So here is a long version of my ambivalent futurology, my spin on the ”coming apart” described by Charles Murray and others. I disagree with Murray, of course, that the main problem is the erosion of skills and habits through welfare dependency. I am sympathetic to his thought that what distinguishes our meritocracy is the pervasiveness of the libertarian thought that privileges (including the gifts of great intelligence and wonderful parents) don’t have corresponding moral responsibilities. (And not I’m speaking Rawlsian here about some government scheme of redistribution). That’s one reason I’m pushing the old-fashioned thought that higher education should be more about the aristocratic virtues of generosity and magnanimity and the Christian virtue of charity. That’s not to say that members of today’s elite are living “after virtue” when it comes to themselves and their own. They often talk in the Sixties “do your own thing” mode. But their words are contradicted by their relational deeds. Divorces is getting less common, families are getting more stable, romance and even careers are being putting on hold to make sure their one or two kids are being raised right. That still means they’re suffering from what Tocqueville calls the heart disease of individualism, of being locked up in a narrow circle of friends and family.

Meanwhile, the families of members of our sinking middle class are getting more pathological, often because they lack the economic wherewithal to do better. This relational disintegration affects men more than women. More on that later.

On the educational front, the democratic thought, pushed by foundations that stand to benefit by its implementation, is that everyone should go to college. The explicit purpose of higher education has become remedial. Parents don’t have time to read to kids or otherwise cultivate their intellectual development.Too many of our public schools are little more than warehouses, and nobody believes that being a high school graduates means, as it did not so long ago, that a person has picked up the skills and competencies required for middle-class productivity. So college has to take up the slack. That fact is what makes the soaring tuition costs — the bubble — particularly repulsive. A kid has to take out huge loans to acquire what he should have learned in high school for free. Sadly, reorienting college around the basic skills and competencies drags the quality of higher education down for everyone. That’s what the experts call “disruptive innovation.”