Charles Murray. |
In an interview with
Canadian podcaster and pro-life activist Jonathan Van Maren, Charles Murray, a
political scientist and author of Coming Apart —
an analysis of the widening economic and social disparities in the United
States in the last half-century — said he believed that U.S. constitutional
government is "dead as a doornail."
Absent large-scale
spiritual renewal, the U.S. might only exist for a few more decades, he said.
Murray holds the F. A. Hayek Emeritus Chair in Cultural Studies at
the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank in Washington,
D.C.
The political
scientist believes that even those who call themselves conservative now believe
things that the American Founders would find scandalous. At present, what is
happening in the U.S. is undergoing a preview of what a
"post-America" may be, he said.
“You cannot have a
free society, a society that allows lots of individual autonomy without some
outside force that leads people to control the self,” Murray explained.
The U.S. today is just
another powerful, rich nation and the "American way of life" is now
“meaningless,” he said.
“What was at the very
core of the American founding — the character of the American people — was what
in the eyes the founders made the experiment possible.”
Murray went to on to
say that it would be great if what used to be called a "religious great
awakening" would happen again and inspire substantial changes in behavior
in the population, particularly if a new upper class joins in the revival of
Judeo-Christian traditions. Yet the scholar is not holding out hope that such a
thing will happen in the U.S. or in Europe, which is on course to die out
culturally. However, he said, neither can ongoing secularization endure.
“I cannot believe that the secularization of society is going to
continue indefinitely. We have never had an advanced culture, in the history of
the world, that is nearly as secular as contemporary Europe. And I would say
that is the test case,” he said.
He added that
Americans ought to return to small towns and live "the traditional
American way of life" and be active in their communities.
In addition to Coming Apart,
Murray is perhaps best known for his scholarship in a 1994 book he co-authored
titled, The
Bell Curve. His newest book, which was just released, is Human
Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class.
In 2017, Murray garnered national headlines after
he was shouted down and prohibited from speaking by an angry mob of students at
Middlebury College, an elite liberal arts college in Vermont. The professor who
had invited him, Allison Stanger, was physically assaulted and ended up in a
neck brace following the attack. The protests were in part because leftist
students considered The Bell Curve to be "white
supremacist" because of the way he discusses racial differences in
intelligence and the implications of those differences.
As was widely reported
at the time, the students who protested his speech chanted: "Racist,
sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray, go away" and "Your message is
hatred, we cannot tolerate it."
https://www.christianpost.com/us/american-constitutional-government-will-die-unless-great-spiritual-awakening-occurs-scholar-says.html
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