To promote Charles Murray’s new book, AEI has put together an interesting and amusing quiz that asks, “How thick is your bubble?” Murray’s thesis, as I discussed Monday, is that there exists an unprecedented and troubling cultural separation between not just rich and poor but between upper-middle class and working class. Simply put, we are living separate lives, defined by increasingly distinct core values and practices.
I scored a 17 on the quiz, which apparently means I need to spend more time on the Upper East Side to better understand the cultural elite. (If my father weren’t a professor, I would have been nearly-perfect on the “keepin’ it real” scale.) Quizzes like these are thoroughly unscientific, but they do help illustrate a troubling reality — our policy-making elite is increasingly (and often completely) disconnected from the very people they claim to “fight for.”
I taught at Cornell Law School for two years (until my wife declared Ithaca “too cold” for our southern blood), and during that time I was surrounded by faculty and students who talked incessantly about poverty, race, and class. Yet as they talked, I realized that few — if any — had ever spent significant time outside their own “superZIPs” (to borrow Murray’s term). They hadn’t seen how policies worked on the ground, they didn’t understand the real-life incompetence of anti-poverty bureaucracies, nor did they comprehend the tremendous social forces tearing at the fabric of poor families. In their well-meaning, wonkish minds, poverty was like a computer virus that needed just the right update to the anti-virus policy software.
On Monday I discussed and endorsed Murray’s call for successful Americans to leave the bubble and to consciously engage across the entire spectrum of American society. There are a number of ways to do this, all requiring more than a little self-sacrifice, and there’s certainly no “one way” to engage (each of us has our own strengths and weaknesses). Some commenters took my post as some sort of hectoring scold to put your kids in public school. Not at all. In fact, though I went to public school from kindergarten through high school, my own kids are in private school. There are many, many other ways to reach out, and public schooling is only one option.
The great challenge of our lives is to truly live our values (as much as we fallen men can). It’s one thing to point out the massive and enduring failures of the liberal public-policy establishment — and that’s certainly a good and valuable contribution to public life — but it’s another thing entirely to do the much harder, more exhausting, and perilous work of rebuilding our culture from the ground up.
You have hit a troubling point. It's something I've been considering in my own life. A feeling that I should do more for my fellow man, yet it is not easy to do as I'm pretty comfortable where I am. Still, as conservatives, if we really want to lessen the welfare state, then we will have to move in and pick up some of the slack.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMy score:
"On a scale from 0 to 20 points, where 20 signifies full engagement with mainstream American culture and 0 signifies deep cultural isolation within the new upper class bubble, you scored between 13 and 16.
In other words, you don't even have a bubble"
Do I win something?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf Fishtown in Philadelphia is the example of where the class that doesn't have a name yet lives, then this quiz has nothing to do with the book. If you're integrated enough into American society to have been in the service and go to Kiwanis meetings, you're not part of the problem. People from Fishtown don't ride Greyhound. Any who hunt or fish are Fishtown aristocracy. The problem is not the prevalence of jobs requiring physical labor, but the absence. Same with factory jobs. Marching in parades is not a big deal there. NASCAR is less popular than parades. I guess this might have changed in the last few years if missionaries have been sent there, but Evalgelical Christianity is at the NASCAR level. This seems like a questionaire for "Are you in contact with the people of rural America (including the rich ones)?" The one that really annoyed me was the beer question. People in Fishtown buy beer. They do not "stock their fridge." I think the only people stocking their fridges are in a pretty narrow slice of high bourgeois America.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYes, exactly, you buy beer, but stock the wine cellar.
Since I'm mostly in the Bubble I do both.
However, since we are talking Philly and beer, I do remember when Rolling Rock was inexpensive (not cheap) beer and when Genesee Cream Ale was the really high quality stuff. That should be worth a few points on that quiz.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCTL--RRock and Jenny Cream--now you're just showing your age...;-)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI don't know if they're still drinking Rolling Rock and Genny Cream in Fishtown, though I doubt it, but it does sound as if we'd both be able to get along fine if we walked through a time warp and wound up in Fishtown in 1983.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI find the quiz entertaining, although it has several questions that imply the assumption of certain facts which may or may not be accurate.
For example, asking me if I've stocked my fridge with a domestic brew over the last year. I answer "No" but only because I DON'T DRINK ALCOHOL! Not because I drink some hi-falutin' fancy barefoot merlot out of California.
Anyway, per the questionnaire, I have no bubble. You should all strive to be more like me. Lucky for you, I have six kids, so I'm expanding the "no-bubble" zone for the next generation.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse5 to 8 for me so I am supposed to be able to see through the bubble, but am supposed to get out more. I can handle having Bud in the fridge every now and again, but will never voluntarily watch Oprah.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI took the quiz and it's stupid. According to the quiz, I'm not in any bubble at all. And yet I'm not a conservative.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNo, Kevin, the bubble in which you live wasn't addressed by that quiz at all. Perhaps a Rorschach, instead, for you?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou encourage people to "leave the bubble." Having grown up in a working class family, I've been trying my whole life to get in that bubble (on the bubble test, I scored such that I have no bubble; big sigh of relief...).
Humor aside, I support what seems to be the motive: let's not have governing elites that have no clue about how the large majority of Americans live.
But let's never confuse knowing with lifestyle preferences. I know what good beer tastes like; I'm not going to pretend to like Natty Bo (the mid-Atlantic's Pabst) just to be one of the guys.
(Do I get bonus outside-the-bubble points for even knowing what Natty Bo is?)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou get huge bonus points for knowing Natty Bo. Of course the quiz is silly and unscientific, but it's a nice conversation-starter.
But I must admit that I can't stand beer snobbery. I was in Chicago a few weeks ago and the waiter literally refused to bring me a Bud Lite until I tasted his favorite local microbrew. I thought it tasted like hydrochloric acid and stuck with the Bud Lite.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIMHO, you drink Bud Light in the Bubble, not outside of the Bubble. :-)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBlasphemy!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI didn't say that I didn't like Bud Light; I think there is a right time and place for most beers, and Bud Light does play one role. It was, for example, the absolutely perfect beer to drink ice cold after a hard morning raising the (pre-fab) walls at a Habitat house on a 90+ degree summer day.
More seriously, isn't one important point in getting "out of the bubble" is to lead, in part by example, those less fortunate to an improved life? Some parts of American culture outside the bubble are superior. Military service, clearly, and, on a less serious note, NASCAR is a vastly sport to soccer or F1 racing. But, many parts of life in the bubble are worth emulating by those outside, like getting and staying married, both parents raising kids, working hard to do well at school, not smoking, etc).
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI don't think it's beer snobbery to desire better than swill for your imbibery. You'll never find Bud or Miller in my frig - unless I were doing a biology experiment with my son, and needed something to keep the frog in before we dissected it. I love true micro-brews - local, grassroots, usually very pure, though I can do without a lot of frufru in my beer (if it has peach blossom or some such in it, I'm not touching it). Doesn't mean there aren't some bad ones, though.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"You'll never find Bud or Miller in my frig - unless I were doing a biology experiment with my son, and needed something to keep the frog in before we dissected it."
Lucky kid.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDid you say son?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJohn of Virginia, I gave you a thumbs-up for trying to get "in" the bubble. Then you chickened out and joined all the other reasonable, open minded people here in thinking that it's good to be in touch with the popular culture (and particularly to not be "elite").
What bogosity. Holding the norm in a decaying society as somehow admirable is idiotic on its face. Even Mr. French pointed that out a few months ago when pushing an article about "evangelicals" and their sexual mores. He noted that these self-identified "Christians" engaged in the same behaviors as the general mess in the U.S.
But it seems it's "all good" now. As Mr. French says, he joins Charles Murray in the "thesis...that there exists an unprecedented and troubling cultural separation between not just rich and poor but between upper-middle class and working class." I suppose one could argue from 1 Cor 9:19-23 that Christian values include flexibility on cultural matters, and mixing it up with common folk was no doubt practiced by Christ. Still, the goal is to preach the Gospel, not betray it, and I believe a distinctive life is far superior to superficial participation in fruitless activities. Put another way, is an "elitist" attitude the problem or is it the ongoing death spiral in the values & customs of "working class" Americans?
The "policy-making elite" needs wisdom, not Bud Lite or Oprah. They can get this from brave conservatism in general and preaching the Gospel in particular. Let's witness where we are, as slave or free, etc. where God chose to save us. No need to go to deep, dark jungles to witness when we're neck high in unbelief. Houses built on any other foundation are built on sand, and the fall will be great.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseEvanston, I think you've missed both Murray's point and mine. We need to leave the bubble to transmit key "bubble" values like marital fidelity and educational excellence. If we are separated from our fellow citizens, and they live in a culture increasingly dominated by vices that are perpetuating poverty and economic stagnation, then what kind of future will we have? The conservative solution is not to rely on government policy but individual engagement. As I said before, military service, adoption, foster parenting, mentoring -- all these things allow us to engage AND transmit core values.
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