Now there is great anxiety about the survival and recognition of these cultures of origin. I suggest that this sense of loss, which reflects, it seems, novel and unwelcome assimilation, is another consequence of the disruption of the family I have been describing. Civic life is expected to be ethnically neutral, and at the same time to acknowledge our multitude of ethnicities and identities in such a way as to affirm them, to make their inheritors all equally glad to embrace and sustain them. These are not realistic expectations. One acquires a culture from within the culture — for all purposes, from the family.
And acculturation takes time. I suggest that those groups who feel unvalued are the very groups who are most vulnerable to the effects of the cheapening of labor, least able to control the use of their time. They look for, or are promised, amendment in the correction of images and phrases, in high school multicultural days and inclusive postage stamp issues. Such things can never supply the positive content of any identity.
The crudeness of public institutions in their attempts to respond to these demands is clearly in large part due to the fact that they are wholly unsuited to the work that is asked of them. Obviously they cannot supply the place of church or synagogue. The setting apart of the weekend once sheltered the traditions and institutions that preserved the variety of cultures. French Catholics and Russian Jews and Dutch Protestants could teach morals and values wholly unembarrassed by the fact that the general public might not agree with every emphasis and particular, and therefore they were able to form coherent moral personalities in a way that a diverse and open civic culture cannot and should not even attempt. It seems to me likely that the openness of the civic culture has depended on the fact that these groups and traditions have functioned as teachers of virtue and morality, sustaining by their various lights a general predisposition toward acting well. When the state attempts to instill morality, the attempt seems intrusive and even threatening precisely because that work has traditionally been reserved to family, community, and religion, to the institutions of our diversity, a thing we have cherished historically much better than we do now, for all our talk. Or rather, our talk arises from a nervous awareness that our traditional diversity is eroding away, and we are increasingly left with simple difference, in its most negative and abrasive forms.
I do not think it is nostalgia to suggest that it would be well to reestablish the setting apart of time traditionally devoted to religious observance. If there is any truth in polls, the American public remains overwhelmingly religious, and religion is characteristically expressed in communities of worship. To take part in them requires time. It may be argued that there are higher values, for example the right to buy what one pleases when one pleases, which involves another’s right to spend Saturday or Sunday standing at a cash register or to compel someone else to stand there. If these are the things we truly prefer, there is no more to be said. But the choice is unpoetical and, in its effects, intolerant. When we were primitive capitalists we did much better. Now people in good circumstances have their Saturdays and Sundays if they want them. So observance is an aspect of privilege, though the privileged among us tend to be the least religious. No wonder the churches are dying out.
Those among us who call themselves traditionalists, and who invoke things like “religion” and “family” in a spirit that makes these honest words feel mean and tainted, are usually loyal first of all to a tooth-and-nail competitiveness our history does not in fact enshrine. Religion and family must shift as they will when there is a dollar at stake. But the exponents of these notions are no better economists than they are historians. Reforms meant to raise the price of labor! they will say. Think of the cost to the employer! But what is the cost to the employer of this steady impoverishment of the consumer — who is, after all, simply someone else’s employee, spending what he dares of what he earns? This wisdom has prevailed for twenty years and more. Its methods are not in fact traditional, and their results are not good.
Well-compensated labor tends to be marketed selectively, and this protects its market value. Badly compensated labor tends to overwhelm demand, and this erodes its market value. Or, one might say, cost rations access, thereby enhancing the price for which work can be sold. This was the effect of the minimum wage law, while it was meaningful. But high levels of employment at low wages create more low-wage employment, for example in services like fast food and child care, services which reflect the fact that people have sold a great deal of their time for relatively little money. Since these services fill needs created by low-wage employment, they must keep their own costs low, and this is an inevitable downward pressure on the pay of their own employees. The accelerating disparity of wealth among us is no great mystery. But it is even now inspiring recondite speculations, electrifying learned brains to the point of reanimating ideas anyone might have thought long and utterly dead, of sclerosis or spleen or intractable primitivity.
I think the history of ideas is easily as peculiar as anything that exists on our planet, that its causalities are whimsical altogether. We know that Communism was a theology, a church militant, with sacred texts and with saints and martyrs and prophets, with doctrines about the nature of the world and of humankind, with immutable laws and millennial visions and life-pervading judgments about the nature of good and evil. No doubt it failed finally for the same reason it lasted as long as it did, because it was a theology, gigantic and rigid and intricate, taking authority from its disciplines and its hierarchies even while they rendered it fantastically ill suited to the practical business of understanding and managing an economy. It seems to me that, obedient to the great law which sooner or later makes one the image of one’s enemy, we have theologized our own economic system, transforming it into something likewise rigid and tendentious and therefore always less useful to us. It is an American-style, stripped-down, low-church theology, its clergy largely self-ordained, golf-shirted, the sort one would be not at all surprised and only a little alarmed to find on one’s doorstep. Its teachings are very, very simple: There really are free and natural markets where the optimum value of things is assigned to them; everyone must compete with everyone; the worthy will prosper and the unworthy fail; those who succeed while others fail will be made deeply and justly happy by this experience, having had no other object in life; each of us is poorer for every cent that is used toward the wealth of all of us; governments are instituted among men chiefly to interfere with the working out of these splendid principles.
This is such a radical obliteration of culture and tradition, let us say of Jesus and Jefferson, as to awe any Bolshevik, of course. But then contemporary discourse is innocent as a babe unborn of any awareness of culture and tradition, so the achievement is never remarked. It is nearly sublime, a sort of cerebral whiteout. But my point here is that unsatisfactory economic ideas and practices which have an impressive history of failure, which caused to founder that great nation California, which lie at the root of much of the shame and dread and division and hostility and cynicism with which our society is presently afflicted, are treated as immutable truths, not to be questioned, not to be interfered with, lest they unleash their terrible retribution, recoiling against whomever would lay a hand on the Ark of Market Economics, if that is the name under which this mighty power is currently invoked.