Thank you for your thoughtful reply however I respectfully disagree. I don’t think you can totally measure wrongdoing (sin) unless I am misunderstanding the question. The initial quesiton was “are the ruch more virtuous than the poor?”
If the original question were “who committs more crimes per the police departmen?” or “who has more out of wedlock births” well, those are things that can be measured concretely with statistics, but how do you measure VIRTUE? I still don’t think it can be done because two people can commit the exact same act and one is doing it for selfish reasons and the other is doing it out of kindness therefore I don’t think we can measure virtue by outside observation.
I think you are falling into the trap of saying that because we cannot know some things that we cannot know anything. It’s true that we cannot judge who is going to heaven and which wrongdoing is mortal sin but, as you note we can observe who is committing crime, who is having out of wedlock births, and most importantly, the correlation between these (for example). If, for example, someone has an abortion out of kindness and not selfishness, we can still say that the abortion was wrong even if the person is simply misguided in her actions.
Let me also remind you that we are looking at what Murray called “American virtues”, what I would call worldly virtues. These are not synonomous with saintly virtues but they are very close and therefore instructive. (I would certainly love to see a Catholic analysis along the lines of Murray but we have to make do with what we have.)
Let me illustrate why this is important with a simple fictional town.
Imagine a town with two neighborhoods, one poor, one rich. The poor neighborhood experiences murder, rape, and burglary at a much higher rate than the rich neighborhood. And, worse, the trends show that crime is worsening in the poor neighborhood while it is falling in the rich neighborhood and that, in the past, the poor neighborhod was not nearly so crime-riden even though it was always poorer.
This is a problem with which the Church is very much concerned. We cannot say that those in the poor neighborhoods are going to hell and that those in the rich neighborhood are going to heaven but we can say that the poor neighborhood is disordered.
Now along comes someone like Murray who also notices that the poor and rich are living their lives very differently. Whereas the poor and rich practiced the same social habits, concurrent to the increase in crime, there is an decreas in the practice of, for example, getting married before having children.
Now imagine further that there are two factions within this town: the materialist faction and the moralist faction. The materialist faction has held power for the last couple generations and it has focused on transferring income from the rich neighborhood to the poor neighborhood. But this has had no discernable effect and, if anything, is again correlated with the increase in crime and the decrease in marriage. The moralist faction advocates moral instruction for the poor but it is out of favor; the rich have chosen to limit their help to the poor to their regular income transfers but to otherwise live their lives separately and avoid being “judgemental” about the moral choices of the poor.
That, in a nutshell, is what Murray has observed in America.
Murray make the additional point that the middle class is not merely a middle range of income, historically it represented a meeting of rich and poor culturaly. The middle class generally practiced the same virtues as the rich but it simply had not attained the same level of income and wealth. What the demise of the middle class represents, in Murray’s view, is not simply the disappearance of the middle range of income but a cultural cleavage.
