Comment by rayiner

It's wonderful that the American elite has broadened as much as it has in the past 70 years or so. With it though there was some load bearing social infrastructure that got demolished.

When it was a little club, you had to think of your family's reputation in the club, and like you say there was a particular framework of their morality.

When the elite franchise was expanded, one problem was that everyone in the elite then had different ideas of morality. When they got into business, the only thing that really united everyone was that they all liked money.

One thing that used to help that we've lost is a moral code in the universities that elites have to attend to get into the club now.

Another thing, after it became illegal to teach the bible in public schools, was "secular bible stories." You had secular saints, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ben Franklin. They each had a characteristic story, like George Washington and the cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln walking 10 miles to return 2 cents, and Ben Franklin flying a kite and discovering that lightning was electricity. Later on, MLK was added to the canon for a whole bunch of stories of courage in defense of justice. All of the stories had a moral lesson about what it meant to be a Good American.

Lately we've cancelled most of our secular saints, and my guess is that the few that are left are on borrowed time. That's not to say that these guys never did anything wrong by any means, but the point of teaching the story wasn't even necessarily even that the story actually happened exactly as it was told, the point was the moral lesson. We've basically just given up on moral education, and all we have left are things like Social Emotional Learning, but it is thin gruel.