The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass. - book review

Public Interest, Fall, 1993 by Aaron Wildavsky

Is culture the culprit?

THEORY IS GOLDEN. In its normative mode, it connects us to what we ought to do; in its empirical expression, it connects what we have done to the actual consequences for ourselves and for others. The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass[dagger] is important because it presents a theory explaining how the policies born of the moral vision of the 1960s created unfortunate consequences both for those the policies were designed to help and for those who wrongly believed they were helping.

There are philosophers of social science who believe that its proper subject matter is unintended consequences. But Myron Magnet goes beyond--as his title has it--connecting the nightmare to the dream. He uses the understanding gained from what went wrong (the individuals who were "liberated" need not self-expression but self-development and self-restraint) to chart a better course. I shall first outline Magnet's theory of how we lost our way and might find our way back, and then appraise its internal coherence and external fit with the facts. Like all major efforts to theorize our practices, it leaves room for others to fill in the gaps and extend its reach.

MAGNET BEGINS by asking whether the same system that, after the Second World War, made most people better off (and some rich) also operated inexorably to make others poor. Was this immiseration of the poor, as Marx might have said, made worse by the Reagan administration's gleefully cutting holes in the saftey net of social programs? Looking at the evidence--between

1980 and 1987 spending on means-tested programs rose 44 percent while over 18 million new jobs were created--Magnet asks why poor people did not seize the opportunity to work themselves out of property in the time-honored American way. Magnet's answer is that "poverty is less an economic matter than a cultural one." His theory is that the poor do not grasp their opportunities but instead "pass on to their children a self-defeating set of values." But what has that to do with the better off? "This book's central argument," Magnet responds, "is that the Haves are implicated because over the last thirty years they radically remade American culture, turning it inside out and upside down to accomplish a cultural revolution whose most mangled victims turned out to be the Have-Nots." What was the content of this revolution?

The sexual revolution, Magnet claims, "ultimately reshaped family life, increasing divorce, illegitimacy, and female-headed families on all levels of society." Hard work, delayed gratification, public decorum, sex within marriage, and the fairness of a capitalist economy were denigrated in favor of personal expressiveness and system blame. Consequently, "Poverty turned pathological . . . because the new culture that the Haves invented--their remade system of beliefs, norms, and institutions--permitted, even celebrated, behavior that, when poor people practice it, will imprison them inextricably in poverty."

There is, I think, no doubt about the harms done--rising personal immortality, from mugging to stealing to cheating to broken families to poor school achievement. Nor do I doubt that denigration of work, personal debauchery, and victimology set bad examples for all of us, especially those who, starting out with the fewest financial and cultural resources, need personal responsibility the most. Indeed, I would go further: Self-esteem, one of the important achievements in life, cannot be sought as an end in itself but must come as a byproduct of meeting standards of excellence--taking pride in work, supporting a family, bringing up decent children, learning about life and imparting that wisdom. By essentially telling people that they cannot achieve on their own, victimology robs its recipients of the very self-respect it promises to supply. It is a cheat in the guise of a favor.

BUT WHAT ABOUT the transmission of the values and beliefs that lead to these harms? What evidence is there that the underclass actually imbibe the new culture Magnet evokes so vividly? Indeed, why could the direction of causality not lead the other way around, from the underclass to what I shall for symmetry call the overclass? To get at questions of causality, the content of the cultures under discussion needs to be more precisely specified.

Magnet denies the culture of poverty thesis as developed by Oscar Lewis and Michael Harrington--"a set of defeatist expectations arising within the ghetto itself in response to overwhelmingly unfavorable economic conditions"--in favor of a model in which the mainstream culture communicates to the poor exactly the wrong message and the most self-destructive values." He rejects the position of William Julius Wilson that restriction of economic choices in an increasingly technological society creates conditions for bad behavior. Rather than regard individuals as products of blind forces they cannot control, Magnet sees human beings as the active shapers of their own consciousness. On this last point--individuals are both shaped by and themselves shape their surrounding--I concur.