God and the underclass: liberalism sneers at religion and scorns God. The Welfare State and the underclass follow accordingly - The Watts-Talent 'Saving Our Children: The American Community Renewal Act of 1996' may solve some problems - Column

National Review, July 15, 1996 by Robert Rector

LIKE the script of a horror film, the underclass nightmare lurches through the pages of every major urban paper.

-- In Queens, a heroin-addicted mother with AIDS murders her four-year-old daughter, stuffs the body in a laundry bag, and with the help of her current boyfriend -- also a drug addict -- tosses the bag from a bridge into the East River. The woman is "mother" to four children through a succession of drug-numbed boyfriends.

-- In Philadelphia, two commercially successful "gangsta rap" artists realize their fantasies, gunning down a female police officer during a holdup.

-- In Chicago, police raid the apartment of five sisters on welfare. The apartment swarms with cockroaches and is chilled by a winter wind pouring through broken windows. In four rooms are 19 children, the youngest 12 months old. Feces and garbage cover the floor; hungry children share food in a dog bowl with several dogs. Dazed, one of the kids asks a policewoman, "Can you be my mommy?"

-- In Detroit, a five-year-old is thrown from a 14th-floor window of a public-housing complex because "he refused to steal."

-- In Washington, D.C., a gunman empties a semi-automatic into a swimming pool crowded with young children.

The statistics are numbing. In Cleveland, the black illegitimate-birth rate has hit 85 per cent. In Washington, D.C., nearly half of all young black men are in jail, on parole, or under arrest. Young men in Harlem are more likely to die of violence than were soldiers in Vietnam.

While underclass pathology is most acute and devastating among urban blacks, it is spreading relentlessly among whites. As Charles Murray warned in his seminal Wall Street Journal article, "The Coming White Underclass," the illegitimate-birth rate (harbinger of all underclass problems) is rising steadily among whites and now approaches 25 per cent. The white illegitimate-birth rate now almost equals the black rate in the mid 1960s when Daniel Patrick Moynihan first issued prophetic warnings about black family collapse.

Conservative explanations of the growth of the underclass have focused on the destructive impact of welfare. As an underclass community starts to emerge, increasing numbers of young women become married to a welfare check rather than to the fathers of their children. Marital disruption starts transforming other behaviors. Young boys raised without fathers grow up wild. Deprived of the role model of a working husband and father, young males look to other role models -- amoral, self-destructive, and violent. As marriage is no longer seen as a necessary prerequisite to childbearing, the behavior of young women also changes; self-control shrinks, promiscuity and early sexual activity flourish.

Welfare's deconstruction of marriage is thus behind the whole tangle of underclass pathology: eroded work ethic, dependence, illegitimacy, drug abuse, crime. This thesis, developed largely by Charles Murray in Losing Ground and subsequent writings, is accurate and compelling. But it is important to note that Murray has never argued that welfare is the sole cause for the growth of the underclass. Moreover, even in the implausible event that the entire government welfare system were obliterated overnight, it is unlikely that this would promptly produce renewed and viable underclass communities. The social equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics holds: it is far easier to destroy social order than to re-build it.

Still public debate on the underclass remains preoccupied with manipulating external economic incentives to alter behavior. Liberals focus on providing well-paying jobs to encourage constructive behavior; conservatives seek to curtail welfare's rewards for self-destructive behavior. We seem to have forgotten that behavior is shaped not only by external economic incentives but also by cultural norms and internal character -- "the habits of the heart." While economic incentives must never be minimized, we should also look to how character is formed: how the principles of virtue are planted and cultivated in the psyche.

Not surprisingly, the growth of the underclass since the mid Sixties has coincided with a weakening of traditional moral culture at all levels of society: sexual mores have changed, the bourgeois family and the work ethic have been ridiculed, self has been exalted over family and community, passion and self-indulgence have been lionized over self-control. The weakening of traditional moral culture was as significant a factor as government welfare programs in the burgeoning underclass pathology. Any strategy aimed at putting the thousand anomic pieces of Humpty Dumpty back together must combine welfare reform with moral and cultural renewal.

To understand the cultural aspect of our problems, we should look to the past. A good place to start is Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion, which examines successful charity efforts in America's past. Olasky explains that charity workers in prior centuries saw the problems of idleness, drunkenness, crime, promiscuity, and marital desertion as emanating from moral culture and individual character. Historically, private charity organizations took as their central task the molding of character and self-discipline within vulnerable low-income communities. Efforts to deal with the economic aspects of behavior while ignoring the moral and spiritual would have been regarded as foolish.