California Conservative

Charles Murray wrote an interesting article titled, “The Hallmark of the Underclass,” and subtitled, “The poverty Katrina underscored is primarily moral, not material.”

That alone should be enough to make liberals scream and pull their hair out. Too many liberals live in a make-believe world where all people are good and productive unless something (poverty, racism) stands in their way. Take away the “something” and the problem is solved. In their world, the enlightened don’t need morality; morality is a tool to control the sheep.

Reality is different. In reality there are some people who eschew paid employment as something akin to slavery and prefer to live off their own cunning — never seeming to make the connection between their continued poverty and the quality of their scheming. In reality there are people too lazy to work who see no point in it when the government will provide all they need. In reality there are people who are unemployable because of drug addiction who have not the slightest interest in cleaning up and probably never will.

These are, at the heart, moral failings. Murray writes:

Criminality is the most extreme manifestation of the unsocialized young male. Another is the proportion of young males who choose not to work. Among black males ages 20-24, for example, the percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. That figure grew during the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing at around 20% during the 1980s. The proportion rose again, reaching 30% in 1999, a year when employers were frantically seeking workers for every level of job. The dropout rate among young white males is lower, but has been increasing faster than among blacks.

These increases are not explained by changes in college enrollment or any other benign cause. Large numbers of healthy young men, at ages when labor force participation used to be close to universal, have dropped out. Remember that these numbers ignore young males already in prison. Include them in the calculation, and the evidence of the deteriorating socialization of young males, concentrated in low income groups, is overwhelming.

Why has the proportion of unsocialized young males risen so relentlessly? In large part, I would argue, because the proportion of young males who have grown up without fathers has also risen relentlessly. The indicator here is the illegitimacy ratio–the percentage of live births that occur to single women. It was a minuscule 4% in the early 1950s, and it has risen substantially in every subsequent decade. The ratio reached the 25% milestone in 1988 and the 33% milestone in 1999. As of 2003, the figure was
35%–of all births, including whites. The black illegitimacy ratio in 2003 was 68%. By way of comparison: The illegitimacy ratio that caused Daniel Patrick Moynihan to proclaim the breakdown of the black family in the early 1960s was 24%.

Those are some pretty telling numbers. Let’s look at these:

The percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. The illegitimacy ratio was a minuscule 4% in the early 1950s.

The percentage who were not working or looking for work reached 30% in 1999. The illegitimacy ratio reached 33% in 1999.

Bear in mind that the illegitimacy ratio has risen over the last 5 decades in spite of the increased availability, ease and affordability of birth control, as well as the national legalization of abortion. It could easily be argued that, if not for those two factors, the illegitimacy rate would be substantially higher.

There is nothing here, however, that argues that illegitimate births are the cause of chosen unemployment, although it may be true that the unemployed have more time for making babies. Each set of figures refers to those 18+, thus the illegitimate babies born in 1999 are hardly the same people not looking for work. The comparison is between those not looking for work and those having babies out of wedlock. This illustrates a common moral base, or lack of.

In the 1950s the prevailing moral culture was essentially the “work hard and get a house with a white picket fence, a wife, 2.5 kids and a dog.” Those who did not conform were shunned. Even growing up in the 60s I was warned against being friends with a certain girl because, and as far as I know only because, the mother she lived with was a single divorcee. Being divorced, being illegitimate, having a criminal record carried stigmas.

Surely these stigmas were often unfair to those involved, but the fear of that sort of social punishment did much to keep people from engaging in certain types of immoral behavior. Thus even those who did not share the moral beliefs nevertheless lived by them.

What was substantially different about the 90s was the almost complete lack of such stigmas, along with the even more destructive erosion of moral values themselves. Many of the children of the 70s and 80s were raised with an “anything goes” and “if it feels good do it” mentality, by people who did not believe in absolute morality, but in relative morality. The great failing of relative morality, of course, is that anyone with good rationalization skills can make anything morally right.

Radical feminism has likewise played a part in the marginalization of entire generations of men. Radical feminism - that is, the belief that women are not just equal but superior - has fed a culture that tells boys that they are not needed. Single moms will do just fine raising the kids. Women don’t need a man to be the bread winner. Men are even discouraged from being the protectors by the pacifists among us, many of whom seem to work in the public school system. Tell a person often enough that he’s irrelevant and he’ll eventually believe it, and that, in part, is what has happened to today’s young men.

Many argue that people SHOULD be free to live as they choose without stigma for choices that essentially hurt no one else. But that argument ignores the reality that these choices DO hurt people, both those doing the choosing and those around them, even though it is not immediate or even readily apparent.

Remember the saying, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste?” Those who choose a life of crime or welfare in order to avoid the tedium and responsibility of a job are wasting their potential. That’s bad enough, but each of those people also hurts others, for example, through higher taxes to pay for their policing, incarceration, and welfare. And there are others who pay a much higher price, such as their children.

We, as a country and as a united people, need to value our children, both boys and girls. We need to return to teaching them the value of honesty, hard work, and delayed gratification. That to do what is right is an end in itself. Those who live in poverty out of hard luck need to be given a hand up. Those who choose a life of crime must be locked up. Welfare should be a short-term solution, not a way of life. We need to value the family and help families stay together through hard times. The real solutions to the problem can’t come from government programs, they must come from people, from society. We, the people, need to step up to the plate and stop expecting government to solve all of our problems.

Cross-posted at Boxer Watch

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2005 at 10:59 am and is filed under Culture, Humanitarian, Miscellania. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.