According to the psychologist Stéphane Bouchard, who studies phobia at the University of Quebec, about a third of phobias are indeed set off by direct exposure to frightening encounters, such as a dog bite. Roughly another third are culturally suggested: a classic example being the increase in shark and water phobias after the movie “Jaws.” With that final third, Mr. Bouchard told me, shrugging, “we just have no clue.”Let me zero in on that final third.“I have a fear of honeycomb shapes,” a woman once wrote to me when I solicited examples of phobias for my research. “I can’t look at something like a beehive. The other day, I saw a box of honeycomb-shaped pasta at the grocery store and it really creeped me out.”

Of all the manifestations of anxiety, specific phobias are by far the most idiosyncratic. About 6 percent of Americans have an acute fear of animals like rats and birds. But after that, the sources of terror are myriad.

Oddly, this act of transmuting anxiety into fear does possess a kind of logic. Anxiety has been described as fear in search of a cause, and there’s little question that fear is more actionable. Instead of being paralyzed by a sense of directionless menace, as would be the case with a generalized anxiety disorder where danger is everywhere and nowhere, the phobic can pour all dread into one vessel, and then swiftly run away.In other words, phobia can be a form of compartmentalization.

A fear of flying, for instance, can relate to acrophobia (fear of heights), or to claustrophobia, or it can be a stand-in for a much more threatening prospect that dare not be confronted at any cost, such as the death of a parent. You’re avoiding grief, and the next thing you know you would rather be trapped in an elevator with bees than board an airplane. The airplane is departing for another world but no, that’s too obvious.

We are not simple creatures, we human beings, and we know it; yet we still insist on imposing simple explanations upon our emotional conduct. “They’re just freaking dandelions, Mom,” my son tells me. It’s just a garter snake. They’re merely peas. How in the world  can you be so idiotically afraid of clowns?There are wider implications here for our civic and political discourse. Certain people may be neurologically prone to anxiety, true, but fear is also circumstantial. The current economic climate is extremely anxiety-provoking, and research has shown that people can tolerate uncertainty for only so long. At some point, the neurotically wired begin to prefer negative certitudes  — or compartmentalized threats  — to ambiguity.

f we cannot tolerate uncertainty, then it might be reasonable to expect an increase in phobic behaviors:   xenophobia, Islamophobia, Obamafear, a terror of newts. These aren’t stances that can be dealt with by counterargument.  They can be quelled only by exposure, by a reminder that the threat is symbolic, a stand-in. Let’s invite the enemy we  fear to dine, then, and rescue ourselves  from irrational conflict.

Who fits the stereotype of the rich and powerful described in this research? Mitt Romney. Empathy: “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” Compassion: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” Sympathy for the disadvantaged: My wife “drives a couple of Cadillacs.” Willingness to lie in negotiations: “I was a severely conservative Republican governor.”

48 percent described the Democratic Party as “weak,” compared to 28 percent who described the Republican Party that way. Conversely, 50 percent said the Republican Party is “cold hearted,” compared to 30 percent who said that was true of the Democrats.

This is the war that is raging throughout America. It is between conservatives, who emphasize personal responsibility and achievement, against liberals, who say the government must take from the wealthy and give to the poor. So it will be interesting this week to see if President Obama can rally the country to support his vision of a strong social compact. He has compassion on his side. Few Americans want to see their fellow citizens suffer. But the president does have that fiscal responsibility issue haunting him because the country remains in dire trouble.

For power holders, the world is viewed through an instrumental lens, and approach is directed toward those individuals who populate the useful parts of the landscape. Our results suggest that power not only channels its possessor’s energy toward goal completion but also targets and attempts to harness the energy of useful others. Thus, power appears to be a great facilitator of goal pursuit through a combination of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes. The nature of the power holder’s goals and interpersonal relationships ultimately determine how power is harnessed and what is accomplished in the end.

Republicans recognize the political usefulness of objectification, capitalizing on “compassion fatigue,” or the exhaustion of empathy, among large swathes of the electorate who are already stressed by the economic collapse of 2008, high levels of unemployment, an epidemic of foreclosures, stagnant wages and a hyper-competitive business arena.

. Republican debates provided further evidence of compassion fatigue when audiences cheered the record-setting use of the death penalty in Texas and applauded the prospect of a gravely ill pauper who, unable to pay medical fees, was allowed to die.Even Rick Santorum, who has been described by the National Review as holding “unstinting devotion to human dignity” and as fluent in “the struggles of the working class,” wants to slash aid to the poor. At a Feb. 21 gathering of 500 voters in Maricopa County, Ariz., Santorum brought the audience to its feet as he declared:We need to take everything from food stamps to Medicaid to the housing programs to education and training programs, we need to cut them, cap them, freeze them, send them to the states, say that there has to be a time limit and a work requirement, and be able to give them the flexibility to do those programs here at the state level.

President Obama has a substantial advantage this year because he does not have a primary challenger, which frees him from the need to emphasize his advocacy for the disempowered — increasing benefits or raising wages for the poor. This allows him to pick and chose the issues he wants to address.At the same time, compassion fatigue may make it easier for the Republican nominee to overcome the liabilities stemming from his own primary rhetoric, to reach beyond the core of the party to white centrist voters less openly drawn to hard-edged conservatism. With their capacity for empathy frayed by a pervasive sense of diminishing opportunity and encroaching shortfall, will these voters once again become dependable Republicans in 2012?

This idea seems laughable if you assume that most swing voters are fiscal conservatives and social moderates, allergic to culture-war appeals and pining for a dream ticket of Michael Bloomberg and Olympia Snowe. But as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has explained, there’s more than one kind of “moderate” in American politics:

There are, very roughly speaking, two kinds of swing voters. One kind is economically conservative, socially liberal swing voters. This is the kind of voter you usually read about, because it’s the kind most familiar to political reporters – affluent and college educated. But there’s a second kind of voter at least as numerous – economically populist and socially conservative. Think of disaffected blue-collar workers, downscale white men who love guns, hate welfare, oppose free trade, and want higher taxes on the rich and corporations. Romney appeals to the former, but Santorum more to the latter

That’s because the former senator has the instincts of an activist, rather than of a president or statesman.

a Rust Belt background would be a potential advantage for a Republican presidential candidate. But a Rust Belt background that includes an 17-point repudiation from the Pennsylvania electorate that knew Santorum best looks more like a liability instead.

both Catholicism and social conservatism are potential assets in a campaign against a president who has spoken condescendingly about Middle Americans who “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion.” But a Catholic conservatism that manifests itself in campaign-trail critiques of contraception promises to alienate many more voters (female voters, especially) than it attracts.

All things being equal, a populist style that’s at odds with the Acela corridor’s attitudes and values can often play well in the heartland. But no presidential candidate can succeed without a modicum of favorable media coverage, and so a successful populist needs to be able to disarm elite journalists (as Huckabee so expertly did, schmoozing on The Daily Show and elsewhere) as often as he alienates them. And nobody has ever used the word “disarming” to describe Rick Santorum’s approach to politics.

his political persona is worlds away from the Washington-New York definitions of “middle-of-the-road.” But a mix of social conservatism and economic populism has a great deal of general-election potential – especially in a contest against a president whose style of liberalism can seem professorial, condescending and aloof.

Whether the topic is social issues or foreign policy, his zeal exceeds his prudence, and as a result his career is littered with debating society provocations (referencing “man-on-dog” sex in an argument about gay marriage, using his doomed 2006 Senate bid to educate Pennsylvanians on the evils of Hugo Chavez, etc.) that have won him far more enemies than friends. His passion for ideas and argument often does him credit, but in a national campaign it would probably do him in.

“It’s just a curious bias of the media around here. It’s wonderful. One person says something negative and the media rushes and covers that. The wonderful balanced media that I love in this community.”

Santorum had reason to be peeved. He was running against the Democrat Bob Casey. He was trailing by double digits and knew he was going to lose. He was not a happy camper, but then he rarely is.

As he has shown in the Republican debates, Santorum can be equable. The anger usually flares on matters closest to his heart: faith, family and morals. And if, by chance, you get him started on the role of religion in American life, get ready for a Vesuvius moment.

Outside of these areas, he was more pragmatic. Then and now, Santorum held predictably conservative views, but he was astute enough to bend on some issues and be — as he put it in the Arizona debate — “a team player.”

In the Senate, he represented a state with a relentlessly moderate-to-centrist electorate so when campaigning he emphasized the good deeds he did in Washington. Editorial board meetings with Santorum usually began with him listing federal money he had brought in for local projects.People who don’t know him — and just see the angry Rick — don’t realize what a clever politician Santorum is. He didn’t rise to become a Washington insider through the power of prayer. He may say the Rosary, but he knows his Machiavelli.

That said, Santorum’s anger is not an act.  It is genuine. It has its roots in the fact that he had the misfortune to be born in the second half of the 20th century. In his view, it was an era when moral relativism and anti-religious feeling held sway, where traditional values were ignored or mocked, where heretics ruled civic and political life. If anything, it’s gotten worse in the 21st, with the election of Barack Obama.Leave it to Santorum to attack Obama on his theology, of all things. He sees the president as an exemplar of mushy, feel-good Christianity that emphasizes tolerance over rectitude, and the love of Jesus over the wrath of God.

Like many American Catholics, I struggle with the church’s teachings as they apply to the modern world. Santorum does not.

I once wrote that Santorum has one of the finest minds of the 13th century. It was meant to elicit a laugh, but there’s truth behind the remark. No Vatican II for Santorum. His belief system is the fixed and firm Catholicism of the Council of Trent in the mid-16th century. And Santorum is a warrior for those beliefs.

During the campaign, he has regularly criticized the media for harping on his public statements on homosexuality, contraception, abortion, the decline in American morals. Still, he can’t resist talking about them. These are the issues that get his juices flowing, not the deficit or federal energy policy.

Santorum went to Houston not to praise Kennedy but to bash him. To Santorum, the Kennedy speech did permanent damage because it led to secularization of American politics. He said it laid the foundation for attacks on religion by the secular left that has led to denial of free speech rights to religious people. “John F. Kennedy chose not to just dispel fear,” Santorum said, “he chose to expel faith.”

Ultimately Kennedy’s attempt to reassure Protestants that the Catholic Church would not control the government and suborn its independence advanced a philosophy of strict separation that would create a purely secular public square cleansed of all religious wisdom and the voice of religious people of all faiths. He laid the foundation for attacks on religious freedom and freedom of speech by the secular left and its political arms like the A.C.L.U and the People for the American Way. This has and will continue to create dissension and division in this country as people of faith increasingly feel like second-class citizens.One consequence of Kennedy’s speech, Santorum said,is the debasement of our First Amendment right of religious freedom. Of all the great and necessary freedoms listed in the First Amendment, freedom to exercise religion (not just to believe, but to live out that belief) is the most important; before freedom of speech, before freedom of the press, before freedom of assembly, before freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances, before all others. This freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, is the trunk from which all other branches of freedom on our great tree of liberty get their life.As so it went for 5,000 words. It is a revelatory critique of the modern world and Santorum quoted G.K. Chesterton, Edmund Burke, St. Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther King to give heft to his assertions.That said, it was an angry speech, conjuring up images of people of faith cowering before leftist thought police. Who could rescue us from this predicament? Who could banish the secularists and restore religious morality to its throne?

But Obama’s early opposition to the Iraq war gave him a political firewall that protected him throughout that primary campaign, while Romney has no such policy safe harbor to safeguard him from an intramural backlash.

Romney and Obama share a lack of natural affinity for this key group of swing voters, but it is Romney who needs to figure out some way of addressing this shortcoming if he wants to make it to the White House. It’s Romney’s misfortune that the voters’ prioritization of economic issues, his own privileged upbringing and his lack of connection with his party’s base on other core issues put him in a much more precarious position than candidate Obama ever reached.

By the time the 2008 general election rolled around, Obama had bolstered his outreach to these voters by recruiting the blue-collar avatar Joe Biden as his running mate. Should Romney win the Republican nomination this year, his advisers will almost certainly be tempted by the working-class credentials that a proletarian like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie or Florida Senator Marco Rubio would bring to the ticket.

Of more immediate concern to Team Romney should be how their candidate can overcome his habit of economic tone-deafness before Rick Santorum steals away enough working-class and culturally conservative voters to throw the Republican primary into complete and utter turmoil.

The curious thing about Romney’s verbal missteps is how limited they are to this very specific area of public policy. He is usually quite articulate when talking about foreign affairs and national security. Despite his complicated history on social and cultural matters like health care and abortion, his explanations are usually both coherent and comprehensible, even to those who oppose his positions. It’s only when he begins talking about economic issues – his biographical strength – that he seems to get clumsy.

The second possibility would be for him to outline a series of proposals specifically targeted at the needs of working-class and poor Americans, not only to control the damage from his gaffes but also to underscore the conservative premise that a right-leaning agenda will create opportunities for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. But while that approach might help Romney in a broader philosophical conversation, it’s unlikely to offer him much protection from the attacks and ridicule that his unforced errors will continue to bring him.

The question is why Romney hasn’t embraced a third alternative – admitting the obvious and then explaining why he gets so tongue-tied when the conversation turns to money. Romney’s upbringing and religious faith suggest a sense of obligation to the less fortunate and an unspoken understanding that it isn’t appropriate to call attention to one’s financial success.It wouldn’t be that hard for him to say something like:I was taught not to brag and boast and think I’m better than other people because of the successes I’ve had, so occasionally I’m going to say things that sound awkward. It’s because I’d rather talk about what it takes to get America back to work.

Romney had sketched out an economic plan that avoided the supply-side gimmicks and outright crankery embraced by many of his rivals. He had backed the smartest conservative thinking on entitlements and was rewarded with bipartisan cover when Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden endorsed a similar model for Medicare reform.

Thanks to his own smooth evasiveness and the blunders of his rivals, meanwhile, he had managed to sidestep the obvious resemblances between his Massachusetts health care bill and the White House’s Affordable Care Act. And by selling himself as a turnaround artist rather than an ideologue, a champion of the middle class rather than a defender of his fellow 1 percenters, he seemed well-positioned to campaign on competence, experience and sound economic stewardship in the general election.

But then came the South Carolina primary, and Romney’s fumbling, tone-deaf responses to Newt Gingrich’s attacks on his career at Bain Capital. His awkwardness didn’t have direct policy implications, but it revealed a surprising inability to defend his own chosen electoral narrative against fairly obvious attacks. And with the businessman-turnaround artist narrative compromised, it became much easier for Romney’s rivals to turn the focus to his moderate past and long list of flip-flops.

It was to change this dynamic, presumably, that Romney’s campaign decided to have him come out for the first time with a big tax reform plan of his own, which he unveiled last week in a speech at Ford Field. In its broadest strokes, the plan isn’t terrible: It promises lower rates and a broader base, which is the goal of just about every sensible tax reform proposal, and it cuts rates for most taxpayers, not just businesses and the rich. But the Romney campaign has declined to explain exactly how the cuts will be paid for, offering vague promises of loophole closing and spending cuts that suggest a return to supply-side irresponsibility.

If left unrevised and unaddressed, this irresponsibility threatens to demolish the pillars of Romney’s general-election argument. First, it will make it considerably harder for him to attack the White House’s record on deficits, which would otherwise be a central part of the case against the president. Second, it will make Romney’s own vision for entitlement reform easy to demagogue and dismiss, since President Obama will have grounds to argue that his opponent only wants to cut Medicare and Social Security in order to cut taxes on the rich.

Both of these problems, needless to say, will be exacerbated if Romney continues to be unable to talk about his wealth in anything save the most clueless and flatfooted fashion. The White House might prefer to face Rick Santorum in the general election, but an out-of-touch rich guy running on Medicare cuts and an ill-considered tax plan will make for a pretty inviting target in his own right.

John McCain has Aeschylated it to “a Greek tragedy.” And he should know from Greek tragedy. “It’s the negative campaigning and the increasingly personal attacks,” he told The Boston Herald, adding, “the likes of which we have never seen.” When a man who was accused of having an illegitimate black child in the 2000 South Carolina primary thinks this is the worst ever, the G.O.P. is really in trouble. The Arizona senator, who’s supporting Romney, grimly noted: “I know he’s going to be the nominee, but I also worry about how much damage has been done.”

Once elected, those presidents curbed the id with the ego, common sense and reason. But now the G.O.P.’s id is unbridled. The horse has thrown the rider; the dark forces are bubbling. Moderates, women, gays, Hispanics and blacks — even the president — are being hunted in this most dangerous game.

Asked in Michigan why he couldn’t excite the base, Romney said he is not willing to make “incendiary comments” or “light my hair on fire.”

moderate Republicans feel passé, Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine shockingly announced her retirement, decrying “ ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies” and a vanishing political center.

The apogee of apathy for Romney was on Friday, when the man who says he’s an expert manager spoke to a mostly empty football stadium in Detroit.

he cited his wife’s two Caddies and his Nascar team-owner pals, and awkwardly mocked the plastic ponchos of Daytona racing fans: “I like those fancy raincoats you bought. Really sprung for the big bucks.”

Mitt was damaged as a contender against Obama when he was forced to admit that he had a 15-percent tax rate (given, as The Huffington Post points out, that Romney averaged $6,400 an hour at Bain Capital while creating lots of jobs with paltry wages).

Now Santorum should forfeit his chance after making a far dumber remark: Kids should beware of college because they’ll get brainwashed.

Pandering to Tea Partiers, Santorum, who has a B.A., M.B.A. and J.D., and who supported higher education in his 2006 senatorial campaign, absurdly turned the American dream inside-out and into sauerkraut.

He called the president “a snob” for encouraging people to get more educated and asserted that Obama only wants Americans to go to college so they can be remade in his image, while being indoctrinated by liberal college professors.

Does he think that defining ambition down and asking kids to give up hope is a good mantra? Even Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, who was trying to mandate that women seeking abortions be shamed with vaginal ultrasounds that Democrats dubbed “legal rape,” thought Santorum went too far.

In an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, Santorum offended the Catholics he’s courting by saying that the J.F.K. speech ratifying the separation of church and state made him want “to throw up” because Kennedy had thrown “his faith under the bus.” “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state are absolute,” Sanctorum said.

After 30 years of Mubarak rule and some $50 billion in U.S. aid, 33 percent of men and 56 percent of women in Egypt still can’t read or write.

What is her priority? Is it to end illiteracy? Is it to articulate a new vision about how Egypt can engage with the world and thrive in the 21st century? Is it to create a positive climate for foreign investors to create jobs desperately needed by young Egyptians? No, it’s to fall back on that golden oldie — that all of Egypt’s problems are the fault of outsiders who want to destabilize Egypt. So let’s jail some Western democracy consultants. That will restore Egypt’s dignity.

Not surprisingly, some members of the U.S. Congress are talking about cutting off the $1.3 billion in aid the U.S. gives Egypt’s army if these Americans are actually thrown in prison.

All these examples tell us that increased efficiency is good, and that removing friction increases efficiency. But the financial crisis, along with the activities of the Occupy movement and the criticism being leveled at Mr. Romney, suggests that maybe there can be too much of a good thing. If loans weren’t securitized, bankers might have taken the time to assess the creditworthiness of each applicant. If homeowners had to apply for loans to improve their houses or buy new cars, instead of writing checks against home equity, they might have thought harder before making weighty financial commitments. If people actually had to go into a bank and stand in line to withdraw cash, they might spend a little less and save a little mor

Finding the “mean” isn’t easy, even when we try to. It is sometimes said that the only way to figure out how much is enough is by experiencing too much. But the challenge is even greater when we’re talking about companies, because companies aren’t even trying to find the “mean.” For an individual company and its shareholders, there is no such thing as too much efficiency. The price of too much efficiency is not paid by the company. It is what economists call a negative externality, paid by the people who lose their jobs and the communities that suffer from job loss. Thus, we can’t expect the free market to find the level of efficiency that keeps firms competitive, provides quality goods at affordable prices and sustains workers and their communities. If we are to find the balance, we must consider stakeholders and not just shareholders. Companies by themselves won’t do this. Sensible regulation might.

So the real criticism embodied by current attacks on Bain Capital is not a criticism of capitalism. It is a criticism of unbridled, single-minded capitalism. Capitalism needn’t be either of those things. It isn’t in other societies with high standards of living, and it hadn’t been historically in the United States. Perhaps we can use the current criticism of Bain Capital as an opportunity to bring a little friction back into our lives. One way to do this is to use regulation to rekindle certain social norms that serve to slow us down. For example, if people thought about their homes less as investments and more as places to live, full of the friction of kids, dogs, friends, neighbors and community organizations attached, there might be less speculation with an eye toward house-flipping. And if companies thought of themselves, at least partly, as caretakers of their communities, they might look differently at streamlining their operations.

We’d all like a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon. The forces of friction that slow us down are an expensive annoyance. But when we’re driving a car, we know where we’re going and we’re in control. Fast is good, though even here, a little bit of friction can forestall disaster when you encounter an icy road. Life is not as predictable as driving. We don’t always know where we’re going. We’re not always in control. Black ice is everywhere. A little something to slow us down in the uncertain world we inhabit may be a lifesaver.

last year Mr. Santorum made a point of defending the medieval Crusades against the “American left who hates Christendom.” Historical issues aside (hey, what are a few massacres of infidels and Jews among friends?), what was this doing in a 21st-century campaign?

Nor is this only about sex and religion: he has also declared that climate change is a hoax, part of a “beautifully concocted scheme” on the part of “the left” to provide “an excuse for more government control of your life.” You may say that such conspiracy-theorizing is hardly unique to Mr. Santorum, but that’s the point: tinfoil hats have become a common, if not mandatory, G.O.P. fashion accessory.

Then there’s Ron Paul, who came in a strong second in Maine’s caucuses despite widespread publicity over such matters as the racist (and conspiracy-minded) newsletters published under his name in the 1990s and his declarations that both the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act were mistakes. Clearly, a large segment of his party’s base is comfortable with views one might have thought were on the extreme fringe.

Finally, there’s Mr. Romney, who will probably get the nomination despite his evident failure to make an emotional connection with, well, anyone. The truth, of course, is that he was not a “severely conservative” governor. His signature achievement was a health reform identical in all important respects to the national reform signed into law by President Obama four years later. And in a rational political world, his campaign would be centered on that achievement.

Libertarians congregated around a government-centric theory. Great Society programs enabled people to avoid work and gave young women an incentive to have children without marrying.

Neo-conservatives had a more culturally deterministic theory. Many of them had been poor during the Depression. Economic stress had not undermined the family then. Moreover, social breakdown began in the 1960s, a time of unprecedented prosperity. They argued that the abandonment of traditional bourgeois norms led to social disruption, especially for those in fragile circumstances.

a new body of research has emerged, which should lead to new theories. This research

tends to support a few common themes. First, no matter how social disorganization got started, once it starts, it takes on a momentum of its own. People who grow up in disrupted communities are more likely to lead disrupted lives as adults, magnifying disorder from one generation to the next.

Second, it’s not true that people in disorganized neighborhoods have bad values. Their goals are not different from everybody else’s. It’s that they lack the social capital to enact those values. Third, while individuals are to be held responsible for their behavior, social context is more powerful than we thought. If any of us grew up in a neighborhood where a third of the men dropped out of school, we’d be much worse off, too.

disruption breeds disruption

children who can’t form secure attachments by 18 months face a much worse set of chances for the rest of their lives because they find it harder to build stable relationships.

materialism is not the greedy desire for material goods, but rather the belief that the fundamental reality of the world is material;

idealism is not the aspiration toward lofty and laudable goals, but rather the belief that the fundamental reality of the world is mental or idea-like. English-speaking philosophers today tend to speak of “physicalism” or “naturalism” rather than materialism (perhaps to avoid confusion with the Wall Street sense of the term). At the same time, Anglo-American historians of philosophy continue to find the distinction between materialism and idealism a useful one in our attempts at categorizing past schools of thought. Democritus and La Mettrie were materialists; Hobbes was pretty close. Berkeley and Kant were idealists; Leibniz may have been.

And it was these paradoxes that led the Irish philosopher to conclude that talk of matter was but a case of multiplying entities beyond necessity. For Berkeley, all we can know are ideas, and for this reason it made sense to suppose that the world itself consists in ideas.

Central to this performance was the concept of  “materialism.” The entire history of philosophy, in fact, was portrayed in Soviet historiography as a series of matches between the materialist home-team and its “idealist” opponents, beginning roughly with Democritus (good) and Plato (bad), and culminating in the opposition between official party philosophy and logical positivism, the latter of which was portrayed as a shrouded variety of idealism. Thus from the “Short Philosophical Dictionary,” published in Moscow in 1951, we learn that the school of logical empiricism represented by Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath and others, “is a form of subjective idealism, characteristic of degenerating bourgeois philosophy in the epoch of the decline of capitalism.”Now the Soviet usage of this pair of terms appears to fly in the face of our ordinary, non-philosophical understanding of them (that, for example,  Wall Street values are “materialist,” while the Occupy movement is “idealist”). One might have thought that the communists should be flinging the “materialist” label at their capitalist enemies, rather than claiming it for themselves. One might also have thought that the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent failed project of building a workers’ utopia was nothing if not idealistic.

one great problem with the concept of materialism is that it says very little in itself. What is required in addition is an elaboration of what a given thinker takes matter, or ideas, to be. It may not be just the Marxist aftertaste, but also the fact that the old common-sense idea about matter as brute, given stuff has turned out to have so little to do with the way the physical world actually is, that has led Anglo-American philosophers to prefer to associate themselves with the “physical” or the “natural” rather than with the material.  Reality, they want to say, is just what is natural, while everything else is in turn “supernatural” (this distinction has its clarity going for it, but it also seems uncomfortably close to tautology). Not every philosopher has a solid grasp of subatomic physics, but most know enough to grasp that, even if reality is eventually exhaustively accounted for through an enumeration of the kinds of particles and a few basic forces, this reality will still look nothing like what your average person-in-the-street takes reality to be.

The 18th-century idealist philosopher George Berkeley strongly believed that matter was only a fiction contrived by philosophers in the first place, for which the real people had no need. For Berkeley, there was never anything common-sensical about matter. We did not need to arrive at the era of atom-splitting and wave-particle duality, then, in order for the paradoxes inherent in matter to make themselves known (is it infinitely divisible or isn’t it?

Soviet and Western Marxists alike, by stark contrast, and before them the French “vulgar” (i.e., non-dialectical) materialists of the 18th century, saw and see the material world as the base and cause of all mental activity, as both bringing ideas into existence, and also determining the form and character of a society’s ideas in accordance with the state of its technology, its methods of resource extraction and its organization of labor. So here to focus on the material is not to become distracted from the true source of being, but rather to zero right in on it.

Consider money. Though it might sometimes be represented by bank notes or coins, money is an immaterial thing par excellence, and to seek to acquire it is to move on the plane of ideas. Of course, money can also be converted into material things, yet it seems simplistic to suppose that we want money only in order to convert it into the material things we really want, since even these material things aren’t just material either: they are symbolically dense artifacts, and they convey to others certain ideas about their owners. This, principally, is why their owners want them, which is to say that materialists (in the everyday sense) are trading in ideas just as much as anyone else.

In the end no one really cares about stuff itself. Material acquisitions — even, or perhaps especially, material acquisitions of things like Rolls Royces and Rolexes — are maneuvers within a universe of materially instantiated ideas. This is human reality, and it is within this reality that mystics, scientists, and philosophers alike are constrained to pursue their various ends, no matter what they might take the ultimate nature of the external world to be.

He contends in “Coming Apart” that there was far greater social cohesion across class lines 50 years ago because “the powerful norms of social and economic behavior in 1960 swept virtually everyone into their embrace,” adding in a Jan. 21 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal thatOver the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.According to Murray, higher education has now become a proxy for higher IQ, as elite colleges become sorting mechanisms for finding, training and introducing to each other the most intellectually gifted young people. Fifty years into the education revolution, members of this elite are likely to be themselves the offspring of cognitively gifted parents, and to ultimately bear cognitively gifted children.

“Industriousness: The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same: Healthy men are supposed to work. In practice, though, that norm has eroded everywhere.”

Murray makes the case that cognitive ability is worth ever more in modern advanced, technologically complex hypercompetitive market economies. As an example, Murray quotes Bill Gates: “Software is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war or we won’t have a future.”

Murray alleges that those with higher IQs now exhibit personal and social behavioral choices in areas like marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity that allow them to enjoy secure and privileged lives. Whites in the lower social-economic strata are less cognitively able – in Murray’s view – and thus less well-equipped to resist the lure of the sexual revolution and doctrines of self-actualization so they succumb to higher rates of family dissolution, non-marital births, worklessness and criminality. This interaction between IQ and behavioral choice, in Murray’s framework, is what has led to the widening income and cultural gap.

Despised by the left, Murray has arguably done liberals a service by requiring them to deal with those whose values may seem alien, to examine the unintended consequences of their policies and to grapple with the political impact of assertions made by the right. He has also amassed substantial evidence to bolster his claims and at the same time elicited a formidable academic counter-attack.

To Murray, the overarching problem is that liberal elites, while themselves living lives of probity, have refused to proselytize for the bourgeois virtues to which they subscribe, thus leaving their less discerning fellow-citizens to flounder in the anti-bourgeois legacy of the counter-cultural 1960s.

“Great Civic Awakening” among the new upper class – an awakening that will lead to the kind of “moral rearmament” and paternalism characteristic of anti-poverty drives in the 19th century. To achieve this, Murray believes, the “new upper class must once again fall in love with what makes America different.”

The cognitive elites Murray cites are deeply committed to liberal norms of cultural tolerance and permissiveness. The antipathy to the moralism of the religious right has, in fact, been a major force driving these upscale, secular voters into the Democratic party.

changes in the world economy may be destructive in terms of the old social model, but they are profoundly liberating and benign in and of themselves. The family farm wasn’t dying because capitalism had failed or a Malthusian crisis was driving the world to starvation. The family farm died of abundance; it died of the rapidly rising productivity that meant that fewer and fewer people had to work to produce the food on which humanity depended.Mead continues:Revolutions in manufacturing and, above all, in communications and information technology create the potential for unprecedented abundance and a further liberation of humanity from meaningless and repetitive work. Our problem isn’t that the sources of prosperity have dried up in a long drought; our problem is that we don’t know how to swim. It is raining soup, and we are stuck holding a fork.The 21st century, Mead adds,must reinvent the American Dream. It must recast our economic, social, familial, educational and political systems for new challenges and new opportunities. Some hallowed practices and institutions will have to go under the bus. But in the end, the changes will make us richer, more free and more secure than we are now.Mead’s predictions may or may not prove prescient, but it his thinking, more than Murray’s, that reflects the underlying optimism that has sustained the United States for more than two centuries — a refusal to believe that anything about human nature is essentially “intractable.” Mead’s way of looking at things is not only more inviting than Murray’s, it is also more on target.

Mr. Murray and other conservatives often seem to assume that the decline of the traditional family has terrible implications for society as a whole. This is, of course, a longstanding position. Reading Mr. Murray, I found myself thinking about an earlier diatribe, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1996 book, “The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values,” which covered much of the same ground, claimed that our society was unraveling and predicted further unraveling as the Victorian virtues continued to erode.

But is it really all about morals? No, it’s mainly about money.

Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.

For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.

So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals.

The first installment of the bailout was supposed to be a $118 billion tranche in March, but officials now say it might be limited to about $40 billion to ensure that Greece continues to abide by the terms in coming months.

I fear we’re facing a crisis in which a chunk of working-class America risks being calcified into an underclass, marked by drugs, despair, family decline, high incarceration rates and a diminishing role of jobs and education as escalators of upward mobility. We need a national conversation about these dimensions of poverty, and maybe Murray can help trigger it. I fear that liberals are too quick to think of inequality as basically about taxes. Yes, our tax system is a disgrace, but poverty is so much deeper and more complex than that.

to blame liberal social policies for the pathologies he examines. Yes, I’ve seen disability programs encourage some people to drop out of the labor force. But there were far greater forces at work, such as the decline in good union jobs.

Eighty percent of the people in my high school cohort dropped out or didn’t pursue college because it used to be possible to earn a solid living at the steel mill, the glove factory or sawmill. That’s what their parents had done. But the glove factory closed, working-class jobs collapsed and unskilled laborers found themselves competing with immigrants. There aren’t ideal solutions, but some evidence suggests that we need more social policy, not less. Early childhood education can support kids being raised by struggling single parents. Treating drug offenders is far cheaper than incarcerating them. A new study finds that a jobs program for newly released prison inmates left them 22 percent less likely to be convicted of another crime. This initiative, by the Center for Employment Opportunities, more than paid for itself: each $1 brought up to $3.85 in benefits.