The Rot is Not Just in Denmark

The Emerging Untouchable Class

Something is rotten in the State of Denmark. So said Marcellus. And so it is with Athens. Athenian life and society is slowly dying out. It is rotting from within. It is integrating into the void.

This neither surprises us, nor dismays us. It is both expected and inevitable. We always knew that it would happen. We knew decades, even generations, in advance that modern Athens would die out. We knew that God is the God Who is not mocked; that society which becomes post-Christian and turns its back upon God, sowing to evil, will reap the consequent corruption.

Neither does it dismay because the necrosis of Athens will bring the very rod of discipline which will turn the hearts of people back again to the God of their fathers. Meanwhile, Jerusalem watches, works and prays that it might be so. We do not expect that there will be any quick revival of the Christian faith. The die is now too firmly cast. The direction is too firmly set: evil and its attendant social destruction is now self-perpetuating, self-feeding; with each generation moving further downwards.

Kay Hymowitz has introduced a striking term into our modern sociological lexicon. She speaks of caste. We had been raised to think of class—socio-economic stratification. Marx brought that into prominence in our lexicon. But caste was something which belonged to another age, in another part of the world. It indicated a rigid form of social stratification, where one's whole existence was pre-ordered and pre-determined by society itself. The caste system was both primitive and destructive.

But Hymowitz has been radical enough to use the word to describe the modern world. She speaks of certain castes emerging where people are locked into the existence of untouchables. Few emerge from the vice grip of being untouchable; thousands fall down into its clutches every year. Those unfortunate enough to be born into the caste are likely to be bound to it forever.

But, the important difference in our modern world is that caste is not prescribed by law nor entrenched by organised institutionalised religion. It is a function of the heart and mind.

Hymowitz, the William E. Simon fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, has argued the thesis in her book Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age. A summary of the case can be found in Marriage and Caste, an article in the Winter 2006 edition of City Journal.

The breakdown of the nuclear family over the past fifty years is now well documented and passe. But what is now emerging is that when it comes to traditional marriage (get married, then have children, and stay together for life) there are now two societies in the United States. Traditional marriage is doing quite well amongst college educated men and women. But it has almost disappeared amongst lower educated, poorer men and women. This has not always been the case. Prior to the attack upon the nuclear family all socio-economic classes lived within this social norm. In 1960, the “percentage of women . . . who had children without first getting married was so low that you'd need a magnifying glass to find it on the graph. . . . Moreover, after getting married and having a baby, almost all women stayed married.”(1)

But now, it is the poorly educated, lower socio-economic segments that absolutely predominate in the nuclear family breakdown statistics. “All the statistics about marriage so often rehashed in magazine and newspaper articles hide a startling truth. Yes, 33 percent of children are born to single mothers; in 2004, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, that amounted to 1.5 million children, the highest number ever. But the vast majority of those children are going home from the maternity wards to low-rent apartments. Yes, experts predict that about 40 to 50 percent of marriages will break up. But most of those divorces will involve women who have always shopped at Wal-Mart.”(2)

So, if marriage is doing much better as an institution amongst college educated couples, and the children of those marriages tend to enjoy far better socio-economic prosperity, then the solution is blindingly obvious: roll out a massive government programme to ensure that children from low socio-economic groups and single parent families get a college education. It has long been the folly of Athenian governments to baptize social problems with torrents of stolen capital in an attempt to remove them.

But what Hymowitz is arguing is that the malady is far, far deeper. Ensuring that your children and grandchildren get a decent education—which in turn is seen as a key to a prosperous life—is a life-long mission. It requires self-denial. It requires shaping your choices about whether you marry, whom you marry, and when you marry. It governs not only how much income you strive to earn, but also how much income you save, denying yourself immediate consumption. Educating children is all about someone else, not about Me.

Then there are the children themselves. Somewhere along the line, the children need to internalise the aspiration and desire to learn and be educated. This will only happen if they are relatively confident of their place in the world. The world must make basic sense to them. They also need a degree of confidence that they can succeed and achieve and that their efforts will make a difference. They must also be very clear that education is important. All these vital attributes are learned primarily from the home. Non nuclear families, where children are wrenched or estranged from their biological parents, or single parent families, find is much much harder to inculcate these vital mores and beliefs to children. The daily existence of the child is a denial of the requisite world view.

It is not surprising, therefore, that children of divorced parents are under-represented in higher education. “Children of divorce are also less likely to graduate and attend college, and when they do go for a BA, they tend to go to less elite schools. Cornell professor Jennifer Gerner was baffled some years ago when she noticed that only about 10 percent of her students came from divorced families. She and her colleague Dean Lillard examined the records of students at the nation's top 50 schools and, much to their surprise, found a similar pattern.”(3) Moreover, children of divorced parents earned less and had lower occupational status.

Once you get into the matrix of the lower caste, you end up reproducing after your own kind. It is virtually impossible to break out. There are some exceptions—but they are rare indeed.

In a more Christian era, when Jerusalem was stronger and Athens weaker, there were socio-economic classes—which is to say that people could be classified according to their occupation and level of income. But movement between classes was far more fluid. The poor, who had the desire and determination to succeed and to ensure that their children lived in better circumstances than they did, usually achieved their desires. Class was not a type-caste but a temporary, shorter-term circumstance. The reason is that the faith and ethics of Jerusalem were more widely respected, even amongst Athenians, so that often times they thought and acted like Christians on so many matters.

Personal responsibility, accountability, self-effort, sacrifice, hard work, the dignity of work, hatred of theft, the integrity of marriage, the importance of children, and the basic hopefulness and meaningfulness of life itself—all of these values arise out of the Christian faith. The widespread acceptance of these values—even amongst many non-Christians—meant that one's current socio-economic class was not a life sentence. Progress and improvement was not only possible—it was to be expected, as one worked out the ethics and values inherited from one's forefathers.

But in a post-Christian world, where Athens is stronger and Jerusalem weaker, where inherited Christian capital was exhausted long ago, once people fall into, or are born into, lower classes it becomes iron-clad. It has become a caste system. People live in degraded circumstances and lock in similar or worse circumstances for their progeny. So the die is cast.

The parable of the Prodigal Son is true on a number of levels. One truth is that the Prodigal did not want to return to his father before his degradation, before he was reduced to eating the rotting food of the pigs. The great mission fields of the next decades will be amongst the rapidly swelling untouchable caste—but only as those within that caste come to hate what they have become, and recognise their own responsibility for it. For the moment far too many still believe that the government is their god and redeemer. The spiral of degradation still has further to run.

But Jerusalem must continue to watch, work, pray—and above all prepare for the labours of harvest ahead. But, as is ever the case, the harvest will neither be amongst the noble, nor the wise, nor the mighty of this world. It will be amongst the poor, the despised, the leprous—the very wretched of the earth. It will be amongst the Untouchable Class.

1.) Marriage and Caste, p.2
2.) Ibid, p.4
3.) Ibid, p.6