Charlie Rose

SharkswithfrikingLazers  02/18/2012 03:06 AM Report

This photograph captures Murray's marriage in a strange metaphor:

http://www.worldpressphoto.org/photo/2012liyangsn-3?gallery=2634

Please notice the watchers, the savers and marriage with an exposed nipple and displayed like a bronze of a dead hero.

MartiniBerend  02/17/2012 08:42 PM Report

The themes and values from this book look like they are coming straight out of the books of Thomas Malthus I am reading about.

grice  02/17/2012 01:15 PM Report

If anyone doubts the effects of the educational abyss in which we founder today, he should read some of the remarks below. Has anyone ever heard about the argumentum ad hominem, for instance? Or the old red herring? Other logical fallacies that one once learned in high school civics classes?

And there is the matter of context, too. The remarks taken from Jefferson, e.g., are drawn largely from letters to private, family members. And some of those letters taken as a whole are simply embarrassing and childish intellectually. I am always shocked at the simplistic reasoning in many of them. For instance, Jefferson tells the wayward Peter Carr to read the Bible in light of physics, which he fashionably identifies as the source of knowledge about the Creator. If the earth had really stopped its rotation, he suggests, every person and physical thing on its face would be flattened by the sudden stop. He thereby dismisses miracles. But couldn't any "Creator" of earth and man, one who could set into effect the laws of physics being discovered in the 18th-century, also handle the little problem of momentum and force generated by such an action? While such a question sounds silly worded thus, it reveals how short-sighted and facile much rationalism of the day was. For someone who wrestles with the more complex reality, one should read John Adams.

Yet Jefferson, Franklin, and the other more Frenchified of the founding fathers were Deists. They were not atheists. No doubt about that. And they wrote within a civic culture thoroughly imbued with Western, Judeo-Christian civic values and in a burgeoning nation wherein the overwhelming majority of citizens were more conventionally religious. The civic culture they envisioned was fueled by an ethic rationalists were free to nitpick while enjoying its benefits. Not one of them imagined a nation unsupported by that culture. But that is what Murray is arguing we have---and we've had it for a while, now.

Cultural values and mores grow from personally held spiritual beliefs. When the belief dies, the civic culture will continue for quite some time (momentum, again). Eventually, however, it will change. Its social and codified ethics require the warm blood of belief for life and effectiveness. The nineteenth-century Brits spent the better part of a century considering this phenomenon. Read Carlyle, Mill, Hardy, Newman, and associates, e.g. Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" describes "the long withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith and the desolating chill that follows.

In other words, Murray's ideas are far from novel. What is novel is that he studies a particular nation in a particular time and seeks merely to identify the qualities that create success in that nation.

While I understand it is not part of his task as a reporter of information, I find it interesting that Murray does not address more seriously the decline of the faith that buttressed the Western worldview. To attribute a group's increasing church attendance to its members having decided rationally that attendance might work toward their success rings hollow to anyone who is aware of how cultures work.

When Troy lay in ashes, Aeneas clutched the effigies of its deities and his family and headed west to plant them in a new land, one that would become the greatest empire the western world had seen. And when, centuries later, that world lay in ruin at the hands of the barbarians, spiritual belief in another Child would reinvigorate and enlarge the values that had created it., would posit a God whose children possessed "certain unalienable rights" because they are "endowed [with these] by their Creator." Those rights are unalienable because they are god-given. This assumption underpinned the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Whether one is religious or not, there is no question that the U.S. was formed by people who saw the civic virtues to as organic outgrowths of the belief in a divinity of a particular sort. This belief was not parallel or equal to the virtues, but the source of those virtues. Yeats asked the question, "What rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem" in the wake of that belief.

I wish Mr. Rose would have raised this pertinent question in his interview. But I'm glad he had the interview. Murray identifies and charts the habits of those who succeed in the U.S. And that identification raises questions that need to be asked----but rarely are asked----about the gap that yawns between the successful and the unsuccessful in America today. By studying only whites, Murray made such a discussion possible. Thanks for scheduling the interview.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  02/17/2012 03:15 AM Report

Charlie--missed opportunity here.

You had Charles Murray talk about marriage and yet you did NOT ask Katherine Boo about it.

She wrote The Marriage Cure in 2003.

The plan uses $300 million in federal funds to raise the marriage rate among the poor in an effort to complete the unfinished business of the 1996 federal-welfare-reform law.

Marriage promoters also see matrimony as a means of decreasing crime and welfare dependence.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/02/06/060206fr_archive01#ixzz1m3I28JrF

SharkswithfrikingLazers  02/17/2012 02:49 AM Report

Paul Krugman does a very good job with Murray:

Lack of economic opportunity is what breeds social disruption.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/blaming-the-victims-of-inequality/

Crime is falling; teenage pregnancy is falling. So maybe those traditional social values aren’t as essential to a good society as conservatives like to imagine.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/a-strange-form-of-social-collapse/

Wilson published When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor, in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group - say, working-class whites - experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.

In any case, the social changes taking place in America's working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  02/17/2012 02:39 AM Report

Charlie, are the Jews still the chosen people as he says?

In the April, 2007 issue of Commentary Magazine, Murray wrote on the disproportionate representation of Jews in the ranks of outstanding achievers and says that one of the reasons is that Jews "have been found to have an unusually high mean intelligence as measured by IQ tests since the first Jewish samples were tested."

His article concludes with the assertion: "At this point, I take sanctuary in my remaining hypothesis, uniquely parsimonious and happily irrefutable. The Jews are God's chosen people."[23]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_%28author%29

How can anyone question a man like this?

SharkswithfrikingLazers  02/17/2012 02:27 AM Report

He is divorced yet he sells us marriage?

How many marriages does little ol' American me need?

Perhaps he needs just one more and he will reach Newt(onian) bliss?

finalfantasytown  02/15/2012 09:16 PM Report

Marriage is the extremist design/experiment of symbiosis. When Adam and Eva left Eden, the heterosexual experiment began.Also they are able to independently raise children off Gods. But why homosexual marriage? If IQ is normal or even high, it is highly possible they take advantages from each other, or against each other. When believing in God, the direction is parallel.

davidhamber  02/15/2012 03:51 AM Report

Apparently, Murray in his insistence on the founding father's religiosity never read these quotes from Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin.

"But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." (Jefferson)

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own." (Jefferson)

"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear. " (Jefferson)

"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. " (Jefferson)

"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State. "

(Jefferson)

"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter." (Jefferson)

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise." -letter to Wm. Bradford, April 1, 1774 (Madison)

.

"Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects." (Madison)

.

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries." -1803 letter objecting use of gov. land for churches. (Madison)

"If we look back into history for the character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practiced it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England blamed persecution in the Romish Church, but practiced it upon the Puritans. They found it wrong in Bishops, but fell into the practice themselves both here (England) and in New England." (Franklin)

.

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches." (Franklin)

"In the affairs of the world, men are saved not by faith, but by the lack of it." (Franklin).

adlicari  02/14/2012 08:36 PM Report

Based upon the comments below, it's pretty easy to see Peacelady did not actually view the interview. Of course, I think a lot of people are just on here trolling against Murray. It's a shame because Murray brings up some really good points. If the best one can do it simply construct strawman arguments against him and then knock them down, then he wins the argument going away.

grice  02/14/2012 08:33 PM Report

Thanks for calling this book to our attention. From the comments below, I suspect most have not read the book and tuned out Mr. Murray. They confuse his report of what he discovered with his private beliefs. He notes, for instance, that he himself is agnostic, though his statistics suggest that religion is a trait of the high-achieving class.

My own view is that the gulf that is widening between the upper economic classes and the lower classes is dangerous enough to suspend all prejudice long enough to explore a new idea.

What i have read in most of these responses is knee-jerk p.c.

Thanks for calling my attention to a thoughtful, original book. I'm reading it now.

Peacelady  02/14/2012 03:23 AM Report

Rarely do I watch an interview on Charlie Rose that I don't come away feeling like I gained some knowledge or insight from a guest he interviewed. Charles Murray is definitely the exception. One did not have to listen closely to pick up on the fact that he is an elite ultra right wing racist conservative. And that's a kind description of him. I'm sorry I wasted my time watching the interview. It left me feeling ill. On the other side of the coin I know that there are many more truly gifted thinkers in our world who choose to look at the world as it is and not in a jaded judgmental way. My final thought on Mr. Murray is - yuck.

bonalibro  02/13/2012 08:23 PM Report

You often challenge your guest's views, Charlie, but with this one you did not. Why? There is much room for criticism of Mr. Murray's book. Particularly, the the effects of mechanization, robotization and jobs off-shoring for the sake of returns to shareholders that has been going on for years. The idea the businesses exist to make profits for their shareholders is a relatively new one, going back maybe thirty years. But it has been a very destructive idea. And particularly destructive of working class people's jobs. Apple Computer is a perfect example. It is sitting on $98 billion in cash profits. Its labor costs in the U.S., when it manufactured here, were 15% of the sale price, in China they are somewhat less but not enough to make an appreciable difference in its costs, as the company has said, perhaps because so much more of the work there is done by hand. But it does make an appreciable difference to the people who used to work at Apple's manufacturing plants in the U.S..

In the post-war eram factory work began to disappear in the central cities of the North in the late fifties and early sixties and many of those effected first were African-Americans. After the riots of 1968, the liberal thinkers like Francis Fox Piven, were scared and welfare was used to forestall further rioting. Yes, the benefits were too generous, particularly for single women with children, and destructive of families, because able bodied fathers were not permitted to benefit, even if there were no jobs for them, but policy dictated by fear is often stupid.

SInce the 1980's, the vilification of unions and the offshoring of middle class manufacturing jobs, and a weakening social contract has resulted in increasing unemployment and underemployment for not only high school graduates, but college graduates as well, many of whom work in the hospitality trades and non-tradable services. Yes, those are loser jobs, on which it is impossible to sustain a family. But that is the result of conservative corporatism or neo-liberalism or whatever you want to call it. The welfare policies that discouraged work have not been around since Clinton reformed welfare fifteen years ago.

tabs  02/13/2012 03:11 PM Report

CHARLIE SAYS, "AMERICAS DECLINE IS OVERBLOWN"

Mr Murray is an able demographer whose work accurately reflects the affects of Americas decline rather than the causative agents. Mr Murray lays the cause of this decline at the feet of President Johnson and his domestic policies rather than the Arc of History. For he forgets that America had a Great Post WW2 Prosperity Boom that brought unprecedented wealth and power to American shores. The results of that 20 years of prosperity came a hubris that there were no limits to American power and that anything was attainable. If one remembers it was President Kennedy who built up American Conventional Arms and started the race for the Moon. After Johnson became President, he escalated the Vietnam war, instituted urban renewal and the Great Society. In the midst of all this wealth and power (1965) came a CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite report that American ship building had been off shored to Japan because Americans were no longer competitive in building ships. From that point on it became ever harder to maintain the illusion of American prosperity in the face of ever increasing foreign competition. That is until the bubble burst in the fall of 2008.

Now comes the question of American decline. With 40 cents of every dollar spent by the US government being borrowed it is only a matter of time before the scope of the US government recedes. The social contract with the American people and the defense budgets will have to be reigned in and a new strategic vision will have to be implemented. The American people standard of living as evidenced by Mr Murray is going to RETURN TO MORE HISTORIC NORMS. Here Mr Murray's short sightedness becomes apparent in that he did not compare the American standard of living to an earlier era (1915) that was more normative of American history in the broad scope than the post WW2 era of great wealth Finally the American economy is like a great engine that keeps on rumbling along as it has to service 300 million people and has multinational/global reach. Here we can expect a 1.5% to 3% growth rate going forward which is not enough for the unemployment rate to drop significantly below that of other Social Democracies. Further with the US Debt to GDP ratio is currently at 100% and climbing. This debt level causes an ever increasing drag on the economy due to the capital being taken out of the economy by governmental borrowing and the servicing of that debt. What this all means is that US corporations are finding that they can remain profitable without as many employees and there is a detachment between how well business and the American people are doing as a whole

Finally the sword of Damocles hanging over the world is if there is either a run on the US debt, on the USD or that the USD is simply printed into oblivion. This will in effect create an economic tsunami that would sweep over the world with the same affect that a nuclear war would have.

machngunjoe  02/13/2012 01:49 PM Report

... I don't subscribe to this guys interpretation of what makes people happy, or what makes a good society. I think that culturally forcing kids to get married and his statistics of how marriage has dropped is irrelevant. Look what this mans ideal society, in regards to marriage brought us in the 40's, 50's and 60's, a bunch of unhappy married couples. I think the current youthful generation looks at their parents mistakes and say to themselves, I'll try a different route. Its a common theme, the newer generations look at what there parents did that didn't work and hey improve on it, big deal. At least that's how I see it. Why get married the 'old fashioned' style like this man and some of our parents did? It didn't seems to work for whatever reason (I am speaking generally here, obviously not all marriages were failures). He states that (lack of marriage) is a collapse of a central cultural/social institution in America, when he stated the 48% of working class people getting married stat. As if Marriage automatically gave some immediate benefit, as if people absolutely can not stay together unless they are married. lol. Really? This guy reminds me of just an old backwards style of thinking and I disagree with his view altogether. I think he is just depressed that the world he grew up with has evolved into what it is today and he misses "the good ol' days", perhaps when a man was in charge of the house and could have his wife, his mistress, and a "partridge in a pear tree"

Also "The State of White America" while discussing the inequality of America? You know, I hope he is just awful at his presentation or I am missing his argument, but does this seems rather....racist? Again, I am sure I am not getting what he is talking about in this interview, but my God man choose a different subtitle! Talk about feeding the stereotype.

mikzyspitlik  02/13/2012 01:44 PM Report

Personally I think Charles was a little premature on his ideas of race when he wrote The Bell Curve. I also think his research was somewhat less than stellar but I certainly can understand why a white man raised in the U.S in this time period would think what he thought. However, one thing I do respect is a man that says what he feels. It's actually made me trust him more despite my being black cause I know he's not going to bs me on his opinions. I don't always agree with them but it's whatever. My story: I'm a black 21 year old getting a Double majoring in Biology and Chemistry and I hope to get an MD/Ph.D. I'm one of the best students at my University and I come from a family of warehouse workers. Success? Hard work always seems to be the magic formula to everything as always. I don't know what's going to happen to America, I'm just going to do my work and hope that I can one day make a significant contribution to this nation for me and my family. Personally, my family is intact and my parents had me when they were 28 and 29 and not 15 so that might be a reason for my success. If you don't have values and family you don't have anything, and I think that's what all these books and studies really boil down to. No matter how many social policies a government implements if you don't take it on yourself it's nothing. As far as IQ well back in middle school it was about 117-120. Now it's around 154...I would also like to mention that I probably have Asperger's but even still. People have to be directed towards a certain destiny and unfortunately Charles Murray did more to cause dissonance rather than healing...I wondered who he voted for for President?

REMant  02/13/2012 12:38 PM Report

Well, I can see no here one wants to talk about Romney's loss of three contests and squeaker in a fourth, Obama's riling the entire Catholic establishment, or his $26 billion "Bank-job." But far be from me to object to someone willing to write about the increase in inequality, and all that. Tho I doubt this is quite as earth-shattering as our Mr. Brooks would have it.

In Losing Ground Murray argued the various Great Society welfare measures failed, because they failed to mainstream the poor when they attempted to equalize status rather than opportunity. His Bell Curve argued similarly that regardless of what they may measure, IQ tests are still the best predictor of success. The authors did not accord this to heredity alone and again suggested the best policy would be mainstreaming. Accepted in both of these, however, was the structure of the society itself conceived, obviously in Social Darwinist fashion. Somewhat puzzling then to find the author credits the SAT for his own elevation to the ranks of America's "cognitive elite." He must consider this equal opportunity; I consider it the Horatio Alger myth.

It really ought to come as no surprise that his more recent books decry No-Child-Left-Behind standards, as much as welfare, for compromising such opportunity, by insisting people are unique, the very argument used by "progressive" educators to demolish the curriculum.

Altho he says he does not discuss causes in this book, confirmed by reviewers, the message would appear to be the same, and I might add the same as Mitt Romney's. The concern now appears to be that the poor out-reproduce the rich, thus turning his earlier argument on its head, but really only returning to that churned out by previous generations faced with a tidal wave of immigration. However, whereas the poor were formerly a problem for only because they were not integrated; the rich are now a problem for segregating themselves, i.e., not exerting leadership. The former were not confronted with responsibility, but it won't do to use that for the latter, who must instead be seen as victims of their success. But it sure doesn't say a lot for the theory of mutation, or the significance of genetic diversity, either.

All this blather about civic virtue, civil society, and so forth would appear to be just a cloak for Social Darwinism. Surely it can't be found there, anymore than in the Great Society. His ending suggestion that the cure for all this is enlightened self-interest can only make sense were both in the process to disappear. It can't happen if rich and poor just cohabitate, and I can have no notion of the motivation for such a desire in its absence.

While it is true more ppl go to college today than 50 or 100 years ago, does it really make any difference? I certainly wouldn't fall for the claim that having a degree is the cause of higher income. More likely higher income is the reason for more diplomas. And I think no one will argue that the product has been improved as a result. In other words, this is a red herring.

Does IQ matter either? If markets were actually allowed by the bankers to work, wealth and incomes would tend toward equality. Intellect could not be more highly regarded than brawn, nor "utilities" get out of kilter. More likely greater intellect is simply more capable of greater dishonesty. The main causes of wealth disparity are, the appreciation of assets by chronic inflation rewarding possession over labor, and, the increase in physical productivity, i.e., mass production, accruing disproportionately to owners. Murray may want to renew his acquaintance with Gertrude Himmelfarb. David Frum, BTW, says he makes no mention whatever about foreign competition or similar problems elsewhere. And also notes he blames everyone but businessmen.* See http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/06/charles-murray-book-review.html

It was George Gilder, I think, who, in the great debate surrounding this subject a generation ago, first claimed (rather patronizingly) that men were motivated to work by marriage. While I have my doubts about that too, I don't doubt the importance of family to the rearing of well-rounded children, but because men and women are on the whole so different, and it makes no sense to me to have one preponderate, when it takes both to procreate, altho it does happen in a large number of species. I certainly can't see how you could arrive at civil society that way, and neither I believe did Moynihan. And it makes no sense to me to blame, as Robert Putnam and others have done, the decline in what is defined apriori as self-interested relations on anything but the rise of self-interested relations, in religious terms, sin and Fall. Concern for the decline of community in sociology alone goes back a century or more, and it certainly wasn't the loss of the market they were concerned about. You can, incidentally, call same-sex living arrangements whatever you want, ditto govt involvement regarding them, but I think the word marriage should be reserved for a union creating a biological family.

The men meeting in Phila in 1787 certainly argued about virtue in the nation they were about to create, and realized it is necessary in a republic, but they didn't assume it. Madison certainly didn't think men were angels, and I can't think of anyone who disagreed with him about that. The problem is that the document they wrote has been subverted in ways foreseen by anti-Federalists at the time, who thought, like Mandeville earlier, that virtue was to be better acquired in the school of hard knocks more than in the school room, in saloons rather than temperance halls, etc, and that the larger the polity the harder that would be.

The reform movements known as the "Great Awakenings" IMHO did more to undermine morals and piety than to promote them. Protestantism in general declined, was "feminized," beginning in the late 18th c, moving from a rational to a sentimental basis, at the same time taking down educational standards while promoting market society, and wreaking havoc with the family and its children. We are far too prone today to read and think about family through the eyes of female and religious correspondence. However they were initially intended, the awakenings, particularly after the first, were part of this movement, not its antithesis, which men like Jonathan Edwards and his successors clearly saw and complained of. Ben Franklin, on the other hand, seems to have been an early promoter of them.

Having been in high school and college in early '60s, it's perfectly clear to me that something did happen beginning about 1965 and ending in 1980, somewhat faster on the coasts, more slowly in the interior. But I don't think welfare per se had much to do with it. It was rather opposed to what was then called "the establishment," by which was meant essentially what I've outlined above. The situation was pretty well sketched by George Orwell and Samuel Butler before him: alienated youth, too dissipated to do anything about it, except to create what became known as the "counterculture," a compound of drugs and various socialisms, a lot like WWI's lost generation, altho Orwell like many on the right today seems to have misunderstood entirely the direction it was coming from.

It would make sense tho to push the origin back to the post-WWII generation's development or reassertion of a rather self-serving self-righteousness, not IMHO materially different from their children, altho I can't say from personal experience. In hindsight I surely would not herald them as "the greatest generation." There was a period, I suppose, altho opinions of the '50s vary, where it looked like the war's hardship, and the singular position in which the country found itself afterwards, would inure to our moral benefit, but it appears short-lived, greatly harmed by the wave of spending and money printing which ensued.

Since I understand Murray made an example of the place, I used to live in Belmont, Mass, myself, on "the hill," too, along with Julia Child and John Kenneth Galbraith, et al, altho not perhaps on one of its older and ritzier streets, and other than its having never been a factory town and a century ago evolving into a bedroom community for places like Harvard and MIT from which Murray got his degrees; being also the headquarters of the John Birch Society, where some notable folksingers sought psychiatric treatment, and the location of the local Mormon temple, it was, at least when I was there, a rather ordinary, if hardly lower-class, Boston suburb. I thought Wellesley a lot more snooty and bobo-ish. I found the cost of living halved when I moved to Indiana. Improving price discrimination law might prove salutary.

In a nutshell, it seems to me that both Murray and Brooks and probably Romney, too, are calling on American elites to forsake their narcissism and take up crusading once again. Personally I think that it's their fault to begin with, no different from what the current admin has in mind, and less libertarianism than fascism. Certainly no less snobbery.

*Frum says he's also waffled on a health care mandate

Richard_DeBiase  02/13/2012 12:27 PM Report

I haven't read Mr. Murray's book, so this comment is based entirely on this interview. But he says he wants to start a conversation.

I think religion and ethics are different things, and unconnected. If anyone is damaging the psyche of the children of single parents, it is people like Mr. Murray by telling them there is something wrong with them. I don't think it is better for the children for couples to stay in an unhappy marriage, especially if one of the parents is abusive. I do not think that children born out-of-wedlock are illegitimate, or should be lied to, or should be lied about.

He seems to be using the logical fallacy, if two things happened at the same time, then one caused the other or they are somehow related; he connects marital and economic status since 1960. He seems to be twisting this logical fallacy to fit his worldview, but he's not even consistent at that. He starts with, not being married causes lower economic status. Then he reverses that into lower economic status causes lack of marriage ("who wants to marry these losers").

Maybe the changes in marital status since 1960, that bother Mr. Murray, would have happened earlier in history if women had more options sooner. Maybe the changes in economic status since 1960 are related to globalization and/or the predatory capitalism of the post-Reagan era. I do not think that current social problems can be blamed on LBJ's Great Society program (that was almost 50 years ago); I would blame many social problems on the ever-escalating Drug War that the Religious Right supports.

Mr. Murray seems to be making a completely religious argument, and dressing it up as sociology. I hate to debate religion, but I believe it was Jesus Christ who advocated the non-judgmentalism that Mr. Murray deplores. It's people like Mr. Murray that give religion a bad name.

There are people looking for excuses to reverse the social advances of the 1960's and 70's, because of their religious or social agenda; it sounds like Mr. Murray is one of them. Maybe we would be further along if people like this were not so good at stopping progress.

Maybe I am completely misunderstanding this guy, but if so, then he really needs to work on his presentation.