Charles Murray is the most influential sociologist in the country
today. His 1982 book Losing Ground provided much of the
intellectual rationale for the Reagan administration’s welfare
policies. More recently, Rep. Paul Ryan claims Murray as his
specialist on urban affairs, while columnist George Will has labeled
him “the
most consequential and conservative contemporary social scientist.”
Murray’s
latest book, Coming
Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,
provoked a great deal of debate in its portrait of white America
increasingly split into two separate worlds based on income,
education and values, with almost no shared culture remaining to link
the two.
But one aspect of the book has
received less attention. In defining the common culture that formerly
united Americans, Murray refers to the Founding Fathers’ use of the
word “virtue,” which, in his definition, is composed of four
values: industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion. Murray’s
argument is that, though such values remain strongly held by the
upper twenty percent of white America, they are much less deeply felt
among the bottom thirty percent.
While
Murray is correct to say that the country was founded largely on the
ideal of virtue, he misses the central meaning of the word. Though
the characteristics he lists were supplementary parts of the concept,
what Americans in the Revolutionary era primarily meant by virtue was
a willingness to put the public good above self-interest. As
historian Gordon Wood wrote in his classic The Creation of the
American Republic, 1776-1787, while in a monarchy people could be
restrained by force, “in a republic, . . . each man must somehow be
persuaded to submerge his personal wants into the greater good of the
whole. This willingness of the individual to sacrifice his private
interests for the good of the community [was what] the eighteenth
century termed ‘public virtue’.”
In other words, the political vision of Murray and many contemporary
conservatives significantly diminishes the value of community, which
was absolutely central to the political ideology that inspired the
Founding Fathers.
It
wasn’t always this way. Historian Warren Susman identified what he
termed the “traditional definitions of conservatism: the organic
society, the need for order, for roots, for place.” In a word,
community.
After
the American Revolution there began to develop an increasing emphasis
on individualism, especially in the aftermath of the market
revolution of the early 1800s. But most conservatives sought to
balance this individualism with a strong sense of the common good.
Herbert Hoover, for instance, one of the most intelligent
conservatives of the early twentieth century, argued in his 1922 book
American Individualism for a combination of economic
self-interest with a call for each person to recognize the divine
element in every other person, and thus willingly work for the common
good. It was, in the words of Hoover’s biographer Joan Hoff Wilson,
“an attempt to reconcile individualism and cooperation through
voluntarism.”
Similarly,
Russell Kirk, the leading intellectual light of post-World War II
conservatism, included community among the ten general principles of
conservatism, saying, “It is the performance of our duties in
community that teaches us prudence and efficiency and charity.”
And
yet the concept of the public good has been largely missing from
conservative thought in the last forty years. As economist Milton
Friedman explained the moral and social obligations of capitalists in
1974, “So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they
stay within the law, have responsibilities . . . other than to make
as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to
that is, no they do not.”
As
journalist Will Bunch comments, one of the ways Ronald Reagan
transformed American political discourse was by making it so “that
the notion of sacrifice is to be ridiculed.” Thus, in the wake of
the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush eschewed calls for
sacrifice or public-spiritedness, and instead urged Americans to
express their patriotism through personal consumption, saying, “Do
your business around the country. . . . Get down to Disney World in
Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be
enjoyed."
Other
conservatives, like former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan
Greenspan and Paul Ryan, have long been under the thrall of Ayn Rand
who preached the virtues of greed and selfishness, the opposite of
Kirk’s prudence and charity. It’s the same kind of thinking that
has made a hero of Cliven Bundy, a man whose sole claim to fame is
his conviction that he is above the law.
As
Gordon Wood said, in the Founding Fathers’ vision, “a republic
was such a delicate polity precisely because it demanded an
extraordinary moral character in the people. Every state in which
people participated needed a degree of virtue; but a republic which
rested solely on the people absolutely required it.”
Isn’t that a vision worth conserving?
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