Growing economic inequality & decreasing mobility

Marriage and Reading as Elite Customs

by Peter Lawler

One thing that distinguishes us conservatives from libertarians is that we are actually worried about growing inequality in America. We’re not that obsessed with the bare fact of economic inequality, but we are concerned about decreasing mobility. And we’re particularly concerned about the breakdown of what can loosely be called our common middle-class culture. As wealthy and sophisticated Americans show signs of becoming a kind of self-perpetuating “cognitive elite,” the lives of members of the lower part of our middle class become increasingly difficult or even pathological. 

Big Think essayist Pamela Haag very incisively described 15 purported human goods Americans used to share in common that are now becoming “elite customs.” They’re obviously not all equally good, and one or two, in my view, aren’t good at all. Let me reflect on the two that seem to me most fundamental—marriage and books. It’s surely true that a worthwhile human life is constituted by meaningful work and personal love. Love, of course, is most often and reliably found within marriage and the family, and certainly it’s within a stable family that we find the surest sources of personal security and personal significance.

To work and love, of course, we should add leisure. And leisure, at its heights, is about enjoyably discovering who we are and what we’re supposed to do through by arousing our minds and hearts—our thoughts and imaginations—by reading. Well, maybe not only reading. But it has been through books that Americans have been infused with what loosely can be called a “common culture,” a common way of experiencing our world and our place in it. We can at least say that one sign of personal impoverishment is the inability to experience the emotional—even erotic—elevation that comes through reading “real books” in our free time.

What we can say of a man who’s never known marriage

 (or a good woman) or a good book?

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