The other day I spotted a few headlines that I thought bore some connection to one another. They were:
Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds
…and:
Small Towns Face Rising Suicide Rates.
…and:
Americans becoming less religious, especially young adults.
There was also this:
Illinois District Violated Transgender Student’s Rights, U.S. Says.
The theme that linked them was, to me, quite obvious; it is the same thing that makes caged lions waste away in zoos, or Indians on their reservations. I was reminded also of Brian W. Aldiss’s haunting short story The Failed Men (also titled Ahead), about time-travelers who go far into the human future, to find a race of men that have lost all purpose and are gradually, morosely, lying down to die. I had a fine, dismal post taking shape in my mind when I went out for an hour-long walk today, and had planned to write it up when I got back.
As I walked, however, I listened to John Derbyshire’s latest podcast, in which, after a fine first half devoted to Europe’s existential crisis, he picked up exactly the same stories, and commented on them exactly as I was about to. So I’ll save myself the trouble and send you off to have a listen. (That’s two links to Derb in almost as many days, but what can I say? The man’s on a roll.)
21 Comments
There was also this on Instapundit last night.. http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/2015/11/americans-mood-darkened-by-widespread.html#.Vj10bxlWsRc.twitter
If your hypothesis — that a putative “lack of purpose” is driving a higher mortality rate among middle aged whites and a higher suicide rate in rural areas — is correct, then why would only those cohorts be affected? Why wouldn’t you see a higher mortality rate among people of color and whites who aren’t middle aged, or a higher suicide rate in urban areas? Do you think that non-whites and those living in cities have a higher sense of purpose?
There is plenty of reason to believe that the proliferation of guns, and ease with which mentally unstable people can acquire them, would have something to do with higher suicide rates, especially considering the trend in rural states to weaken their already porous gun control laws. Ceteris paribus, someone with a gun is more likely to commit suicide than someone without a gun. But I can see why you wouldn’t want to go there.
Equally obvious — if not more so – is the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, the increasing stress which workers endure, the loss of good-paying union jobs, automation, outsourcing, and the shift of power from labor to capital. Loss of employment creates enormous emotional trauma, and fear of job loss is nearly as difficult. Few situations are more stressful than being an unemployed steel worker with four kids to feed. (Here it is reasonable to speculate that higher mortality affected middle aged whites in greater numbers because more of them went from high paying white collar jobs to working in supermarkets and gas stations).
Or it could be the widespread and unprecedented use of opioids and other prescription pain killers, tranquilizers, and sedatives. As someone whose best friend (a middle aged white guy) hanged himself after excessive use of these drugs, I can tell you that, at least in his instance, lack of purpose was not at issue.
I understand that your preferred narrative is that the world is going to the dogs, things are falling apart, the center cannot hold, and it’s all because of a left wing conspiracy to demolish the cultural foundations of Western civilization, resulting in anomie and anhedonia. Thus any unfortunate news is ascribed to this purported decline — even one as patently absurd as suggesting that people are offing themselves because they don’t approve of transgender rights — while vastly more plausible explanations are ignored. When all you have is a hammer, not everything is a nail.
If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning. I’d hammer in the evening, all over this land. I’d hammer out danger; I’d hammer out a warning. I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters, all over this land.
But since I don’t have any siblings I’d hammer Leftist pinheads (who are really dumb as nails), all over this land.
Because it is those people — older whites brought up in traditional, working-class, mostly religious, non-urban America — whose cultural foundation has changed the most drastically, and who are most marginalized (to put it mildly) in the Brave New World we’ve brought into being. The jobs are gone, and their whole way of life is publicly scorned and mocked (think “bitter clingers”).
See above. They, at least, aren’t on the receiving end of so much cultural disapproval. “People of color” and other designated victim groups are at the apex of an inverted status hierarchy that grants them a world of deference and preferences; non-urban white proles, once the backbone of the nation, are now at the very bottom. They are mocked and reviled as knuckle-dragging, hate-filled, wholly unwelcome atavisms, and it’s made very clear every day that the sooner they are made a minority in their own nation– or even better, die out altogether — the better.
As for guns: the places where this is happening have always had easy access to firearms, so an increase in suicides still needs explaining.
Quite so; that’s certainly part of the story. And none of it is made any better by steady pressure for low-income jobs from an infinite supply of unskilled immigrants.
The increase in drug use is a symptom, not a cause. Clive’s story was an outlier; he was not a member of the cohort we are talking about here.
I don’t “prefer” it; I wish it weren’t so. That’s like saying to a doctor “I know your preferred diagnosis is Hansen’s disease.” I’m simply looking at the symptoms, and making the diagnosis that seems correct, based on my knowledge and understanding.
We all know that your “preferred narrative” is to deny that any of this is happening, which is more astonishing to me every day.
The cohort “whose cultural foundation has changed the most drastically” is not the middle aged — it is those who are older and have seen the greatest change. The world has changed much more for me than my brother, who is ten years younger. Yet the white elderly have increased longevity, while the white middle-aged cohort has decreased longevity, throwing doubt on the purported correlation between social change and mortality.
People of color live with far, far more “cultural disapproval” than whites. They are far more likely to be stopped by the police and/or harassed by them for things which whites would be left alone for; far more likely to be jailed for offenses which would not incarcerate whites with a similar offense and criminal record; far more likely to suffer capital punishment than similarly situated whites; far less likely to be hired than similarly situated whites; far less able to rent or buy property; and so forth. The notion that somehow whites, or working class whites, are socially disadvantaged while people of color are granted preferential treatment is simply untethered to reality. It is as risible as Christians claiming that Christianity in America is “under attack.” It just ain’t so.
There is not “an infinite supply of unskilled immigrants,” as there are no more illegal immigrants here than when Bush was President, and unskilled immigrants are not the reason why white collar professionals are finding themselves unable to find work. If your training and career is in mainframe computers, print magazines, or travel agencies, and those industries have been decimated by technological change and the Internet, then your inability to find comparable work has nothing to do with immigration. Ditto if your factory shut down, your industry now resides in Bengalore, or Excel spreadsheets made your career as a scrivener obsolete.
Drug use is a symptom and a cause. There are more licit drugs which are being abused now than ever before, and they are prescribed with greater frequency.
If by “any of this” you mean a purported decline of Western civilization: no, of course not. By any objective standard — infant mortality, longevity, poverty, literacy, the number of people living in peace, the number of people living under self-rule — humanity is in a far better place than ever before. By subjective standards — morality, justice, the quality of life — there is no former historical era which comes close to 2015. Those who posit the Spenglerian decline of civilization spend too much time staring at their computers, listening to like-minded doomsayers, and should get out a lot more.
If the cause of increased middle aged white mortality was that fewer Americans self-identify as religious, then you would see the same thing in other Western societies, all of which are less religious than we are. But you don’t. You would see it in non-white, and older or younger white Americans, who also are less religious than before. But you don’t. If transgender rights offend any group the most, it would be those who are oldest — but they aren’t jumping off bridges as a result. The causes of the increased mortality are complex and numerous, and ascribing them to a putative decline in social cohesion or religious faith is simplistic, inaccurate, and unhelpful.
Where you haven’t misunderstood what I’ve said here, you’ve misrepresented it. I haven’t the time to reply right now, but I suppose I will have to do so later.
“By subjective standards” gets it about right, though: by the “subjective standards” of, say, the Frankfurt School, things are going swimmingly. Not so sure about the “subjective standards” of the very people we are talking about, though.
As for the general condition of Western civilization, I suggest you look at what’s going on in Europe at the moment, thanks to a few decades of your ideological heroes running the show.
Your first question is your best: why is the rise in these particular forms of death not seen also in older whites of the same lower-income, less educated cohort?
Given that the causes of these excess deaths are drinking, drugs, and suicide — in other words, despair — the question is: why would despair increase among these particular whites, and not their older kin?
I imagine the answer is that middle age is a time when one is more engaged with the world, when one still wants to be part of things in a way that is less important in advanced age. One still wants to participate in civil society, work at a rewarding job, and to be an active link in the great chain of heritage that binds the past to the future. If we have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the high civilization and traditions we inherited from those who came before us, and a duty to cherish and preserve it for the children of our people, it would be easy for a person brought up in the traditional American nation to feel that their generation has failed in its stewardship, that it has broken the great chain. They are reminded every day that they are to be displaced in their own lifetimes, reduced to a minority in their own homeland; that the traditions they honor are not only obsolete, but morally wrong; that the history in which they were taught to take such pride is nothing more than a litany of sins and oppressions that they more properly ought to be ashamed of. Their ancient heroes are reviled as racists and bigots, just as they themselves are, and they are reminded at every opportunity that their comfort in belonging to the civilization they created for themselves, according to their own nature and cultural particularity, is not the natural ease of a people at home, but is instead some sort of reprehensible “privilege” — a privilege that emanates, by some magical and invisible process, from their very “whiteness”. In every bastion of the hegemonic culture — in movies, TV, books, in politics and academia — they are detested, while a parade of “victims” in every imaginable form lines up to bray their resentment, and to claim their reparations.
Your remarks about immigration are both false and off-topic. I said nothing, specifically, about illegal immigration, although I certainly do not believe that there are no more people here illegally than when your president took office. (But as long as we are on the subject, why would a person raised to believe that this is a nation of laws not despair for his country at the sight of “sanctuary cities”? What has become of the rule of law when illegal aliens are invited as honored guests to the State of the Union, are given lavish welfare benefits drawn from the public fisc, enjoy in-state tuition at state universities, and may even get law licenses — while American veterans die waiting for medical treatment?)
Furthermore it is not, as you seem to think, “white-collar professionals”, but poorly educated, working-class whites, who are dying in greater and greater numbers. When they lose their jobs, due to outsourcing and corporate globalism, they must fall back on precisely the low-wage jobs that are under constant and increasing pressure from a continuing tidal wave of low-skilled immigrants.
Finally, in terms of the things that make for happy human communities — social cohesion, civil society, and above all having one’s own place in a familiar culture that is your home — that was your father’s and father’s father’s home, and will be your children’s and your children’s children’s — by these measures we have fallen very far indeed. The nation is more fractured, more tense, more atomized every day. And the great principle of “subsidiarity” that was the organizing basis of American life — that local government is better government, being more flexible, more responsive to specific needs and problems, and vastly more accountable — has been stood on its head, with the very results that Tocqueville foresaw nearly two centuries ago. As local government gives way to relentless centralization, the civil society breaks down, and the horizontal ligatures that bind people into healthy local communities disintegrate, leaving behind a nation of radically deracinated individuals whose only meaningful relation is with a central bureaucracy from which all blessings must flow.
The decline of religion — which, together with a common tongue, has always been one of every society’s most powerful forces of social cohesion — only accelerates this process of atomization and social disintegration. Again, though, you miss the point: it is those who understand this — those who remember a time in (a far more cohesive) America when religion was respected rather than mocked — for whom the decline of religion, and the exclusion of religion from the public square, would be cause for despair.
Likewise, there is nothing absurd, let alone “patently” so, in seeing the wholesale rejection, or even inversion, of traditional and even universal moral and sexual norms (not to mention biological realities) as a sign of a terrible decline. A lot of people feel that when government bullies show up to force you to let some big hairy male go into the shower with your teenage daughter, that something has gone very wrong indeed — that this has gone far beyond any thing that could possibly be imagined to be “justice”.
It begins to feel more like revenge, and deliberate humiliation.
This may be part of the underlying problem on this thread’s subject matter–by Joel Kotkin..http://www.newgeography.com/content/005092-are-we-heading-an-economic-civil-war
http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2015/11/everything_we_know_about_the_university_of_missouri_football_boycott.html
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2015/11/_gentler_war_on_drugs_for_whites_is_a_smack_in_black_america_s_face.html
I don’t think it’s his “preferred narrative”. I think it’s his only narrative for every discussion to which he “contributes” his rants.
Malcolm,
Though you insist that the OEM is sincere about his notions of the real world we live in, I must continue to dissent. I strongly believe that his intentions are, at the very least, disingenuous. Perhaps it’s a consequence of my being more cynical than you are when it comes to human nature. My personal experiences, however, have been quantifiably more extensive than yours, given our age gap and my having lived on two continents, three countries, and five different States in the United States.
It seems clear to me that the OEM is in it for the pleasure he gets from poking you in the eye on the issues you so gallantly promote. When he hears you say “which is more astonishing to me every day” it makes his own day.
Ross Douthat just addressed that exact question.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/opinion/sunday/the-dying-of-the-whites.html
“The notion that somehow whites, or working class whites, are socially disadvantaged while people of color are granted preferential treatment is simply untethered to reality.”
What’s untethered to reality is the idea that prosperity comes from how other people treat you. Prosperity comes from the behavior that follows along with your cultural capital– your ideas about working, spending, saving, investing, leading stable lives, raising your children properly, and so on. If you have those things, as immigrant group after immigrant group have proved (including black ones from the West Indies and Africa), nothing can stop you.
It’s not surprising that the intense narcissism of the Left and the political priorities of Democratic leaders have combined to shout for circumstances-as-destiny. After all, that lends itself perfectly to the addiction of the former to victim culture and the addiction of the latter to government action that can be offered in trade for votes. What it does not lend itself to is effectiveness. Since cultural capital, which would be effective, is something that liberalism conveys badly outside of family relationships (as for example by Hollywood or the news media) and that government can’t convey at all, it’s anything but surprising that at best it gets ignored.
Even Krugman seems to have noticed although for once he appears not to have a cure – so that’s good!
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-09/krugman-doesnt-understand-why-darkness-spreading-over-part-our-society
Can’t speak (well type) for anyone else Antiquarian – One-Eyed – but I wish to express my thanks first, to One-Eyed … for pointing out our host’s shortcomings back in September
Whereby Antiquarian you decided to join our little “discussion” (or, what our erstwhile compatriot EE calls “Man Chat” … though I’d be remiss failing to note we’ve been blessed with more female perspective than when I first dipped my toe here – Musey, Libertybelle, oh yeah and you Essential E too).
Speaking for myself Antiquarian – Welcome Aboard!.
_________
Bill V, I see took note (however, whenever I cannot say – the Derb has noted as our host points out),
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2015/11/abdication-of-authority.html
& from particularly One of Mr V’s links:
http://espn.go.com/college-football/team/_/id/142/missouri-tigers
_________
(Should anyone find theirself confused at my … don’t worry you’re not going crazy. It’s just me – if confirmation is necessary – ask Musey to explain.)
Though it is always a bit risky to concur with JK (since I am no expert when it comes Arkansasian expression) — welcome Antiquarian to our discussion group.
Well, thank you both for the kind welcome, though as JK notes, I first arrived at these halls back in September, so these further welcomes come as a (nice) surprise.
It’s to One-Eyed’s credit that, as wrong as he is about lots of stuff, he still seeks out smart people who disagree with him. (He’s also an habituÁ© of Megan McArdle’s mostly-libertarian commentariat, from which perspective I myself hail, and where there are also many such people. I recommend it again to you all.)
I found this over at hbdChick just now…
“Can intelligence explain the overrepresentation of liberals and leftists in American academia? — “Liberals and leftists are overrepresented in American academia. One explanation is that liberals and leftists have higher intelligence. This hypothesis is tested. Intelligence accounts for some but not all of the overrepresentation.””. It links to an additional source also.
Liberals are hugely overrepresented by Ashkenazi Jews, who in turn are overrepresented by high-intelligence people. The overrepresentation of liberals by my own people is indeed a very heavy cross for me to bear (inappropriate metaphor intended).
My sense is that God was correct (as He usually is) when He called us the stiff-necked people. When Moses “persuaded” Pharaoh to let the Jewish slaves go, they soon began kvetching about how they missed the “comforts” of slavery in Egypt.
There is simply no accounting for intelligent people clinging to repeatedly discredited ideology. And yet, roughly 80% of the stiff-necked people do. It just makes me want to wring their stiff necks.
Henry, the phenomenon you mention reminds me of why the armed forces are underpaid: if the government can take it for granted that people will serve in part for patriotism, they can underpay them and use the extra cash elsewhere. In your case, by parallel, if Jewish people can take it for granted that Republicans will support Israel without question, they’re free to let their votes turn on other stuff.
antiquarian,
That may be part of the explanation but not all of it, though I am at a loss to explain it in full.
American Jews are not monolithic in their support for Israel; not by a long shot. The co-religionists of my generation are. But the younger generations who either don’t know or care much about the Holocaust seem to be, at best, ambivalent, probably because they have been coddled by America’s comforts and opportunities all their lives.
For me and I suppose others who have known about the Nazi horrors first hand, Israel represents our last best hope for survival if Jew-hatred rises to the levels in Nazi Germany.
But even that does not explain everything because I used to think such hatred could not reach those levels, at least not here in America. With the advent of the hardly-disguised anti-Semitic Obama, however, my own confidence in the beneficence of most American people has been sorely shaken.