During my senior year in high school, in 6th period English class to be precise, I was assigned a seat next to a guy I’d barely known. He didn’t appear to be interested in the class and was a bit of a cutup, to tell the truth. Yet he was a very funny and interesting guy. I liked him.
Of course, we both went off to college and I never gave him a second thought. Until, that is, he authored a book in the late 70s entitled, A Walk Across America. It became a bestseller.
Turns out, Peter (Jenkins) had grown disenchanted with his life and future, so decided to walk from New York to Oregon – just because. During his journey he found Jesus.
Eventually, as I say, he wrote a book about his experiences on the road. (And has since written several others.) At one point his exploits were featured in National Geographic as well.
But it’s the first book’s opening paragraph that got my attention. He said he’d grown up in Greenwich, CT, the kind of town where if you don’t get into an Ivy League school you’re deemed a failure. No truer words were ever spoken.
In assessing the current academic landscape, however, it may be even worse than back in 1969. The pressure for young people to get into a good school has grown exponentially.
This is due in large part to the fact that an Ivy League degree is one’s guaranteed entry into the elite class, far more than in the past. Because there is such a yawning disparity today between those who are members of the elite class and those who are not, getting into the right school can make the difference between a life of social and vocational fulfillment and one of limited opportunity and diminished satisfaction.
This was brought home to me several years ago while talking to a PhD student at one of America’s top universities. I had expressed concern over the future of healthcare in our country. I said I feared (and still do) a two-tiered system, one where top-notch healthcare is available only to the wealthiest while the rest are forced into a subpar health system.
He nodded in agreement, but then said something that startled me. “That’s why I want to be in the group that gets the best healthcare!” he said, somewhat jauntily. My jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it.
A few years back, Charles Murray published a landmark book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Based on exhaustive statistical studies, Murray details the trends in American culture that have led to an ever-widening social and economic gap between today’s elites and the rest of society.
One of those trends is the global economy, which has produced extreme wealth for a handful of people, while at the same time outsourcing much of the jobs overseas. As one author recently put it, it’s like strip-mining, extracting the labor and resources out of a particular area and then moving on. There are many communities in our nation that, once prosperous, are being overwhelmed with unemployment, crime, and drug abuse.
Another trend is that the wealthy today live mostly segregated lives, set apart from those less affluent and successful. Their natural constituency lives in places like London, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and not necessarily in the town next door.
Murray documents the way U.S. demographics have changed. When I was a kid, there existed the durable WASP idea of noblesse oblige, the now antiquated requirement that those with means have a civic responsibility to assist those without such means.
Murray uses statistics to show that the disparity between incomes as late as the 50’s was relatively small. In addition, the wealthy realized that their destiny was tied into the destiny of the citizens and public institutions of the community in which they lived. Thus, civic participation was high.
Today, in studied contrast, the successful live in what Murray calls “SuperZips,” zip codes dotted around the country, but mostly around the major cities on both coasts, where the elites live. Here there is no real socio-economic variation. He shows not only the uniformity of high income levels within these SuperZips, but also that most of their residents are graduates of the “Ivies” or some other elite institution. The less wealthy simply cannot afford to live in these SuperZips.
Among other things, this has resulted, perhaps not surprisingly, in a disconnect between our elites and the rest of society. And as the global economy increasingly stresses and weakens the “middle class,” the result is a small group of elites surrounded by a burgeoning “underclass.”
One of the most significant observations Murray makes is that the residents of the SuperZips tend to live according to the old Protestant ethos, despite their “bohemian” rhetoric. Statistically, their divorce rate is low, while their children are encouraged to both excel in school and maintain traditional moral conduct. They even attend houses of worship in numbers far greater than the general population.
Meanwhile, the rest of society flails about amid increasing moral decay, the result of what R.R. Reno calls “moral deregulation.” Divorce rates are high, unemployment is rampant, drug-use is on the rise, and religious attendance is low and getting lower.
Curiously, while those in the SuperZips talk incessantly about diversity, postmodernist ethics, and liberation from traditional norms, their lifestyles betray the exact opposite.
Worse still, the growing “underclass,” at the very same time, is drowning in the fallout from the very rhetoric the elite class so blithely espouses and so thoughtlessly recommends. As Murray concludes, with a clever turn of phrase, the elites simply “won’t preach what they practice.”
So, I’m inclined to cut my PhD friend a little bit of slack. For him, the pressures and the demands of entry into America’s mandarin class are real, as are the consequences of “failure.”
However, I would recommend to him the words of the Apostle Paul in Romans 12:1-8:
“For by the grace given me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.”
In other words, God gives each of us certain gifts, not that we might horde them or steal them away, but that we, not thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought, might use these gifts to benefit all. For we are, as Paul makes clear, communal beings at our core.