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Book Review:
The Dream and the Nightmare by Myron Magnet Published 1993 Reviewed March 2019 |
It isn't "the system, man."
Culture is causative.
It makes or breaks economies.
Therefore as individuals we can, and must, choose our culture carefully.
Culture is causative.
It makes or breaks economies.
Therefore as individuals we can, and must, choose our culture carefully.
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Traits of an Economically Constructive Culture:
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Author's site
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I live in a distinctly hippified part of the country: Northwest Washington State. One day last year an Eagle Scout friend and I were commiserating about what it's like to live in an area where hippies have managed to dominate the culture, and he mentioned this book to me. I bought it right away, and finally got around to reading it in early 2019.
It was published the year before I became a father. In the final chapter, "The Poverty of Spirit", Magnet writes, "Imagine a young person entering into adult life at the start of the eighties boom" (232).
I don't have to imagine, because that young person was me. I graduated high school in 1981 and joined the Marine Corps in 1982.
He continues, "By the early eighties, even belief in something as basic as Truth with a capital T was already being eroded by the humanities professors' assertions that all moral values are relative . . . . Today, a decade later (1993), the trashing of values and standards has become almost exuberantly explicit" (233).
This was the culture into which I brought new life. Believe me, navigating it was difficult and it left a lasting impression on both me and my son. Raising that boy to know right from wrong and true from false in this culture was an uphill battle. It was difficult, even traumatic.
At the time it just felt difficult for me. I didn't yet understand that my challenge was also the country's challenge. I only saw life through my own eyes and only understood my own experiences.
Now, having read Magnet's book, I'm able to see much more clearly how my personal struggle fit into the larger context of the country's struggle. I now see how my problem was a very small piece of a very large puzzle.
During this same time I also felt very concerned about the plight of the poor. As a Christian I felt I should do something about it, and tried. I came up with an idea that I called "Pillows on the Pews." I suggested it to local clergy and they rejected it, citing concerns about liability and whatnot.
Now, in 2019, I see it's no longer an idea. Homelessness has become such a large problem that some churches are doing precisely that: opening their doors to the homeless in severe weather and letting them sleep in the pews. For example, The Gubbio Project began in 2004.
Article
Contents
After the introduction entitled "What's Gone Wrong?" the book is broken down into the following chapters:
- The Power of Culture
- The Underclass
- The Hole in the Theory
- The Homeless
- Homelessness and Liberty
- Victimizing the Poor
- Race and Reparations
- Rebels with a Cause
- The Living Constitution
- Trashing the Culture, and
- The Poverty of Spirit.
Themes
- Culture is causative. It has the power to create or destroy economies.
- The deterministic Marxist-Freudian narrative, which has been used to set pubic policy, has it backward. Economics does not cause Culture. Culture causes Economics.
- The solutions to economic problems are not economic. They're cultural. (For example, in Peter G. Peterson's words, Entitlement Culture or Endowment Culture?) To try to solve economic problems with economic solutions is like flooding an engine with too much gas. Throwing more money at a problem does not solve it; indeed, it can make it worse (21).
- In the 1960s, by popularizing impoverishing behavior of "personal liberation" in our culture, the "Haves" ruined life for the "Have Nots." They caused the Dickensian conditions that are now rampant in our cities.
- "There but for the grace of God go I" is a fallacy. This is deterministic, bad religion. Poverty isn't just bad luck. It's the consequence of unnecessary, chosen, dissolute, self-defeating behavior that has consistently depleting effects. It is Deficit Living that can and should be amended. The Bible itself is not deterministic about poverty. It has much to say about the importance of sobriety, diligence, and hard work.
Notable Quotes and Commentary
Chapter One: The Power of Culture
"By basing social policy on a vision of the individual self that is so utterly the creation of material forces, the liberal view makes the self so passive and shrunken as to deprive it of moral significance or dignity or even individuality. In doing so, liberalism ignores and devalues the entity that social policy's proper object is to promote. From this point of view, selves could be corn or alfalfa, automatically flourishing or languishing with a greater or lesser supply of sunshine, rain, and nitrogen, rather than human creatures with individual human souls" (27).
"What chiefly ails the individuals who compose the underclass is that the cultural inheritance essential to develop fully humanized, fully individual selves is not getting transmitted adequately to them" (28).
". . . the American cultural revolution [of the 1960s] . . . was long in the making. It was foreshadowed a century ago, when writers and artists first started thinking of themselves as an avant-garde dedicated to dumbfounding the bourgeoisie and dancing upon its straitlaced values" (33).
"One way to read the sixties is to say it was a failed experiment whose price was paid by the Have-Nots. The rest of us landed on our feet" (34). ~ Sociologist Christopher Jencks
"Turn on, tune in, drop out."
"Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture's got to go."
Chapter Two: The Underclass
"All through the fifties, black and white men participated in the labor force, as workers, or as active job seekers, at the same rate. But in the mid-sixties, black men suddenly, startlingly, and in ever-increasing numbers began to drop out" (44).
Chapter Three: The Hole in the Theory
"In the end, the world [Charles] Murray paints [in his book Losing Ground], with its heartlessly mechanical [robotic] interplay of incentives, seems aridly devoid of values. Its inhabitants seem mere passive responders to external incentives, not free moral agents with lives and fates that have moral significance" (59).
"At the bottom of [William Julius] Wilson's theory [in his book The Truly Disadvantaged] is the erroneous assumption that people are basically passive" (65).
"Culture, not capital, is the key ingredient in Korean business success in the ghettos" (67).
"Of the somber lessons in all of this [the Central Park 'wilding' of 1989] the one I want to underscore is the power the underclass culture has to mark even those who from an economic point of view are outside that class, albeit not far from its brink. Like a collapsing star sucking a rush of matter into its dense, dying mass, underclass culture exerts a vast gravitational force that not only sways those within it but radiates even beyond" (72).
Three examples of successes that focused on culture: Eugene M. Lang (73), Principal Jeffrey Litt at Mohegan School in the Bronx (75), and Kimi Gray (76).
Chapter Four: The Homeless
"These numbers [popularly cited statistics about homelessness] are pure fantasy. They were pulled out of the air by the wildest of the advocates, the late Mitch Snyder, a troubled, stubble-bearded radical activist who headed an antiquated Washington anti-war commune grandiosely styled the Community for Creative Non-Violence . . . the evidence suggests a number around one tenth of Snyder's . . ." (80-81).
"It's not merely the size of the problem that the advocates have misrepresented. More importantly, they have hopelessly muddled the larger question of who the homeless are and how they landed in their deplorable plight . . . . What you see, if you stop to look, is craziness, drunkenness, dope, and danger . . . homeless families - almost all of them - consist of a single mother and her children" (81-83).
Four books influenced the "liberation" or deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill:
"[Elite opinion makers] accepted without resistance the view that reason is relative, defined by nothing but culture and politics. They entertained the idea that the utterances of the mad . . . might be a kind of truth. They toyed with the conceit that mental patients are political prisoners . . . that madness might be merely an 'alternative life-style' . . . . But at the end of the day they were real lunatics who were actually released, often into cruel homelessness" (94).
"States pounced gleefully on the opportunity to transfer the cost of treating mental illness from their own coffers to those of the federal government . . . . But ultimately and most ironically, the states saved almost nothing by these machinations . . . [from 1961 to 1981] most state hospitals balked at firing staff, whose salaries eat up three quarters of the budgets of those institutions . . . the total government tab - including federal, state, and local spending - zoomed from $1 billion in 1963 to just over $17 billion in 1985" (99-100).
Chapter Five: Homelessness and Liberty
"The destruction the psychiatrists began, the civil liberties lawyers completed, sacrificing the mentally ill homeless on the altar of an idea of liberty and liberation exaggerated to the point of fanaticism and caricature" (101).
"Homelessness is the clearest case of a social pathology whose cure requires first of all that we stop doing most of the things currently seen as solutions to the problem . . . . The first essential reversal is to reclaim public spaces . . . . The second necessary reversal requires sharply curtailing public shelter systems . . . "(117).
"We have misconceived every part of the homelessness problem - who the homeless are, how they got that way, what our own responsibility for their plight really is, what help to give them.
We have abandoned the mad to the streets in the name of a liberty that mocks them. We take the sympathy we owe them and lavish it indiscriminately upon those who happen to look like them and be standing near them. If our public spaces are hijacked and despoiled, that somehow helps assuage the vague guilt we feel but can't quite bring into focus. If that erodes our social order, who are we - the guilty - to call others to account?
Enough. It's time to stop kidding ourselves and clean up the mess that a specious liberation has made" (118-119).
Chapter Six: Victimizing the Poor
"Despite their presumably benevolent, humanitarian objectives, the things we tell the worst off about themselves are bonds and fetters. In particular, one belief central to the new culture of the Haves has wreaked incalculable mischief: the idea that the poor are victims, that poverty is in itself evidence of victimization. For by persuading the worst-off that they are the casualties of [determinism] . . . we make them passive, hopeless, and resentful" (121-122).
Three enormously influential texts redefined the poor as victims:
"At the deepest level, however The Other America asked the wrong question by asking why pockets of individuals remain poor in a rich society. Poverty is no mystery, it has been said. The real wonder is how societies become rich in the first place . . . .
What kindles the spirit that conjures up prosperity? The answer is culture - values and beliefs - not Economics" (133-134).
"This (Rawls' view in A Theory of Justice) was an extraordinary development, making the condition of the poor, rather than the overall national wealth or freedom or virtue or artistic achievement or true democracy, the justification of the whole society. Thereafter the Have Nots . . . came to stand as a . . . judgment upon the Haves and the social system they uphold" (137).
Chapter Seven: Race and Reparations
The idea of Reparations produced much more harm than good. They subverted in three key ways the liberation offered by the Civil Rights Act . . . .
"Fear transmuted into anger led some . . . to see oppression that wasn't there, and the imaginary oppression grew to monstrous, truly delusional proportions" (examples listed in detail on pp 154-157).
"To remain obsessed with past injustice is to remain forever in its thrall" (157).
Chapter Eight: Rebels with a Cause
Castaways: The Penikese Island Experiment by George Cadwalader. "[He] found that violence and crime are not generated by an individual's social environment" (160).
Blaming "The System" - "you can't end crime in the streets . . . until you attack crime in the suites . . . rests on theoretical foundations that George Cadwalader found false" (163-164).
"Not only does the social order not cause crime, it is the very thing that restrains crime" (166).
"When crime flourishes as it now does in our cities, especially crimes of mindless malice, it isn't because society has so oppressed people as to bend them out of their true nature and twist them into moral deformity. It is because the criminals haven't been adequately socialized" (167).
In 1957, in his book The White Negro, Norman Mailer popularized "the idea that black crime was a kind of regenerative rebellion . . ." analogous to the Boston Tea Party or Robin Hood (168-169) . . . and that led to modern gangster culture (172).
This idea of regenerative rebellion found its way into laws and law enforcement, worsening the problem of urban crime (174-182).
Chapter Nine: The Living Constitution
The Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown vs. The Board of Education crystallized the idea of The Living Constitution by using ambiguous reasoning that converted its affirmation of nondiscrimination into a warrant for discrimination (busing, integration, Affirmative Action), and launched the justices from a Preserver role to an Innovative Social Engineer role (183-197).
"The controlling belief is that you can fight fire with fire and end up with something more than scorched earth - that you can overcome one evil by using a dose of the same evil" (197).
Chapter Ten: Trashing the Culture
The same ambiguity underlying the doctrine of The Living Constitution found its way into Academe. "The professors began to forget what gives literature its interest and power: its exploration of how an individual exerts his free will and moral choice under a given set of circumstances . . . ."
"By mixing Freud and Marx together, humanities faculties concocted a worldview that contained in microcosm both aspects [political and personal liberation] of the cultural revolution of the Haves. That worldview is based on a misreading of Freud . . . [whose] final conviction was that civilization is precious, for it permits all the distinctly human achievements" (209).
They drifted instead into a deterministic, deconstructionist world view that regarded Western culture as oppressive of ethnic minorities and the poor, and that doubted, questioned, subverted, and undermined the meaning and importance of classic literature. This climate of doubt, suspicion, and even paranoia deprived the Have Nots of the clarity and certainty they needed to progress. It is as if at a time when they needed solid ladders to climb, academic elites were destroying them.
This worldview culminated in 1988 when protesters led by Jesse Jackson at Stanford University chanted, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go" (218).
Deconstructionism was led by two men: Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. In Belgium, de Man " . . . had been a willing writer of blatantly anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi articles for Belgium's principal, and hated, collaborationist newspaper . . . [and had earned himself] a local reputation for dishonesty" (222).
No wonder he would be motivated to blur distinctions between good and evil, true and false, right and wrong. This motive, this agenda, spread like a cancer through American colleges and universities.
This Freudian-Marxist Determinism led to Deconstructionism, which in turn led to Political Correctness, Multiculturalism, and culminated in Afrocentrism, which asserts that American black people ". . . do not have an American cultural identity, but a superior African one, from which they can draw self-esteem in plenty and which should be taught in schools to white and black students alike" (228). This Afrocentrism is so alienating and self-defeating that Arthur Schlesinger wrote, "If some Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to devise an educational curriculum for the specific purpose of handicapping and disabling black Americans, he would not be likely to come up with anything more diabolically effective than Afrocentrism" (229).
Chapter Eleven: The Poverty of Spirit
"The cultural revolution hit the worst-off hardest of all, inflicting catastrophic damage on them. But looking over the wreckage, one can't help but see that the damage was so extensive that it wasn't just the underclass who suffered harm. The Haves who trashed America's culture injured, in addition, their own children . . . . The cultural revolution created a spiritual vacuum within them [the Haves' children] that greedy selfishness could invade and fill" (231).
"The cultural revolution, not soulless greed, created the vacuum, and during the eighties boom money expanded to fill the emptiness" (234).
"After thirty years of cultural revolution, we have come to an impasse. How do we get out of it? What is to be done about the underclass, the homeless, and the pervasive sense that these groups are evidence that our national life is fundamentally askew?
". . . The first answer to the question of what is to be done, then, is to stop doing what makes the problem worse. Stop the current welfare system, stop quota-based Affirmative Action, stop treating criminals as justified rebels, stop letting bums expropriate public spaces or wrongdoers live in public housing at public expense, stop Afrocentric education in the schools" (236-237).
"It's as if the rich and the poor are under a spell of malign enchantment. The poor already have a strenuous but genuine opportunity for escaping poverty, but they lack the inner resources to embrace their chance. The rich believe that the degraded condition of the worst-off is an indictment of their society and ultimately, of themselves. But they can't see that the required solution is for the poor to take responsibility for themselves, not to be made dependent on programs and exempted from responsibility. Nor can they see that their own spiritual malaise comes from the erosion of the most cherished mainstream values in the course of the effort to rescue the worst-off.
For the breakdown of the poor to be healed and the moral confusion of the Haves to be dispelled, we need above all to repair the damage that has been done to the beliefs and values that have made America remarkable and that for two centuries have successfully transformed huddled masses of the poor into free and prosperous citizens" (238).
"By basing social policy on a vision of the individual self that is so utterly the creation of material forces, the liberal view makes the self so passive and shrunken as to deprive it of moral significance or dignity or even individuality. In doing so, liberalism ignores and devalues the entity that social policy's proper object is to promote. From this point of view, selves could be corn or alfalfa, automatically flourishing or languishing with a greater or lesser supply of sunshine, rain, and nitrogen, rather than human creatures with individual human souls" (27).
"What chiefly ails the individuals who compose the underclass is that the cultural inheritance essential to develop fully humanized, fully individual selves is not getting transmitted adequately to them" (28).
". . . the American cultural revolution [of the 1960s] . . . was long in the making. It was foreshadowed a century ago, when writers and artists first started thinking of themselves as an avant-garde dedicated to dumbfounding the bourgeoisie and dancing upon its straitlaced values" (33).
"One way to read the sixties is to say it was a failed experiment whose price was paid by the Have-Nots. The rest of us landed on our feet" (34). ~ Sociologist Christopher Jencks
"Turn on, tune in, drop out."
"Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture's got to go."
Chapter Two: The Underclass
"All through the fifties, black and white men participated in the labor force, as workers, or as active job seekers, at the same rate. But in the mid-sixties, black men suddenly, startlingly, and in ever-increasing numbers began to drop out" (44).
Chapter Three: The Hole in the Theory
"In the end, the world [Charles] Murray paints [in his book Losing Ground], with its heartlessly mechanical [robotic] interplay of incentives, seems aridly devoid of values. Its inhabitants seem mere passive responders to external incentives, not free moral agents with lives and fates that have moral significance" (59).
"At the bottom of [William Julius] Wilson's theory [in his book The Truly Disadvantaged] is the erroneous assumption that people are basically passive" (65).
"Culture, not capital, is the key ingredient in Korean business success in the ghettos" (67).
"Of the somber lessons in all of this [the Central Park 'wilding' of 1989] the one I want to underscore is the power the underclass culture has to mark even those who from an economic point of view are outside that class, albeit not far from its brink. Like a collapsing star sucking a rush of matter into its dense, dying mass, underclass culture exerts a vast gravitational force that not only sways those within it but radiates even beyond" (72).
Three examples of successes that focused on culture: Eugene M. Lang (73), Principal Jeffrey Litt at Mohegan School in the Bronx (75), and Kimi Gray (76).
Chapter Four: The Homeless
"These numbers [popularly cited statistics about homelessness] are pure fantasy. They were pulled out of the air by the wildest of the advocates, the late Mitch Snyder, a troubled, stubble-bearded radical activist who headed an antiquated Washington anti-war commune grandiosely styled the Community for Creative Non-Violence . . . the evidence suggests a number around one tenth of Snyder's . . ." (80-81).
"It's not merely the size of the problem that the advocates have misrepresented. More importantly, they have hopelessly muddled the larger question of who the homeless are and how they landed in their deplorable plight . . . . What you see, if you stop to look, is craziness, drunkenness, dope, and danger . . . homeless families - almost all of them - consist of a single mother and her children" (81-83).
Four books influenced the "liberation" or deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill:
- The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz (1961) asserted there is no such thing as mental illness. Szasz argued that what we call "mental illness" is really an expression of protest against oppression.
- Asylums by Erving Goffman (1961) asserted that mental institutions cause people to appear crazy.
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (1962), a popular fictional novel that demonized mental institution workers and glorified patients. "As Kesey sees it, and his audience readily understood it, the asylum is a metaphor for the social order itself - a vast, implacable engine dedicated to regimenting and tyrannizing over people, forcing them to fear, to conform, to be hypocritical, to suppress their impulses and hate themselves, robbing them of freedom, pleasure, and individuality" (91).
- The Politics of Experience by R.D. Laing (1967) argued that the "unreason" of the insane is actually a transcendent, higher reason.
"[Elite opinion makers] accepted without resistance the view that reason is relative, defined by nothing but culture and politics. They entertained the idea that the utterances of the mad . . . might be a kind of truth. They toyed with the conceit that mental patients are political prisoners . . . that madness might be merely an 'alternative life-style' . . . . But at the end of the day they were real lunatics who were actually released, often into cruel homelessness" (94).
"States pounced gleefully on the opportunity to transfer the cost of treating mental illness from their own coffers to those of the federal government . . . . But ultimately and most ironically, the states saved almost nothing by these machinations . . . [from 1961 to 1981] most state hospitals balked at firing staff, whose salaries eat up three quarters of the budgets of those institutions . . . the total government tab - including federal, state, and local spending - zoomed from $1 billion in 1963 to just over $17 billion in 1985" (99-100).
Chapter Five: Homelessness and Liberty
"The destruction the psychiatrists began, the civil liberties lawyers completed, sacrificing the mentally ill homeless on the altar of an idea of liberty and liberation exaggerated to the point of fanaticism and caricature" (101).
"Homelessness is the clearest case of a social pathology whose cure requires first of all that we stop doing most of the things currently seen as solutions to the problem . . . . The first essential reversal is to reclaim public spaces . . . . The second necessary reversal requires sharply curtailing public shelter systems . . . "(117).
"We have misconceived every part of the homelessness problem - who the homeless are, how they got that way, what our own responsibility for their plight really is, what help to give them.
We have abandoned the mad to the streets in the name of a liberty that mocks them. We take the sympathy we owe them and lavish it indiscriminately upon those who happen to look like them and be standing near them. If our public spaces are hijacked and despoiled, that somehow helps assuage the vague guilt we feel but can't quite bring into focus. If that erodes our social order, who are we - the guilty - to call others to account?
Enough. It's time to stop kidding ourselves and clean up the mess that a specious liberation has made" (118-119).
Chapter Six: Victimizing the Poor
"Despite their presumably benevolent, humanitarian objectives, the things we tell the worst off about themselves are bonds and fetters. In particular, one belief central to the new culture of the Haves has wreaked incalculable mischief: the idea that the poor are victims, that poverty is in itself evidence of victimization. For by persuading the worst-off that they are the casualties of [determinism] . . . we make them passive, hopeless, and resentful" (121-122).
Three enormously influential texts redefined the poor as victims:
- The Other America by Michael Harrington (1962)
- Blaming the Victim by William Ryan (1971)
- A Theory of Justice by John Rawls (1971) - made the condition of the Have Nots the moral touchstone of any society.
"At the deepest level, however The Other America asked the wrong question by asking why pockets of individuals remain poor in a rich society. Poverty is no mystery, it has been said. The real wonder is how societies become rich in the first place . . . .
What kindles the spirit that conjures up prosperity? The answer is culture - values and beliefs - not Economics" (133-134).
"This (Rawls' view in A Theory of Justice) was an extraordinary development, making the condition of the poor, rather than the overall national wealth or freedom or virtue or artistic achievement or true democracy, the justification of the whole society. Thereafter the Have Nots . . . came to stand as a . . . judgment upon the Haves and the social system they uphold" (137).
Chapter Seven: Race and Reparations
The idea of Reparations produced much more harm than good. They subverted in three key ways the liberation offered by the Civil Rights Act . . . .
- Welfare lulls people into dependency. Lao-tzu wrote, "The more subsidies you have, the less self-reliant people will be."
- Respect for the dignity of all work was degraded. This deprived the Have Nots of the first rung on the ladder of opportunity.
- The Victim identity underlying Reparations paralyzed recipients into passivity, anxiety, and self-doubt. Equal opportunity to succeed also means equal opportunity to fail. "The more they feared failure, the angrier they became" (154).
"Fear transmuted into anger led some . . . to see oppression that wasn't there, and the imaginary oppression grew to monstrous, truly delusional proportions" (examples listed in detail on pp 154-157).
"To remain obsessed with past injustice is to remain forever in its thrall" (157).
Chapter Eight: Rebels with a Cause
Castaways: The Penikese Island Experiment by George Cadwalader. "[He] found that violence and crime are not generated by an individual's social environment" (160).
Blaming "The System" - "you can't end crime in the streets . . . until you attack crime in the suites . . . rests on theoretical foundations that George Cadwalader found false" (163-164).
"Not only does the social order not cause crime, it is the very thing that restrains crime" (166).
"When crime flourishes as it now does in our cities, especially crimes of mindless malice, it isn't because society has so oppressed people as to bend them out of their true nature and twist them into moral deformity. It is because the criminals haven't been adequately socialized" (167).
In 1957, in his book The White Negro, Norman Mailer popularized "the idea that black crime was a kind of regenerative rebellion . . ." analogous to the Boston Tea Party or Robin Hood (168-169) . . . and that led to modern gangster culture (172).
This idea of regenerative rebellion found its way into laws and law enforcement, worsening the problem of urban crime (174-182).
Chapter Nine: The Living Constitution
The Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown vs. The Board of Education crystallized the idea of The Living Constitution by using ambiguous reasoning that converted its affirmation of nondiscrimination into a warrant for discrimination (busing, integration, Affirmative Action), and launched the justices from a Preserver role to an Innovative Social Engineer role (183-197).
"The controlling belief is that you can fight fire with fire and end up with something more than scorched earth - that you can overcome one evil by using a dose of the same evil" (197).
Chapter Ten: Trashing the Culture
The same ambiguity underlying the doctrine of The Living Constitution found its way into Academe. "The professors began to forget what gives literature its interest and power: its exploration of how an individual exerts his free will and moral choice under a given set of circumstances . . . ."
"By mixing Freud and Marx together, humanities faculties concocted a worldview that contained in microcosm both aspects [political and personal liberation] of the cultural revolution of the Haves. That worldview is based on a misreading of Freud . . . [whose] final conviction was that civilization is precious, for it permits all the distinctly human achievements" (209).
They drifted instead into a deterministic, deconstructionist world view that regarded Western culture as oppressive of ethnic minorities and the poor, and that doubted, questioned, subverted, and undermined the meaning and importance of classic literature. This climate of doubt, suspicion, and even paranoia deprived the Have Nots of the clarity and certainty they needed to progress. It is as if at a time when they needed solid ladders to climb, academic elites were destroying them.
This worldview culminated in 1988 when protesters led by Jesse Jackson at Stanford University chanted, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go" (218).
Deconstructionism was led by two men: Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. In Belgium, de Man " . . . had been a willing writer of blatantly anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi articles for Belgium's principal, and hated, collaborationist newspaper . . . [and had earned himself] a local reputation for dishonesty" (222).
No wonder he would be motivated to blur distinctions between good and evil, true and false, right and wrong. This motive, this agenda, spread like a cancer through American colleges and universities.
This Freudian-Marxist Determinism led to Deconstructionism, which in turn led to Political Correctness, Multiculturalism, and culminated in Afrocentrism, which asserts that American black people ". . . do not have an American cultural identity, but a superior African one, from which they can draw self-esteem in plenty and which should be taught in schools to white and black students alike" (228). This Afrocentrism is so alienating and self-defeating that Arthur Schlesinger wrote, "If some Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to devise an educational curriculum for the specific purpose of handicapping and disabling black Americans, he would not be likely to come up with anything more diabolically effective than Afrocentrism" (229).
Chapter Eleven: The Poverty of Spirit
"The cultural revolution hit the worst-off hardest of all, inflicting catastrophic damage on them. But looking over the wreckage, one can't help but see that the damage was so extensive that it wasn't just the underclass who suffered harm. The Haves who trashed America's culture injured, in addition, their own children . . . . The cultural revolution created a spiritual vacuum within them [the Haves' children] that greedy selfishness could invade and fill" (231).
"The cultural revolution, not soulless greed, created the vacuum, and during the eighties boom money expanded to fill the emptiness" (234).
"After thirty years of cultural revolution, we have come to an impasse. How do we get out of it? What is to be done about the underclass, the homeless, and the pervasive sense that these groups are evidence that our national life is fundamentally askew?
". . . The first answer to the question of what is to be done, then, is to stop doing what makes the problem worse. Stop the current welfare system, stop quota-based Affirmative Action, stop treating criminals as justified rebels, stop letting bums expropriate public spaces or wrongdoers live in public housing at public expense, stop Afrocentric education in the schools" (236-237).
"It's as if the rich and the poor are under a spell of malign enchantment. The poor already have a strenuous but genuine opportunity for escaping poverty, but they lack the inner resources to embrace their chance. The rich believe that the degraded condition of the worst-off is an indictment of their society and ultimately, of themselves. But they can't see that the required solution is for the poor to take responsibility for themselves, not to be made dependent on programs and exempted from responsibility. Nor can they see that their own spiritual malaise comes from the erosion of the most cherished mainstream values in the course of the effort to rescue the worst-off.
For the breakdown of the poor to be healed and the moral confusion of the Haves to be dispelled, we need above all to repair the damage that has been done to the beliefs and values that have made America remarkable and that for two centuries have successfully transformed huddled masses of the poor into free and prosperous citizens" (238).
