We Need a Cultural Revolution

Yesterday’s headline in the Columbus Dispatch was “Who Can Stop the Bloodshed?” An inner-city teenage had been shot and killed for no good reason.  And recently while visiting my mother in Minneapolis, there was an item on the evening news about a rally against the shootings that occur in the inner city that often hurt innocent bystanders. These sorts of events are fairly common these days: a shooting of an innocent person in the inner city followed by calls of various sorts for change.

But here’s the sad truth about the matter. Calls for change aren’t going to change anything. Saying that “Everyone is against this,” which was said in the rally in Minneapolis, aren’t even true because obviously some people are for it. And others who are against it nevertheless engage in rebellious behavior that tends to encourage it. Nor will rallies or demonstrations or marches or police task forces or anything so mundane actually change anything. What is needed is a cultural revolution. This is because inner-city shootings are now part of our culture, and it would require a huge cultural shift, a cultural revolution to change things. And there is no such shift or revolution in sight, so expect the shootings to continue, and expect that after each one we will hear the same anguished cries demanding change, even as the people demanding change don’t really want much of anything changed.

The problem goes back to that cultural revolution called the Sixties, because this sort of thing did not happen before that decade. Part of that decade was the rise of the left’s cultural dominance, and the left (whether the old left or the new left) has always been soft on crime. Pushing poor people into crime makes sense to the left because such criminals are seen by them as heroes against the evil capitalists. But in fact poor people who turn to crime basically rob other poor people, which means that the total gain for the poor is zero. Moreover, once businesses in poor neighborhoods realize they have to deal with criminals, they raise prices, either because they have to hire more security people or because they have to compensate for the goods lost through theft. Once again, this doesn’t really help the poor.

Also, the strong tendency for males in the inner city to form gangs means that the gangs battle each other rather than wealthier people. Now until the Sixties these gangs didn’t really do much to each other, because they were using fists or at worst knives. But another aspect of the Sixties was the importance of being a rebel, of pushing boundaries and shocking more respectable people. And so the gangs went from using fists to using knives to using guns. Inevitably, outsiders would on occasion get killed.

While being a rebel is one of the strongest themes of Sixties’ culture, in fact it too hurts the poor. Rebellion is really nothing but a game for rich kids. This was inadvertently shown in a New Yorker cartoon from the late 1970s. The cartoon showed an enormous office with an executive sitting at an enormous desk. His secretary, standing in the doorway, is saying to him, “It’s your son. He’s giving up living in a teepee and wants to join the firm.” The message couldn’t be clearer: rich kids who rebel can be reabsorbed into society rather easily once they get tired of rebelling.

With poor kids, the situation is different. It is hard to have a decent life or get a good job when one is a rebel. This was acknowledged recently by Ann Althouse, who said that “what I needed was to get serious after years of underemployment inspired by books and movies about defying authority. I had to set aside that obsolescent hippie balkiness and adopt a pragmatic attitude for the task ahead” (here ).

So what happens when the poor come to their senses? They find that it is nearly impossible to get their lives back. To begin with, they have no manners. Wealthier people know when to turn on the manners and when to turn them off, but poor people don’t. They use inappropriate language at the wrong times, and they pay for it. Or they have offputting tattoos that make any advance into a decent management position nearly impossible. Even if their manners are tolerable and their tattoos are hidden or nonexistent, their rebellious attitudes toward their employers may make it impossible for them to advance and may even get them fired. In fact, if employers find that too many of their employees are rebellious and so unemployable, they will probably begin to think about relocating abroad, which lessens the pool of available jobs for the poor, and that in turn decreases the amount of pay offered. None of this helps the poor.

Even worse, they may have had a child way too early. If they are female, they will find they can never go to college because so much of their time, money, and energy is taken up by the child that none is left over for college. If they are male, they can get hit with child support, which can thwart them from getting ahead, too. As part of their rebelliousness, they may have committed crimes, and this criminal record will follow them everywhere, making it difficult to have a good job. Or they have gotten hooked on drugs, and they find it impossible to get off them.

For blacks, the situation is even worse because the Sixties spawned the horrible “acting-white” syndrome, the mentality that swept through the inner city in the late Sixties that said that wanting a good education was acting like whites, and one must rebel against that. Now strictly speaking this was rebelling against both whites and Asians, and in fact it was probably rebelling against Asians more than whites. But never mind, the damage was done. Once inner-city blacks decided that getting a good education was a bad thing, their opportunities in life were quite limited. For women, the obvious choice seemed to be to have a child as soon as possible, and since almost no one can thrive with a child when they are still a young teenager, that guaranteed that these women would stay poor. For men, the obvious choice seemed to be to become a criminal, especially a drug dealer. But being a drug dealer is dangerous. Like other businesses, it is competitive, but because it is illegal, there is a strong temptation to use guns when dealing with the competition, so gun battles erupt in the inner city, and gun battles in the inner city lead to the occasional stray bullet killing an innocent person.

These, then, are the forces that encourage the situation we have today. It is impossible to deal with this situation by the use of rallies or anything similar. Moreover, the occasional sane person who denounces the whole situation is usually, if they are black, thought of as stodgy, as out of touch with today’s values, as a goody two shoes who is culturally backwards, and so on, and if they are white, denounced as a racist. One will be told that one cannot roll back the clock, and of course there is a good deal of wisdom in this since there are so many entrenched attitudes one has to deal with that it is difficult to know where to start.

And so we need a cultural revolution to change things, a revolution that will tell the poor that it is not in their best interests to rebel or engage in crime, but I see no evidence that any such revolution is coming. Such a revolution would attempt to roll back or to transcend the Sixties, and that is a huge undertaking because so many people have invested their identity in the Sixties that resistance will be enormous. Expect, then, that the bloodshed will continue, and that the worthless calls to end the bloodshed will also continue.

Comments

[pst314]

"But in fact poor people who turn to crime basically rob other poor people"

I hope you're not implying that it is in any way okay to rob wealthier people.

[Eric Blair]

++ungood. This is thought crime.

[james]

didn't critics in the 60's predict exactly this? and get called crypto-nazi's for their troubles?

[pst314]

"didn't critics in the 60's predict exactly this? and get called crypto-nazi's for their troubles?"

Yes, constantly. I lived through those times and I remember very well.

[John Pepple]

pst314: No, I'm merely pointing out that the poor weren't helped by turning to crime.

james: Yes, probably, but this whole blog is devoted to starting afresh with leftism, with being self-critical and not merely critical of non-leftists.

[sf]

You write, "poor people who turn to crime basically rob other poor people, which means that the total gain for the poor is zero."

You seem to be implying that if poor criminals would just stop and think, they'd realize victimizing other poor folks was a zero-sum action. But even if that happened, do you think the crooks would decide to forego crime and get legitimate jobs?

Sorry to sound snarky but with logic like this it's no wonder leftist politics produces such consistently marvelous results!

[sf]

Let me quickly add that I enjoyed most of your points, and wish you the best of luck in trying to get the Left to take a closer look at what it's trying to accomplish.

While I am not optimistic that left and right can find enough common ground to work together on anything significant, hope springs eternal that some miracle will occur.

[John Pepple]

sf: Thanks for the encouragement.

I assume that poor criminals are self-interested and don't care about their victims.

My point was that from the left's perspective, encouraging crime doesn't help the poor at all and if anything, hurts it. I could have added that robbing a convenience store, say, isn't exactly striking a huge blow against capitalism.

[Gordon]

My wife is a housing inspector for the city. The council decided to sponsor internships for high-school aged kids from the inner city (this means black kids, because the Mexican and Asian kids are already working in family businesses).

It was a disaster. The kids don't know how to behave. They use inappropriate language. They don't show up on time. Some of them took the opportunity to steal from the adult employees.

There's a great cultural gap here. One might hope that gap is bridged because welfare reform forced many single black mothers to learn job skills. But one of the first things the Obama administration did was undo the incentives that made welfare reform a success.