Between Two Worlds

In Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society, he quotes Christopher Jencks' book Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass to the effect that three principles constitute the basic minimum of an American civilizational code:

1. working men are generally expected to keep steady jobs;
2. women should not bear illegitimate children they cannot support;
3. everyone should refrain from violence.

Obviously these three norms are not sufficient conditions for a civilized society; but they are necessary. If this is true, our society is in obvious trouble.

With regard to the issue of how crime and dependency should be tackled? There are a number of proposals:

1. Criminals should pay mandatory restitution to those they have wronged; if they lack the resources, they should be required to do physical labor.
2. Parents should be held partly responsible for the crimes of their minor-age children.
3. Welfare benefits should be limited for mothers who continue to have children on welfare.
4. Teenage welfare mothers should take up education, training, or work.
5. Paternity and child-support laws should be strengthened.
6. The tax code should be modified to strengthen rather than penalize two-parent families.

Which of these proposals does D'Souza think should be implemented? All of them.

He writes: "we have to recognize that poverty and pathology today do not merely arise from the absence of opportunity but also from the inability or refusal to take advantage of opportunity. There is a dynamic interplay between external incentives and cultural responses to them. What we have now is a downward spiral produced by dysfunctional cultural orientations and destructive social policies. We need to revers the trend, to generate an upward spiral in which social structures and cultural habits work together to generate great productivity and social responsibility. This should be the test of every public policy measure: the degree to which it expands opportunity while at the same time fostering productive and responsibile behavior on the part of citizens."

What do you think?