Rod Dreher has a interesting and fairly extensive analysis of an important article at the Wall Street Journal by Charles Murray, introducing his new book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. The results of Murray’s diagnosis show that America is a cultural Third World country:
The problem Charles Murray diagnoses is real. He offers no real solution. I can’t see that its possible within libertarian philosophy to come up with an effective solution. Murray needs to read Alasdair MacIntyre, who doesn’t have much of a solution either, but who at least understands the profundity of our cultural brokenness. This cultural Third World to which America is descending — by which I mean a society in which the ultrarich live radically segregated from the masses — seems to me to be an outworking of ideas and trends that have been at work for a very long time.
Read more here
January 25th, 2012 | 5:24 pm
Philip Rieff used accurately used the number three (Third Culture) to describe our culture quite some time ago. While his usage is quite different than that intended above, I’m guessing that there’s a certain overlap in their analyses.