Preach What You Practice

In Coming Apart, Charles Murray describes the United States as more and more separating into two distinct and disconnected halves. One group is committed to long-term traditional marriage; devoted to caring for and supporting their children, both emotionally and financially; well educated; employed at professional or other high status jobs; concerned about health and fitness; and belong to civic and religious organizations that both help them sustain their lives and contribute to the social welfare of the areas in which they live. As a shorthand, Murray describes these people as living in Belmont.

People in the other group are usually unmarried, or cohabiting, or divorced; often have children outside of marriage; are either employed in menial, short-term jobs or unemployed and living on some form of the dole; use drugs and alcohol for recreation and seldom see medical professionals for preventive care; have low levels of schooling; and do not belong to civic or religious organizations. These people Murray describes as living in Fishtown.

Murray provides an impressive amount of data, covering, more or less, the last 50 years, and all of it based on lives led by whites. He also demonstrates that the trend lines are toward a greater and greater separation. He argues that this presents a very real danger to both our basic political principles: liberty and equality.

I'm not a social scientist by training so I'm not in a position to make a judgment about his use of data or about the conclusions he makes based on the interpretation of those data. But there was one point he made that really got my attention. After describing the lives of the people of Belmont at great length, and supporting his description with a very large set of data, he points out that despite their leading very traditional lives, they are resolutely committed to avoiding judgments about the lives that other people lead. In other words, they practice the virtues but feel morally constrained from preaching the virtues.

As I said, I don't have the kind of data at hand that Murray does, nor would I know what to do with it if I did; my evidence to support this is anecdotal. For several years, I taught people who were in graduate programs to obtain teaching credentials. Every semester, some 20-25% of those students were "returning," more-or-less middle-aged people, most of them women, who had come back to school to earn their credentials and teach.

They were, almost without exception, very good students and a pleasure to have in the classroom because they were thoughtful, interested, inquiring, and willing to grapple with sometimes difficult conceptual and practical questions. On these questions, they were willing to disagree, both in classroom discussion and on paper.

But on one point they were unanimous. They had all led very traditional lives to that point. Although some were recently divorced, most were still married; had put untold time and energy into rearing their children, some of those children with very demanding conditions; were church-goers and involved in local politics; were willing to argue vociferously for better diet and more exercise. But they were also committed without question to the premise that they should not judge, criticize, stigmatize, or condemn the behavior of others.

They were, in other words, moral relativists, without acting like it. My experience is that Murray is right: that the residents of Belmont practice the virtues but are morally resistant to preaching them.

I think of this now because there has been so much talk about the lack of "civility" in public and political discourse. There is no need to provide evidence for this concern; watching the talking-heads yell at one another or following any Comments section on-line would be sufficient to lead one to think that all civility (not to mention logic, precise and correct language, or a dependence on evidence) had long since gone away.

I have come to think of this as a conflict between the lives that the residents of Belmont lead and the public faces that our public institutions, especially our political institutions, put forward. We are all temptable toward acting selfishly, irrationally, and cruelly; and we all need reasons not to give in those temptations. In the past, there were such widely-held standards of decency, such powerful social stigma, and such widely heard preachments from the pulpit and elsewhere, that those reasons not to give in to temptation were all around us. It helped.

Somehow, over the last 50 years certainly and probably over a longer period than that, those standards, stigmas, and preachments became fewer and less influential. And there has been a high price paid.

It is not just that our influential public institutions act badly, speak ill, and provide harmful examples; it is that ordinary people, good people, are worn down and become, if not bad, then apathetic. It feels like its just too much.

I could be wrong, I hope I am, but it seems unlikely that those institutions will decide to act better and provide better examples. But the residents of Belmont are already practicing the virtues, despite the influence of those institutions. Maybe this is weak-minded Romanticism, but perhaps it would help if those virtuous citizens came to realize that practicing the virtues is not enough; that, in fact, it is selfish and tribal. They have an obligation to the republic, an obligation as citizens, to preach what they practice.