It is interesting to read what’s happening at the nation’s foremost neo-conservative think tank, The American Enterprise Institute. On March 11, Charles Murray delivered the Irving Kristol Lecture, at AEI’s Annual Dinner at the Washington Hilton. I didn’t read who all was in attendance at the dinner, but according to Wikipedia, membership in AEI includes Newt Gingrich, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Dick and Lynne Cheney.
Charles Murray is author of the controversial book, The Bell Curve, that discussed the impact of IQ on American society and was accused by some critics as having a racist viewpoint. Murray criticized the American welfare system in a book entitled, Losing Ground.
Murray in his speech to AEI introduced the theme of his speech by saying, “President Obama and his leading intellectual heroes are the American equivalent of Europe’s social democrats. There’s nothing sinister about that. They share an intellectually respectable view that Europe’s regulatory and social welfare systems are more progressive than America’s and advocate reforms that would make the American system more like the European system. The advent of the Obama administration brings this question before the nation: Do we want the United States to be like Europe?”
Murray’s answer “No,” is not surprising, but, how he justifies his answer is surprising. Murray argues against America becoming like Europe not for reasons involving the economy, but for reasons involving happiness. Yes, happiness.
Murray says, “My text is drawn from Federalist 62, probably written by James Madison: ‘A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.’ Note the word: happiness. Not prosperity. Not security. Not equality. Happiness, which the Founders used in its Aristotelian sense of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.”
Murray sets two goals for himself in his speech. “First,” he says, “I will argue that the European model is fundamentally flawed because, despite its material successes, it is not suited to the way that human beings flourish–it does not conduce to Aristotelian happiness. Second, I will argue that twenty-first-century science will prove me right.”
This to me seems a strange argument. Murray seems to admit that if Obama succeeds in pushing the U.S. to become more like Europe in terms of its progressive social welfare system, there will be more wide spread material success for more U.S. citizens. But, he argues, this increase in general prosperity and security will result, overall, in less happiness, rather than more happiness. Murray’s claims that he has a scientific basis for making such a paradoxical claim, it seems to me, is based on a pretty flimsy thinking.
Murray warns that the mentality of the European Syndrome is rising in America. He says, “That mentality goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.”
He says, “The same self-absorption in whiling away life as pleasantly as possible explains why Europe has become a continent that no longer celebrates greatness. When life is a matter of whiling away the time, the concept of greatness is irritating and threatening.”
Murray says, “Among those (in America) who self-identify as liberal or extremely liberal, secularism is close to European levels. Birth rates are close to European levels. Charitable giving is close to European levels. There is every reason to believe that when Americans embrace the European model, they begin to behave like Europeans.”
Murray argues that what is needed in America is a “Great Awakening,” particularly among America’s elites. He says, “I use the phrase ‘Great Awakening’ to evoke a particular kind of event. American history has seen three religious revivals known as Great Awakenings–some say four. They were not dispassionate, polite reconsideration of opinions. They were renewals of faith, felt in the gut.”
He says, “Every society since the advent of agriculture has had elites. So does the United States. Broadly defined, America’s elites comprise several million people; narrowly defined, they amount to a few tens of thousands. We have a lot of examples of both kinds in this room tonight.”
Excerpts from the speech:
- “It isn’t usually put this way, but the advent of the Obama administration brings this question before the nation: Do we want the United States to be like Europe?” Charles Krauthammer observed a few days later, “We’ve been trying to figure out who Barack Obama is, where he’s really from. From Hawaii? Indonesia? The Ivy League? Chicago? Now we know: he’s a Swede.”
- President Obama and his leading intellectual heroes are the American equivalent of Europe’s social democrats. There’s nothing sinister about that. They share an intellectually respectable view that Europe’s regulatory and social welfare systems are more progressive than America’s and advocate reforms that would make the American system more like the European system.
- My text is drawn from Federalist 62, probably written by James Madison: “A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.” Note the word: happiness. Not prosperity. Not security. Not equality. Happiness, which the Founders used in its Aristotelian sense of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.
- And since happiness is a word that gets thrown around too casually, the phrase I’ll use from now on is “deep satisfactions.” I’m talking about the kinds of things that we look back upon when we reach old age and let us decide that we can be proud of who we have been and what we have done. Or not.
- If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation, and faith. Two clarifications: “Community” can embrace people who are scattered geographically. “Vocation” can include avocations or causes. Seen in this light, the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. And that’s what’s wrong with the European model. It doesn’t do that. It enfeebles every single one of them.
- When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, it inevitably takes some of the action away from families and communities, and the web frays, and eventually disintegrates.
- A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: “He is a man who pulls his own weight.” “He’s a good provider.” If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away.
- If we want to know where America as a whole is headed–its destination–we should look to Europe…. What’s happening? Call it the Europe syndrome. I’m not talking about all Europeans, by any means. That mentality goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.
- The same self-absorption in whiling away life as pleasantly as possible explains why Europe has become a continent that no longer celebrates greatness. When life is a matter of whiling away the time, the concept of greatness is irritating and threatening. What explains Europe’s military impotence? I am surely simplifying, but this has to be part of it: If the purpose of life is to while away the time as pleasantly as possible, what can be worth dying for?
- Every element of the Europe Syndrome is infiltrating American life as well.We are seeing that infiltration appear most obviously among those who are most openly attached to the European model–namely, America’s social democrats, heavily represented in university faculties and the most fashionable neighborhoods of our great cities.
- The European model provides the intellectual framework for the social policies of the triumphant Democratic Party, and it faces no credible opposition from Republican politicians.
- There is reason for strategic optimism, and that leads to the second point I want to make tonight: Critics of the European model are about to get a lot of new firepower. Not only is the European model inimical to human flourishing, twenty-first-century science is going to explain why. … We are just at the beginning of a very steep learning curve. Rather, it is the tendency of the findings that lets us predict with some confidence the broad outlines of what the future will bring, and they offer nothing but bad news for social democrats.
- Two premises about human beings are at the heart of the social democratic agenda: What I will label “the equality premise” and “the New Man premise.”
- The equality premise says that, in a fair society, different groups of people–men and women, blacks and whites, straights and gays, the children of poor people and the children of rich people–will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life–the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and CEOs. When that doesn’t happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. For the last forty years, this premise has justified thousands of pages of government regulations and legislation that has reached into everything from the paperwork required to fire someone to the funding of high school wrestling teams. Everything that we associate with the phrase “politically correct” eventually comes back to the equality premise. Every form of affirmative action derives from it. Much of the Democratic Party’s proposed domestic legislation assumes that it is true.
- Groups of people will turn out to be different from each other, on average, and those differences will also produce group differences in outcomes in life, on average, that everyone knows are not the product of discrimination and inadequate government regulation. And a void will have developed in the moral universe of the Left. If social policy cannot be built on the premise that group differences must be eliminated, what can it be built upon? It can be built upon the restoration of the premise that used to be part of the warp and woof of American idealism: people must be treated as individuals.
- The second bedrock premise of the social democratic agenda is what I call the New Man premise, borrowing the old Communist claim that it would create a “New Man” by remaking human nature. This premise says that human beings are malleable through the right government interventions. The second tendency of the new findings of biology will be to show that the New Man premise is nonsense.
- Social democrats will simply have to stop making glib claims that the traditional family is just one of many equally valid alternatives. They will have to acknowledge that the traditional family plays a special, indispensable role in human flourishing and that social policy must be based on that truth. The same concrete effects of the new knowledge will make us rethink every domain in which the central government has imposed its judgment on how people ought to live their lives–in schools, workplaces, the courts, social services, as well as the family.
- A lot more people thinking like grown-ups–must be translated into a kind of political Great Awakening among America’s elites. I use the phrase “Great Awakening” to evoke a particular kind of event. American history has seen three religious revivals known as Great Awakenings–some say four. They were not dispassionate, polite reconsideration of opinions. They were renewals of faith, felt in the gut.
- Every society since the advent of agriculture has had elites. So does the United States. Broadly defined, America’s elites comprise several million people; narrowly defined, they amount to a few tens of thousands. We have a lot of examples of both kinds in this room tonight.
- When I say that something akin to a political Great Awakening is required among America’s elites, what I mean is that America’s elites have to ask themselves how much they really do value what has made America exceptional, and what they are willing to do to preserve it. Let me close with a few remarks about what that will entail.
- American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. …I’m thinking of qualities such as American optimism… There is the striking lack of class envy in America… And then there is perhaps the most important symptom of all, the signature of American exceptionalism–the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies.
- The exceptionalism has not been a figment of anyone’s imagination, and it has been wonderful. But it isn’t something in the water that has made us that way. It comes from the cultural capital generated by the system that the Founders laid down, a system that says people must be free to live life as they see fit and to be responsible for the consequences of their actions; that it is not the government’s job to protect people from themselves; that it is not the government’s job to stage-manage how people interact with each other. Discard the system that created the cultural capital, and the qualities we love about Americans can go away. In some circles, they are going away.
- Why do I focus on the elites in urging a Great Awakening? Because my sense is that the instincts of middle America remain distinctively American. …The center still holds. It’s the bottom and top of American society where we have a problem. And since it’s the top that has such decisive influence on American culture, economy, and governance, I focus on it.
- A political Great Awakening among the elites can arise in part from the renewed understanding that it can be pleasant to lead a glossy life, but it is ultimately more fun to lead a textured life, and to be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives. Perhaps events will help us out here–remember what Irving Kristol has been saying for years: “There’s nothing wrong with this country that couldn’t be cured by a long, hard depression.”
- What it comes down to is that America’s elites must once again fall in love with what makes America different. … I say soberly and without hyperbole, that this is the hour. The possibility that irreversible damage will be done to the American project over the next few years is real. And so it is our job to make the case for that reawakening.
- The drift toward the European model can be slowed by piecemeal victories on specific items of legislation, but only slowed. It is going to be stopped only when we are all talking again about why America is exceptional, and why it is so important that America remain exceptional. That requires once again seeing the American project for what it is: a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the earth, and immeasurably precious.
