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  3. The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic turbulence but also of impressive social cohesion

The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic turbulence but also of impressive social cohesion

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问题     The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic turbulence but also of impressive social cohesion. Marriage rates were high. Community groups connected people across class. In the half-century between 1962 and the present, America has become more prosperous, peaceful and fair, but the social fabric has deteriorated. Social trust has plummeted. Society has segmented. The share of Americans born out of wedlock is now at 40 percent and rising.
    As early as the 1970s, three large theories had emerged to explain the weakening of the social fabric. Liberals assembled around an economically determinist theory. The loss of good working-class jobs undermined communities and led to the social deterioration. Libertarians assembled 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. They argued that the abandonment of traditional bourgeois norms led to social disruption.
    Over the past 25 years, though, a new body of research has emerged. 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. The recent research details how disruption breeds disruption.
    Over the past two weeks, Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart has restarted the social disruption debate. But, judging by ihe firestorm, you would have no idea that the sociological and psychological research of the past 25 years even existed. Murray neglects this research in his book. Meanwhile, his left-wing critics in the blogosphere have reverted to crude 1970s economic determinism; It’s all the fault of lost jobs. This economic determinism would be bad enough if it was just making public debate dumber. But the amputation of sociologic, psychological and cognitive considerations makes good policy impossible.
    The American social fabric is now so exhausted that even if manufacturing jobs miraculously came back we still would not be producing enough stable, skilled workers to fill them. It’s not enough just to have economic growth policies. The country also needs to rebuild orderly communities. This requires bourgeois paternalism: Building organizations and structures that induce people to behave responsibly rather than irresponsibly and, yes, sometimes using government to do so. Social repair requires sociological thinking. The depressing lesson of the last few weeks is that the public debate is dominated by people who stopped thinking in 1975.
The first paragraph compares the periods before and after 1962 to show .
选项 A、the diminishing of class distinction
B、the deterioration of social fairness
C、the degradation of social cohesion
D、the abandonment of social norms
答案C
解析 第一段对比了两个时期：1912至1962年社会动荡，但社会凝聚力惊人；1962年至今，社会繁荣、和平，但社会结构却恶化了。文中从社区、婚姻家庭、社会信任等方面加以说明。下文开始关于“社会解体”的讨论。可见该段比较是为了引出社会凝聚力下降、社会解体这一现象，[C]选项正确。
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