David Brooks's wrote a column several years ago, that I have to say I agree with to a large extent–culture matters. I think that a fundamental mistake of both the left and the right, for different reasons, is to look at the problems surrounding poverty primarily in economic terms. The economic is obviously a factor, but it's secondary. The primary factor shaping the chronic poverty of the underclass is cultural. I think Brooks is half right in what he says, so let's try to understand that part of it.
The core assumption [held on the left] is that economic forces determine culture and shape behavior. As William Julius Wilson wrote in "The Truly Disadvantaged," "If ghetto underclass minorities have limited aspirations, a hedonistic orientation toward life or lack of plans for the future, such outlooks ultimately are the result of restricted opportunities and feelings of resignation originating from bitter personal experiences and a bleak future."
That's the liberal position, and Brooks contrasts it with his understanding of the conservative position:
Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that liberals have it backward. In reality, culture shapes economics. A person's behavior determines his or her economic destiny. If people live in an environment that fosters industriousness, sobriety, fidelity, punctuality and dependability, they will thrive. But the Great Society welfare system encouraged or enabled bad behavior, and popular culture glamorizes irresponsibility.
We've now had a 40-year experiment to determine which side is right, and while both arguments have merit, it's clear the conservatives have a more accurate view of poverty.
For decades welfare programs funneled money to the disadvantaged, but families dissolved and poverty rates remained stubbornly high. Then the nation switched tack in the mid-1990's, embracing policies that demanded work. Many liberals made a series of horrifying predictions about what welfare reform would do to the poor. These predictions, based on the paleoliberal understanding of poverty, were extravagantly wrong.
The part that's half right is that if you don't change the culture of hopelessness that reinforces chronic poverty, it doesn't really matter much what you do programmatically. That's as true now with the ideas of the corporate education reformers,whose solutions are also naively technocratic and doomed to fail. Conservatives wrongly think, though, that because the Great Society Programs of sixties didn't work out as hoped, that two conclusions follow: First, that those programs made the situation worse. And second, that it logically follows from those specific disappointments that any governmental attempt to grapple with complex social problems is doomed to failure and that government will never have any competency in dealing with such issues.
I think that Brooks is taking a more nuanced position than to buy wholesale into either of these two conclusions, but his suggestion that compassionate conservatism offers a more effective approach to the problems of chonic poverty, and that the state has no role to play is the equivalent of saying that nothing is better than something because compassionate conservatism, whatever it might be in theory, has been for conservatives nothing more than an empty campaign slogan. Nevertheless, the challenge is to change the culture, and that is an educational challenge, but not one that belongs only to the schools.
In my view the problem with the mentality behind the design of many of the social welfare programs of the Great Society era was its similarity to the mentality that conducted the war in Vietnam. Both approaches were the product of technocrats and as such astonishingly naive about history, culture, and human social psychology, and both were absurdly rationalistic in their strategies. In other words, the overly rationalistic liberal technocratic mentality of the sixties era developed sterile, soulless solutions for problems that had mainly to do with the frustrated aspirations of the soul. Go into any city where the HUD high-rise housing projects stand now as bleak monuments to hopelessness for a people who more than anything needed something to hope for and work for.
But while I've never been a big fan of the design of many of sixties era programs, I don't buy the argument that these programs made things worse. Things were going to be bad no matter what. Without those programs there's not telling how bad things could have gotten, as our cities would have devolved into something looking more like the favellas in Latin America.
That's what happens when uneducated people with minimal skills are put out of work in rural areas as agriculture mechanizes. They come into the cities, which are unable to absorb them, and they squat. They are anomic, without a culture. This is as true in the slums of ancient Rome as in the favellas of Latin America. They have neither their traditional rural culture to support them nor any real hope for a brighter future, and the result is profound social dysfunction and the culture of hopelessness that comes with it.
I don't want to hear about how Asians and other ethnic minorities had nothing and yet made something of their lives. It's true, and it's admirable, but they had something that African Americans and Native Americans didn't have–a past and a future. Both had their traditional cultures forcibly taken from them, and both were told that their future was going to be pretty much what white folk told them it was going to be, which is no future at all.
What we went through here in the fifties and sixties is what happens everywhere when premodern societies modernize. The American South maintained in some very important ways a premodern structure and mentality, until it started to come out of it to become the so-called "New South" in the '70s. The mentality of the premodern still lingers powerfully in the culture of that region, and for complicated reasons that mentality has an inordinate influence on the rest of American society in this time of transition.
A nostalgia for the loss of the traditional has been the force driving the culture wars we've been suffering through for the last twenty years, but it's really the resurgence of the kind of primitive thinking that was challenged but not defeated at the time of the Scopes trial. I understand that nostalgia, I really do, but nostalgia makes us look in the wrong direction. It's "Lot's Wife Syndrome," and sooner or later we've all got to get over it by finding a way to look forward rather than backward, or we rigidify into pillars of salt.
But here's the point. It's wrong to think that the Great Society programs failed because they didn't achieve what a lot of naive social planners thought they would. They succeeded insofar as they insured a minimal level of physical well being for people who would have had nothing otherwise. There's a lot more that needs to be said about this. It's complicated, and I can hear the objections.
But the goal of this website is to explore what it means to have a future. The reason we're in the grip of this nostalgia, this longing for the certainties of a now-destroyed traditional way of life, is because we haven't framed yet a vision of something better. I am not particularly interested in the agenda of the secular left. I believe that their agenda is in most respects sterile, even though I accept much if not most of its critique of American society. And yet I do believe that it is possible to frame a progressive, human, future-oriented social vision and a politics for accomplishing it.
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