DO AS WE DO, NOT AS WE SAY YOU SHOULD:

Near the end of "Labor's Love Lost," his illuminating new book on the decline of the working-class family, the Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin cites research suggesting that many working-class men, far from being trapped in an antique paradigm of "restricted emotional language," have actually thrown themselves into therapeutic, "spiritual but not religious" questing, substituting Oprah-esque self-help for more traditional forms of self-conceiving and belonging.

Cherlin, working from progressive premises, sees this as potentially good news: a sign that these men are getting over Gary Cooper and preparing to embrace the more egalitarian and emotionally open patterns of the upper class.

But given that this shift has coincided with lost ground for blue-collar men, another interpretation seems possible. We may have a culture in which the working class is encouraged to imitate what are sold as key upper-class values -- sexual permissiveness and self-fashioning, spirituality and emotivism -- when really the upper class is also held together by a kind of secret traditionalism, without whose binding power family life ends up coming apart even faster.

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