PERSPECTIVE ON POVERTY : How the ‘60s Doomed the Have-Nots : The counterculture, rejecting ‘bourgeois’ values, turned those needing help away from success-building virtues.

Why, when immigrants from around the globe are making American lives worthy of respect and self-respect from the humblest jobs, do the poorest Americans--the underclass--not work?

The key to the mystery is that their poverty is less an economic matter than a cultural one. In many cases, these “have-nots” lack the inner resources to seize their chance, and they pass on to their children a self-defeating set of values and attitudes, along with an impoverished intellectual and emotional development that generally imprisons them in failure as well.

Three, sometimes four generations have made the pathology that locks them in--lack of education, failure to work, welfare dependency, crime and drug abuse--drearily familiar. But the underclass culture they live in is not wholly of their own invention. It is a dialect, so to speak, shaped more by the culture as a whole than by any independent, internal dynamic.

That’s why the prosperous are implicated in the poverty of the poor, even though they don’t extract their BMWs from the hides of the underclass the way mine owners squeezed profits out of abused children in the Industrial Revolution. The “haves” are implicated because over the last 30 years they radically remade American culture, turning it inside out and upside down to accomplish a cultural revolution whose most mangled victims turned out to be the have-nots.

This was the opposite of what was supposed to happen. For when the haves began their cultural revolution a generation ago, they acted in the name of two related liberations. Impelled by the fervor of the civil-rights movement, they sought the political and economic liberation of the poor and the black have-nots. Their honorable aim was to complete democracy’s work, to make American society more open. In addition, the haves sought personal liberation for themselves. They yearned to free themselves from stifling conformity. That longing found expression in the sexual revolution, which reshaped family life, increasing divorce, illegitimacy and female-headed families on all levels of society, and in the ‘60s counterculture, which rejected traditional bourgeois culture.

Bourgeois culture’s sexual mores--based on guilt, marriage and the belief that gratification should be deferred to achieve future goals--were seen as symptoms of its pathology. Its sobriety and decorum were mere slavish conformity; its industriousness betokened a materialistic value system; its family life was another arena of coercion and guilt. This culture went hand in hand with an inherently unjust capitalist economic order and a political order whose murderousness was plainly revealed by the war in Vietnam.

The cultural revolution failed in devastating ways. Instead of ending poverty for the have-nots, it fostered, in the underclass and the homeless, a new, intractable poverty that seems to belong more to the era of ragged chimney sweeps than to modern America. Poverty turned pathological because the new culture that the haves invented permitted, even celebrated, behavior that, when poor people practice it, will imprison them in poverty. It’s hard to persuade ghetto 15-year-olds not to get pregnant, for instance, when the entire culture, from rock music to perfume commercials to highbrow books, is intoxicated with the joy of what before AIDS was called “recreational” sex.

Worse, during the ‘60s and ‘70s, the new culture of the haves, in its quest for personal liberation, withdrew respect from the behavior and attitudes that have traditionally boosted people up the economic ladder--deferral of gratification, sobriety, thrift, dogged industry and the whole catalogue of antique-sounding bourgeois virtues.

Moreover, the new culture held the poor back by robbing them of responsibility for their fate, further squelching their initiative and energy. Instead of telling them to take advantage of opportunities that were rapidly opening, the new culture told the have-nots that they were victims of an unjust society and, if they were black, they were entitled to restitution. It told them that the traditional standards of the larger community often didn’t apply to them, that their wrongdoing might well be justified rebellion or the expression of yet another legitimate “alternative lifestyle.” It told them that, if they were mentally ill, they were really just marching to a different drummer and should be free to march in the streets--which is where many of them ended up, homeless.