I mentioned these facts at a recent conference, and one of my fellow panelists erupted in anger. “Yes, but who do you think caused the decline of the black family? Clearly it is the result of slavery.” He went on to remind me that in no southern state were slaves legally permitted to marry and that masters periodically broke up families and sold off children. All of this is sadly true. And the argument sounds so reasonable that it is only by looking at the facts that we see that it is largely erroneous. In the early part of the twentieth century W. E. B. DuBois published his study of the black family in which he pointed out that the illegitimacy rate for blacks in the United States was around 20 percent.25 From 1900 to 1965 the black illegitimacy rate remained roughly at that figure.26 Indeed, in 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan did his famous report on the Negro family and announced a national scandal: the black illegitimacy rate had reached 25 percent.27
Let us concede that slavery was primarily responsible for that figure. After emancipation, however, African-Americans made strenuous attempts to reunite and rebuild their families. This is a black success story that is not well known. (Black activists don’t publicize it because it disrupts the profitable narrative of victimization.) Ironically, it is during the period from 1965 to the present—a period that saw the Great Society, the civil rights laws, affirmative action, welfare, and other attempts to integrate blacks into the mainstream and raise their standard of living—that the black family disintegrated. Today that disintegration has reached the point that the typical African-American child is born out of wedlock.
The African-American sociologist William Julius Wilson concedes the existence of cultural pathologies like illegitimacy and high crime rates in the black community. He blames these not on slavery but on racism, poverty, and unemployment.28 Wilson points out, for example, that a young black man who doesn’t have a job is in no position to support a family. Who should be surprised, therefore, that he gets a girl pregnant and refuses to marry her? The problem with Wilson’s analysis is that it ignores the historical record. Consider the period of the 1930s in the segregationist South. Racism, poverty, and unemployment were rampant. Yet what was the black illegitimacy rate? It remained at 20 percent! The black crime rate? It was a lot lower than it is now. Neither Wilson nor anyone else has explained why, at a time when economic and social conditions have greatly improved for blacks, these cultural problems have worsened.
Let me summarize my argument by reexamining the debate in the early twentieth century between W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. Although the debate focused on black Americans, it is relevant to the question of how any group starting out at the bottom can advance in society. DuBois, a distinguished scholar and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), argued that African-Americans in the United States face one big problem, and it is racism. Washington, who was born a slave but went on to become head of the Tuskegee Institute, maintained that African-Americans face two big problems. One is racism, he conceded. The other, he said, is black cultural disadvantage. Washington said that black crime rates were too high, black savings rates were too low, blacks did not have enough respect for educational achievement.
DuBois countered that these problems, if they existed, were due to the legacy of slavery and racism. Washington did not disagree, but he insisted that, whatever their source, these cultural problems demanded attention. What is the point of having rights, Washington said, without the ability to exercise those rights and compete effectively with other groups? To put the matter in contemporary terms, there is little benefit in having the right to a job at General Motors if you don’t know how to do the job. Washington further argued that if these cultural deficiencies were not addressed, they would help to strengthen racism by giving it an empirical foundation.
The civil rights movement, led by the NAACP, fought for decades to implement the DuBois program and secure basic rights for black Americans. This was a necessary campaign, and ultimately it was successful. The laws were changed, and blacks achieved their goal of full citizenship. Obviously enforcement remained an issue, but at this point, it seems to me, the DuBois program was largely achieved. At this crucial juncture the civil rights movement should have moved from the DuBois agenda to the Booker T. Washington agenda.
Unfortunately, this did not happen. It still hasn’t happened. Even today the NAACP and other civil rights groups continue to “agitate, agitate, agitate” to achieve black progress. This is the approach that Jesse Jackson has perfected. It draws on the language and tactics of political struggle to make gains. But how significant are those gains? A few years ago I was in Washington, D.C., and there was a big march on the mall. All the major civil rights groups were represented. Several speakers ascended the podium, thumped their fists, and said, “We’ve got to go to Bill Clinton and demand 300,000 new jobs.” Now this was during the impeachment controversy, and anyone who had been following the news knew that Bill Clinton had found it incredibly difficult to get one job—for Monica Lewinsky. Where did the man have 300,000 jobs to give anyone? The fact is that the civil rights leadership continues to pursue a strategy that has run its course, that no longer pays real dividends.
Meanwhile, there is another group that is following the Booker T. Washington strategy, and that is the nonwhite immigrants. I don’t mean just the Koreans and the Asian Indians; I also mean black immigrants—the West Indians, the Haitians, the Nigerians. All are darker than African-Americans, and yet white racism does not seem to stop them. The immigrants know that racism today is not systematic, it is episodic, and they are able to find ways to navigate around its obstacles. Even immigrants who start out at the very bottom are making rapid gains, surging ahead of African-Americans and claiming the American dream for themselves. West Indians, for instance, have established a strong business and professional community, and have nearly achieved income parity with whites.29
How is this possible? The immigrants don’t spend a lot of time contemplating the hardships of the past; their gaze is firmly fixed on the future. They recognize that education and entrepreneurship are the fastest ladders to success in America. They push their children to study, so that they will be admitted to Berkeley and MIT, and they pool their resources and set up small businesses, so that they can make some money and move to the suburbs. There are plenty of hurdles along the way, but the immigrant is sustained by the hope that he, or his children, will be able to break the chain of necessity and pursue the American dream.
Thus we find that any group that is trying to move up in America and succeed is confronted with two possible strategies—the immigrant strategy and the Jesse Jackson strategy—and it is an empirical question as to which one works better. So far the evidence is overwhelming that the immigrant approach of assimilating to the cultural strategies of success is vastly better for group uplift than the Jesse Jackson approach of political agitation.
One of the blessings of living in a multiracial society is that we can learn from one another. Black Americans have contributed greatly to America by pressuring the country to live up to its highest principles. As an immigrant, I owe a tremendous debt to the black civil rights movement for opening up doors that would otherwise have remained closed. All Americans have a lot to learn from African-Americans about suffering, about dignity, about creativity, and about charm. But it is also a fact that the black leadership can learn a lot from the immigrants, especially black immigrants. African-Americans can move up faster if they focus less on manufacturing representation and more on building intellectual and economic skills. In this way blacks can achieve a level of competitive success that is ultimately the best, and final, refutation of “rumors of inferiority.”
Martin Luther King once said that ultimately every man must write with his own hand the charter of his emancipation proclamation. What he meant by this is that in a decent society, citizens will be granted equality of rights under the law. We do have that right, but we do not have any more rights than this. African-Amer
icans were not always granted legal equality, but now they have it, and it is all that they are entitled to. King’s point is that what we do with our rights, what we make of ourselves, the kind of script that we write of our lives, this finally is up to us.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHEN VIRTUE LOSES ALL HER LOVELINESS
Freedom and Its Abuses
Hey! American man! You are a godless
homosexual rapist of your grandmother’s pet goat.
—SALMAN RUSHDIE
THE MOST SERIOUS CHARGE AGAINST AMERICA IS NOT that it is an oppressive society, or one that denies freedom and opportunity to minorities. It is the charge that America is an immoral society. Islamic fundamentalists hold that the United States and the West may be materially advanced but they are morally decadent. This is not a new perspective. Muslim travelers to the West have frequently commented on what they regard as the low state of Western morality, especially in the sexual domain. In one medieval Muslim account, a Frenchman comes home to find another man in bed with his wife:
“What brings you here to my wife?” he asks.
The man replies, “I was tired so I came in to rest.”
“And how did you get into my bed?”
“I found the bed made, so I lay down on it.”
“But the woman was sleeping with you!”
“It was her bed. Could I have kept her out of her own bed?”
“If you do this again,” the Frenchman warns, “you and I will quarrel.”1
The Muslim writer cites the incident to show the shocking moral laxity that he believes characterizes marriages in the West. If Muslims thought the level of Western sexual morality was bad in the Middle Ages, imagine what they must think of us today. Not surprisingly, Islamic criticisms of Western mores have intensified in modern times. As Sayyid Qutb observes, at least the West used to be Christian; now it is pagan. Qutb argues that modern America is suffering from jahiliyya—from the same polytheism, idolatry, and moral degeneracy that the prophet Muhammad found in the Bedouin tribes in the seventh century.
The Islamic view of Western immorality is supported by the observations of many critics within America and Europe. Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, recently termed the West “the first atheistic civilization in the history of humankind.”2 In 1978, in his famous Harvard address, the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn charged that in the West freedom has become another word for licentiousness, and “man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer.”3 Many American conservatives and evangelical Christians share these concerns. Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attack, the editor of the evangelical weekly World described the World Trade Center as a modern Tower of Babel dedicated to the “false deities” of materialism, secularism, and relativism.4 On the Right, figures such as Robert Bork, Bill Bennett, and Gary Bauer have warned that American culture has deteriorated to the point that, in Bork’s expression, the U.S. is “slouching towards Gomorrah.”5
Some Americans will find this portrait of their country to be exaggerated and unduly harsh. They will point out, correctly, that many Americans are deeply religious, and that of all First World countries, America has the highest percentage of people who believe in God and go to church.6 While recognizing that America exhibits a good deal of religious and moral diversity, these people note that this is the natural consequence of a society whose people come from different backgrounds and practice different faiths. They argue, too, that Hollywood movies and TV shows are entertainment—they should not be seen as representative of how people really live. The weirdos that we see on daytime talk shows, for instance, are the modern equivalent of circus freaks. Finally, we should note that in recent years crime and illegitimacy rates have declined, so that American culture is healthier in these respects.
While these are valid points, the criticisms of Qutb, Solzhenitsyn, Havel, Bork, and others cannot be so easily dismissed. True, Americans are probably more religious and socially conservative than Europeans, but that is not saying much, considering how decadent the Europeans are. Not withstanding all the picturesque churches that dot the American landscape, religion seems to have little or no public authority over society. And the “death of God” appears to have resulted, just as Nietzsche said it would, in the collapse of traditional morality and the rise of moral relativism. Even people who live upright, good lives have difficulty justifying their choices or regarding them as normative for others. Meanwhile, every depraved pervert—such as Rushdie’s American character, who wants to have sex with a goat—can deflect criticism by invoking the relativist doctrine, “Who are you to impose your values on me?”
The disastrous consequences of this moral upheaval have been compiled by Bill Bennett in his Index of Leading Cultural Indicators .7 But they are evident for all to see. America is a country where the traditional family seems to have irretrievably broken down: the typical marriage ends in divorce, and illegitimacy is now common across racial and socioeconomic lines. Behavior that is considered wrong and deviant in many cultures—such as premarital sex, homosexuality, and the use of pornography—is tolerated, if not accepted, in the United States. Newcomers are often shocked by the vulgarity and shamelessness of American popular culture that, even as entertainment, shapes the general tone of society. Perhaps one should not be surprised at the barbarism and weirdness of many American teenagers—their role models are people like Howard Stern, Dennis Rodman, Madonna, and the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.
Perhaps these anxieties about moral and cultural breakdown are mainly felt by conservatives, who tend to define morality narrowly in terms of what it is good to do (or, more precisely, not to do). But morality as classically understood also includes what it is good to be, and what it is good to love. This broader view of morality gives rise to a set of problems that is widely acknowledged throughout the culture. Thoughtful observers have noticed that Americans are extremely unsure of who they really are, what their highest priorities should be, and whether they are truly happy. Many people—not just young people but middle-aged guys like Newt Gingrich and Al Gore—go through identity crises in which they have to “find themselves.” Life in the United States is characterized by a peculiar restlessness and angst, even in the midst of prosperity. Many Americans seek a higher sense of meaning or significance in their lives, yet it remains elusive, just over the horizon. Despite the gregariousness and affability of Americans, friendship and community appear to be scarce commodities in the United States. People are constantly in pursuit of love “relationships,” yet few of these prove to be lasting. In most countries married life comes easily—its success is taken for granted—but in America married life is a struggle, and even happy marriages are haunted by the shadow of divorce.
All of this adds up to a powerful critique, which states that in America freedom has established itself as the highest value and has fatally undermined other cherished values. In other words, the triumph of freedom comes at the expense of decency, community, and virtue. Freedom in America means choice, and from the perspective of the critics, choice has been deified without regard to the content of choice. Consequently morality withers, and even choice itself ceases to matter because there is no significance to what one chooses. Good choices, bad choices: no one really cares. The result, in this view, is a debauched, demoralized, unhappy society. What is so great about American freedom if it leads to such deplorable results?
In this chapter I will argue that the critics who denounce the culture in this way are missing something vitally important about America. But we cannot deny that the problems they describe are real. What, then, is their cause? One answer, given by many Islamic writers and some people in the U.S. as well, is that the American system of technological capitalism is to blame. Early in the twentieth century the economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted that technological capitalism would produce massive social upheaval. In Schumpeter’s view, technological capitalism unleashes a “gale of creative destruction” that undermines t
raditional institutions and traditional values.8
Clearly there is some truth to Schumpeter’s analysis. Consider the one thing that has done more to undermine morality in America than the combined influence of Darwin, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. I speak, of course, of the automobile. Before the era of the automobile most Americans lived on farms or in small towns. Their virtue and chastity were sustained by the moral supervision of the local community. A man looks out of his window. “Isn’t that Art Buckner’s son? What’s he up to? Hey! Stop that! Get out of there!” What destroyed this comprehensive moral ecosystem was the car. By providing universal access to the city, the car helped to bring about the end of a whole way of life in America. The point of this example is not to oppose cars, or to advocate that they be outlawed, but to show that the apparatus of modern technology makes inevitable some degree of moral change.
Technology has also helped to change women’s roles and thus to destabilize traditional “family values.” Here the great catalyst of social transformation was the mass movement of women into the workplace. Feminists fought for women’s right to have careers, but their success was made possible by the pill, the vacuum cleaner, and the forklift. Think about this: only a few decades ago, housework was a full-time occupation—cooking and cleaning took up virtually the whole day. The vacuum cleaner and other domestic appliances changed that. Until recently, work outside the home was harsh and physically demanding. Forklifts and other machines have reduced the need for human muscle. Finally, before the invention of the pill, women could not effectively control their reproduction, and therefore, for most women, the question of having a full-time career simply did not arise.
Like technology, capitalism has had a transforming effect on mores. Capitalism produces mass affluence, and mass affluence extends to ordinary people the same avenues of fulfillment—and of debauchery—previously available only to the upper class. Capitalism also produces a dynamic, mobile society in which people rarely end up living where they were born. Indeed, the average American moves a dozen times over the course of his life.9 Only the “nuclear family” holds together; the extended family is scattered. Mobility also makes it difficult for Americans to form lasting friendships or to develop an enduring sense of community. Most relationships under capitalism are based on contract and mutual convenience. The commercial and social motto of America is: “Have a nice day.” The pursuit of success under capitalism is also very time consuming and tends to shut out other demands on one’s time. In Third World countries, if someone comes a long distance to see you, a month-long visit is considered insultingly short; in America, even relatives are expected to leave within a few days. While Americans treat others with respect and courtesy, they are not, in general, known for their hospitality.
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