``Language, appearance, sex, and family: Each of the signs by which we used to recognize a member of the underclass fails today. But the proletarianization of the dominant minority has broader implications than changes in social norms. What we are witnessing is the aftermath of a collapse of the code of the elites, creating a vacuum in which underclass behavior takes on the elements of a code. ...''
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The responses so far seem to miss the biggest problem with Murray's essay which isn't that the elite use foul language, have poor taste in women, investments, social policy, as well as have limited sexual imaginations, but rather that the sensibility and creative powers of the ruling elite are to be considered the standard measure of the sensibility and creative powers of the people who are ruled.
>From such a confined view of historical and social processes, clearly
the essay illustrates that there is indeed a deterioration of the
social sophistication and conceptualization of the world by whatever
class claims to be represented by its text. At a guess, that class
would be the fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, where
evidently the race to the bottom is all but a completed task.
Chuck Grimes