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SOCIETY REVIEW BY WRAY HERBERT
The markets will fix everything
THE RATIONAL OPTIMIST How Prosperity Evolves By Matt Ridley Harper. 438 pp. $26.99
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arly in this sprawling and ambitious volume, futurist Matt Ridley com- pares a modern computer mouse to
CENTRAL PRESS/GETTY IMAGES RACE REVIEW BY KEVIN BOYLE Politics cheapens poverty
FREEDOM IS NOT ENOUGH The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle Over Black Family Life — from LBJ to Obama By James T. Patterson Basic. 264 pp. $26.95
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hortly after the cataclysmic Watts riot in the summer of 1965, word spread around Washington that the Johnson administra- tion had in its hands a secret report on the state of Black America. It had been writ- ten, said the rumors, by a little-known official in the Department of Labor: Daniel Patrick Moyni- han. And it was “a political atom bomb,” according to columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “which strips away usual equivocations and expos- es the ugly truth about the big-city Negros’ plight.” What followed, as Brown University historian James T. Patterson makes clear in this fine-grained study, was one of the great tragedies of postwar policy making. Moynihan drafted his report in hopes of ad-
vancing the nation’s racial agenda. By early 1965 Af- rican Americans had finally shattered the Southern system of segregation. But securing civil rights was only a first step, he argued. Now it was time to ad- dress the economic injustice that kept almost half the black population below the poverty line, to turn equality of opportunity into equality of outcome. To reach that extraordinary goal, though, the federal government had to confront what Moynihan be- lieved to be the great plague sweeping through black ghettos: the disintegration of traditional fam- ily life. Much of the report was devoted to pre- senting the grim evidence of that disintegration: The divorce rate for blacks was 40 percent higher than for whites; a quarter of African-American ba- bies were born to unwed mothers; 36 percent of black children were living with one parent or none at all. Unless those trends were reversed, Moynihan insisted — and they could be with proper govern- ment action — the cycle of poverty that trapped so many African Americans would not be broken.
1967 FILE PHOTO
The reaction to Daniel Moynihan’s report on “The Negro Family” still effects public policy.
African American scholars and activists had been making these same points for years. But in the after- math of Watts, the message seemed to take on a more sinister tone. As soon as rumors of Moynihan’s work began to circulate, liberals — white and black — condemned it as irresponsible, an attempt to blame African Americans for their own victimization just as white fears of ghetto blacks were skyrocket- ing. Once the report was made public, the liberal at- tacks intensified: It was sensationalistic, simplistic, insensitive and inaccurate, critics charged, “one of those academic efforts to get our eyes off the prize,” a model of “genteel racism.” The backlash terrified the White House, which promptly disassociated itself from the report and its author. “I don’t know what was in there,” LBJ reportedly said, “but whatever it was, stay away from it.” The story of the Moynihan Report’s demise has been told a number of times before. Patterson’s key contribution is to show how the controversy that Moynihan triggered continued to warp public dis- cussion of the concerns he raised long after the re- port itself had been filed away. The conflict so scarred liberals, Patterson says, that for almost 20
years they refused to acknowledge the crisis in in- ner-city family life. Only in the mid-1980s did they begin to change their minds, a transformation led by social scientists like William Julius Wilson, who wrote in his brilliant 1987 book, “The Truly Disad- vantaged,” that Moynihan’s analysis had been “pro- phetic.” But by then conservatives had taken con- trol of the issue, trading on the image of the dys- functional poor — Ronald Reagan’s famous “welfare queen” — to hammer away at the liberal state Moynihan had intended to champion. There the debate remains. In 1996 Bill Clinton signed a Republican-sponsored bill that abolished the nation’s foremost welfare program, Aid to Fami- lies with Dependent Children, an action that en- raged then-Sen.Moynihan. In the years since, there has been no attempt to revive the comprehensive governmental attack on poverty that had seemed possible in the mid-1960s. Instead, politicians across the ideological spectrum settle for lecturing poor African Americans on their responsibilities. Even Barack Obama, who has written so movingly about the burdens of being raised in a fatherless home, seems more willing to criticize the poor for their behavior — too many African American fa- thers are “acting like boys instead of men,” he said in a widely publicized speech in 2008 — than to use federal power to address the tangle of problems that afflicts the inner cities. Meanwhile, the situation Moynihan described 45
years ago has grown far, far worse. In 2008, 72 per- cent of African American babies were born to single mothers, a rate almost one and a half times that of Hispanic Americans, two and a half times that of non-Hispanic whites, and four and a half times that of Asian Americans. If current patterns hold, half of those newborns will be raised in poverty. That’s ap- proximately a quarter-million African American children, more than the entire population of Orlan- do, Fla., trapped on the bottom rung of the American social structure each year by the accident of birth. As Moynihan understood, that’s an injustice that can- not be solved by jeremiads alone.
bookworld@washpost.com
Kevin Boyle teaches history at Ohio State University. He is the author of “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age,” which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2004.
a hand axe from the Middle Stone Age. Both artifacts have been designed to fit into a human hand, but there the simi- larities end. One is the product of a single person’s ingenuity and labor — and of a single substance — while the other is a complex amalgam of materials and labor and strands of human cleverness. No sin- gle person knows how to make a computer mouse from scratch, yet it’s as ordinary as that flint axe was half-a-million years ago. Ridley uses this example to illustrate the idea of the collective brain, a core concept in this rosy view of human progress. At some point in human pre-history, Ridley argues, people began to recognize the se- vere limitations of self-sufficiency. They started specializing their talents and ef- forts and swapping their services, creating a communal intellect that sparked in- novation and progress. Indeed, that sim- ple but profound shift in human sensibil- ity has led to unprecedented prosperity, leisure, peace and liberty — trends that will only accelerate in the century ahead. At least that’s what Ridley believes, and he bolsters this argument with an impres- sive tour of evolutionary biology, anthro- pology, economics, philosophy and world history. His intellectual heroes are Charles Darwin and Adam Smith. He believes that human society has evolved through natural selection — not of genes but of ideas — and through free trade in these ideas. Wherever he looks in the past, Ridley finds that un- encumbered commerce has sparked in- novation and betterment, while bureauc- racy and regulation have stifled creativity and led to stagnation. He ranges nimbly from the excesses of the Ming Dynasty to Walmart merchandizing to the business strategies of sardine fishermen of southern India, and each lesson points him to exu- berant optimism about where human soci- ety is heading. If Ridley is sanguine about the future, he is equally as contemptuous of the past —and of anyone who looks back with even a hint of nostalgia. To pick just one of many examples, the author at one point describes a family at the turn of the 19th century. The father is reading from the Bi- ble while the mother prepares the eve- ning’s stew. The children are gathered around the hearth of their simple timber- framed house. Here is Ridley commenting on this peaceful scene: “Outside there is no noise of traffic, there are no drug deal- ers and neither dioxins nor radioactive fall-out have been found in the cow’s milk. All is tranquil; a bird sings outside the window.”Then Ridley pulls the old switch- eroo, snidely mocking the idyllic tableau that he himself has just created. He grimly paints the reality of the earlier time — the bronchitic coughs and pneumonia and smallpox that will cut short these lives; the foul-tasting water and gray, nutritionally bankrupt diet; the unwanted pregnancies and drunken husbands and hopeless lives of women; the isolated, uncultured lives; and so on and so on. It’s a cheap trick — setting up a straw man just to tear it down. And it’s a trick un- worthy of this otherwise cogent and eru- dite social critic. Other, equally serious critics raise genuine concerns about the state of the planet and the unintended con- sequences of progress; they shouldn’t be so glibly dismissed. And even yearning for a less hectic time is not as simple-minded as Ridley suggests. The urge to simplify is not the same as longing for raw sewage and wife-beating, and to twist it that way is in- sulting to serious-minded folks who would like a course correction. Ridley’s snarki- ness diminishes his analysis. But a diminished masterful work is still a
3 books about yoga
These new yoga books won’t help you sharpen your one-legged king pigeon pose, but if you’re curious about how this ancient Indian tradition conquered the Western world’s gyms, find a resting pose that works for you and prepare to be enlightened.
Stefanie Syman begins by noting that the 2009 Easter Egg Roll was likely the first time yoga had been practiced on the White House lawn. A century earlier Americans widely believed that yoga “per- verted one’s moral sense” and “was about as useful as malaria or consumption but far easier to avoid.” Syman traces the evolution of yoga through the stories of its notable practitioners, such as Tho- reau, Margaret Woodrow Wilson and, yes, Madonna.
1 BIGSTOCKPHOTO
“The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America,” by Stefanie Syman (Farrar Straus Giroux, $28)
Robert Love writes in his introduction that he had assumed the Bea- tles were responsible for popularizing yoga. In fact, he reports, it was the Iowa-born businessman and mystic Pierre Bernard (nick- named “The Great Oom”) who helped bring it to the masses. Love details Bernard’s strange exploits — such as the secretive Tantric ceremonies held at his clinic — as he successfully packaged and sold yoga to skeptical consumers.
2
The most academic of the three books, “Yoga Body” is for those with a serious interest in yogi philosophy. Mark Singleton argues that yoga as practiced in the Indian tradition had to do more with purification and meditation than with the health and fitness aspects that have made it all the rage today.
3 — Stephen Lowman
lowmans@washpost.com
“Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice,” by Mark Singleton (Oxford Univ.; paperback, $17.95)
“The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America,” by Robert Love (Viking, $27.95)
very good book. It’s provocative to stake out such a position at this moment in history, with the world economy still reeling from the excesses of unregulated bankers. Ridley — a former banker himself — concedes as much, but he confidently predicts that mar- ket forces will pull the world out of the cur- rent crisis. He also believes these forces will meet any challenges brought about by glob- al climate change. Climate pessimism is based on ignorance of future technologies, he argues. He is convinced that human in- genuity will cause new, planet-saving ideas to bubble up and avert climate disaster. Maybe, maybe not. This rich analysis shouldn’t properly be reviewed until 2110, because only then will we know if Ridley’s confidence in human ingenuity is warrant- ed. Futurists don’t have a great track record, but let’s hope that future generations will review this rose-tinted vision favorably.
bookworld@washpost.com
Wray Herbert is the author of “On Second
Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits,” which will be published in September.
SUNDAY, JULY 18, 2010
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