Talking Trash: When Standards are set by the Underclass

Many elites in the United States are disavowing what is best in our culture and imitating what is worst.  Over the past several decades American life has coarsened.  The late historian Arnold Toynbee would find in this no mystery: we are witnessing the proletarianisation of the dominant minority.

In a chapter of a Study of History, entitled ‘Schism of the Soul’, Toynbee discusses the disintegration of civilisations.  He observes that one of the consistent symptoms of disintegration is that elites—his ‘dominant minority’—begin to imitate those at the bottom of society.  His argument is that the growth phase of a civilisation is led by a creative minority with a strong, self-confident sense of style, virtue and purpose, whom the uncreative majority imitates.  In a disintegrating civilisation, the creative minority has degenerated into elites that are no longer setting the example.  Among other reactions are a ‘lapse into truancy’ (a rejection of the obligations of citizenship) and a ‘surrender to a sense of promiscuity’ (vulgarisation of manners, the arts, and language) that ‘appear first in the ranks of the proletariat’ and are taken up by the dominant minority as it ‘succumbs to the sickness of proletarianisation’.

Truancy and promiscuity, in Toynbee’s sense, are not new in America.  But until a few decades ago they were publicly despised and largely confined to the group we used to call ‘low-class’ or ‘trash’, and which we now call the underclass.  Today, those behaviours have been transmuted into a code that the elites sometimes imitate, sometimes placate, and fear to challenge.  Meanwhile, they no longer have a code of their own in which they have confidence.

In 1960 four letter words were still unknown in public discourse.  Among the elites, they were used sparingly, even in private.  Now even the quality press publishes four letter words and leaves bad grammar uncorrected.  A deliberate choice has been made to approve the vulgar and the illiterate, both of which used to be classic indicators of the underclass.

‘In 1960 four letter words were still unknown in public discourse‘

Respectfulness towards, and imitation of, underclass behaviour extend to the other classic signals that used to distinguish ‘nice’ people from ‘riff-raff’—appearance, sexual behaviour and the formation of family.  But the proletarianisation of the elites has broader implications than changes in social norms.

Consider the code of the gentleman as it evolved in America, where it had nothing to do with being rich or well-born.  To be an American gentleman meant that one was brave, loyal, and true.  When one was in the wrong, one owned up and took one’s punishment like a man.  One didn’t take advantage of women.  One was gracious in victory and a good sport in defeat.  One’s handshake was more binding than any legal document.  They used to be rules.  Now they are jokes.  Some men still live by them, but they are embarrassed to say so.

The collapse of old codes leaves a vacuum that must be filled.  Within the elites, the replacement has been tenets that tell us to treat people equally, regardless of gender, race or sexual preference, to be against poverty and war, and to be for fairness and diversity.  These are not bad things to be against and for, respectively, but the new code, which I will call ecumenical niceness, has a crucial flaw.  The code of the elites is supposed to set the standard for the society, but ecumenical niceness has a hold only on those people whom the elites are willing to judge –namely , one another.  One of the chief tenets of ecumenical niceness is not to be judgmental about the underclass.

Within the underclass, the vacuum has been filled by a distinctive, separate code.  Call it thug code: take what you want, respond violently to anyone who antagonises you, gloat when you win, despite courtesy as weakness, treat women as receptacles, take pride in cheating, deceiving, or exploiting successfully.  The world of hip-hop is where the code is openly embraced.  The hitherto inarticulate values of underclass males from time immemorial are now made articulate with the collaboration of some of America’s best creative and merchandising talent.

The disintegration of a civilisation is not a monolithic process.  As elite culture begins to mimic proletarian culture, remnants of the elites become utopians, or ascetics, or try to reinvoke old norms (viz. the words you are reading).  Important voices have again begun to talk about virtue, but they must start by defending the proposition that virtue and vice are valid concepts.  They may talk about the coarsening of American life, but can no longer appeal to a common understanding of vulgarity and a common contempt for the vulgar.  The elites have already been proletarianised, and only remnants protest.

Toynbee’s argument is persuasive, and not only for America.  Elites throughout the West also suffer from ‘the sickness of proletarianisation’, disavowing what is best in their cultures, and imitating what is worst.  The survival of our cultures requires that we contrive to get well.
 

About the Author:
  This is an edited version of an article by Dr Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve and Losing Ground, from the Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2001, and the basis of a speech he gave on Tuesday 22 May, 2001, in Melbourne for the CIS.