For over a quarter of a century I have taught in what was once an affluent suburban high school. In May I retired from this position. Because of major demographic changes in student clientele the institution has transformed into a inner city school. This transformation has also resulted in substantial changes in attitudes and perceptions of the students.
Most students today have very little knowledge or interest to historical events that happened before they were born. Their willfully ignorant attitudes on contemporary events are emotional responses, not ones based on real world historical knowledge. Sloganeering for Free health care, free college, saving the planet, just sound “fair’ and “equitable.” Fairness and equality are the primary values they see stressed in the greater culture and media. Someone who does not share these mandated “politically correct” values is unfair, mean, and a “racist.” They have virtually no knowledge of how over time Americans attitudes towards social and political equality have dramatically changed. All they know is that in the past everyone supported slavery and racism. They can’t tell either chronologically or by other ways of historical evidence when this occurred or why and how it changed. To them 1865 (when the Civil War ended) and 1965 (when the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had become law) are not separate but blend into one amorphous thing called ancient history, of which they have no interest, and do not see how these past events affect their lives today. They are trapped in the perpetual present, not caring about the past or future.
It is five decades since Edward Banfield’s highly controversial The Unheavenly City was published, and the sequel, The Unheavenly City Revisited, four years later.
I have been championing this volume for almost 50 years since first encountering it. Murray Rothbard loved this book and devoted a substantial portion of his, For a New Liberty, to a detailed examination of it.
Banfield had many brilliant observations on race, crime, and other hot topics in his book.
It was his innovative redefinition of the concept of social class that is most memorable and which has drawn the most controversy.
Banfield carefully defined class membership, not in terms of income status, such as government statistical poverty levels, but in terms of orientation toward the future, or time preference.
The more pronounced one’s “future orientation” was, the higher one’s social class.
Multicultural critics of this idea now claim it is “cultural racism” to value or promote “future time orientation.”
Known to economists and other social scientists as “low time-preference,” this is what is called setting goals or encouraging purposeful “middle class values” such as punctuality, thrift, foresight, deferred self-gratification of needs or wants, and self-discipline as opposed to “underclass values” or “high time preference” behaviors such as improvidence, hedonism, purposelessness, immediate self-gratification of needs or wants, and capricious spontaneity or irresponsibility.
The Unheavenly City continues to define the real class struggle in America.
In an extremely perceptive essay, Riots—Not Fun or Profit for the Rest of Us, Lew Rockwell draws upon and cites this seminal work and cogently relates it to the current series of destructive riots sweeping across America in its major metropolitan urban areas and densely concentrated cities.
Here is the actual text from Banfield’s book which still remains the most precise explanation for the riots and turmoil America is undergoing in its major cities today.
2:41 am on June 2, 2020
