On “The Corner” the other day, by way of commemorating the centenary of the sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein, I
posted Heinlein's contribution to the 1950s radio series “This I Believe.”
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Eschewing any religious or metaphysical affirmations, Heinlein laid out his
social credo: “I believe in my neighbors... in my townspeople... in my fellow citizens.” He went on to write about his local priest, whose “goodness and charity and loving kindness shine in his daily actions. ... If I’m in trouble, I’ll go to him.” (Heinlein was an atheist, by the way.) Heinlein’s next-door neighbor, he tells us, was a veterinarian: “Doc will get out of bed after a hard day to help a stray cat — no fee, no prospect of a fee.”
Heinlein went on to praise the charity and conscientiousness of his fellow citizens: “For the one who says, ‘The heck with you, I've got mine,’ there are a hundred, a thousand, who will say, ‘Sure, pal, sit down.’ I know that despite all warnings against hitchhikers, I can step to the highway, thumb for a ride, and in a few minutes a car or a truck will stop and someone will say, ‘Climb in, Mack. How far you going?’ ... I believe in the honest craft of workmen. Take a look around you. There never were enough bosses to check up on all that work. From Independence Hall to the Grand Coulee Dam, these things were built level and square by craftsmen who were honest in their bones.”
Heinlein even had a good word for politicians: “I believe that almost all politicians are honest. For every bribed alderman, there are hundreds of politicians — low paid or not paid at all — doing their level best without thanks or glory to make our system work. If this were not true, we would never have gotten past the thirteen colonies.
That one Corner posting brought in more reader e-mail than an average ten columns. I have only just got through it all. The general tone was, I am sorry to say, rather sour. Reader X was representative:
Mr. Derbyshire: (1) — Most Americans are unlikely to see or even know a priest these days. You just don't see many around much. The days of the local priest involved in community affairs are long gone, along with the priests.
(2) — Most people will not have a doctor in their neighborhood. Doctors now live in upscale neighborhoods, as far away from the rabble as possible.
(3) — The honest workmen now speak Spanish and live in run-down apartments in the seedy parts of town.
(4) — The low paid politician has vanished. The surest route to wealth is politics, followed closely by government service. These folks don’t live in town much either. They live in the part of town with the doctors.
(5) — A popular fiction writer would never be able to write such an essay these days. He would not know much about workmen, teachers, town folk and the like. He would have a big house next to the doctor and politician. They would spend cocktail hour talking about how the rabble in town would not allow their servants to become citizens.
You’ll notice a theme here. I suspect the reason the old order came crashing down was that the new order allowed the elites to leave town. Once they were unburdened with the task of mixing with the hoi polloi, the old order was not of much use to anyone, particularly the elites.
I think Reader X is over-egging the pudding, but he has a point. The way the post-WWII meritocracy eventually shook out, there was a social separating, a sort of chromatography. America has always had elites, of course, and we have always had an underclass of some kind. Both seem to be much bigger now than they were then, though. Furthermore, if you subtracted off the elites and the underclass in Heinlein’s time, what was left — the great middle — was far more homogenous then than it is now, its members much better acquainted with each other. The social distance between (say) a doctor and (say) a cop, was smaller then than it is now.
In a later post, I made some follow-up comments of an obvious sort about how Heinlein’s essay made the 1950s seem like an awfully long time ago:
I am in broad sympathy with the many people who have observed that the 1950s were, with numerous obvious qualifications, a sort of Golden Age of American civilization. What on earth happened to us?
Well, the Great Disruption happened. An old order, with its many unsatisfactory features, ended, and a new one — also with many unsatisfactory features, but different ones mostly milder in their unsatisfactoriness — came up.
The main reason the 1950s looks so good to so many of us is that in moving from the old order to the new, we lost much of our civilizational confidence. You may say that that confidence was misplaced, or an illusion; you may even say that it was obnoxious, and good riddance to it; and you may be right on all points. There is something awfully attractive about civilizational confidence though. Like innocence, once gone, it can't be recaptured. Those of us who recall it shouldn't be blamed for missing it.
The point here is that the “social capital” Heinlein describes — the neighborliness and mutual assistance, the networks of clubs, associations, friendly societies, and volunteer organizations that hold communities together — was a key underpinning of that civilizational confidence.
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Along with the Great Disruption, another thing that happened was diversity. This came upon us in three ways.
