If you doubt the impotence of ecumenical niceness, consider the recent reaction to the white rapper Eminem. If the elites still possessed a cultural code with spine and lan, Eminem would have no more chance of recording his lyrics than a four-letter word had of getting into Sports Illustrated in 1960. To recognize a disintegrating civilization, Toynbee says, look for a riven culture riven as our culture is today. For every example of violence and moral obtuseness coming out of Hollywood, one can cite films, often faithful renderings of classic novels, expressing an exquisite moral sensibility. In social life, there are signs that the family in the upper half of American society is beginning to reknit itself, even as it continues to disintegrate in the lower half.
Religion seems to be taken more seriously by today s elites than it was twenty years ago.
I used to think these contrasting trends foreshadowed a bimodal America, with the elites doing well and the underclass growing. If he is right, bean counting doesn t work in this case. Whether a culture turns out bits and pieces of the admirable is irrelevant to understanding where it stands on the trajectory of history. If the question is whether America s elites are being proletarianized, the answer is found by identifying the things that are no longer taken for granted. It may be a positive sign that important voices have again begun to talk about virtue, but the salient fact is that they must start by defending the proposition that virtue and vice are valid concepts.