmark and Canada, for example--are arguably the best societies in the history of the human race. O, do they ever have problems as well; a knowledge of human nature, however, consigns the desire for perfection to the naive. It is quite possible that a regulated--not too much, not too little--capitalist democracy is the best form of government possible, at least at the present time. Ours is very far from the best government possible, and the distance between justice and status quo is widening to an alarming degree. The democracy of the United States is being undermined by narcissistic plutocrats; we need to restore a balance between individuality and justice before it is too late.
3.
The Stone Age ended concomitantly with the end of the last Ice Age, about twelve thousand years ago. Once the period of hunter-gathering ended, civilization advanced rapidly. However, it seems to be a general rule that progress almost always has a downside. Once people settled in communities, individuals had the opportunity to devote themselves to particular tasks. Pottery, poetry, religion and, eventually, philosophy and science; all beacons of light that emerged from the dark. Along with these came priests, pharaohs, kings at the top and peons at the bottom. Along with the beacons of light came the shadows of injustice. Human society became quite hierarchical, and has remained so, in various ways, ever since.
If you don't like any kind of hierarchy and advocate for a thoroughly egalitarian society, you are living in a dreamworld; get your feet back on the ground. The best thing we can do, given human nature and the nature of civilization, is to move-- significantly, why not?--toward a more just society.
How to move in that direction? If one demonizes either the rich or the poor, progress will be fitful at best. An essential modus vivendi entails the conviction that all strata of society are interconnected.
India, with its caste system, is one of the most hierarchical systems on earth. Using the caste system as providing a theoretical framework for a functional society certainly absolves me from the criticism that I would like to remove hierarchy altogether. The following diagram depicts society as a human being, whose various parts (castes) are all essential if society is to move forward:
Traditionally, the brahmins are the thinkers, the kshatriyas are the rulers, the vaisyas are the merchants and the sudras are the laborers. The point I want to make is this: society cannot move forward without its feet! No, Mr. Williamson, I'm not claiming that this metaphor is reality. The value of this metaphor is its illustration of the fact that we cannot move forward if any class is abused, ignored and deemed inessential.
Let us extend the metaphor: if we ignore our feet, treatable wounds can turn gangrenous. Any hope for progress will thus be brought to a standstill. We had better take care of our body politic as well as our bodies; the gross inequality that exists in America today will continue to slow us down, perhaps even cripple us, perhaps even kill us, if we don't. What good is a head if the rest of the body is dead?
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