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Back to Business as Usual After the London Bombings: What We Can Do

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What Muslims Must Do After 7/7

by Christopher Chantrill
July 17, 2005 at 7:53 pm

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A WEEK AFTER the bombings of 7/7 the British think they have a problem. The bombers were native Britons. They weren’t crazed loners or foreigners but Islamic children of the British nation state, kids who had enjoyed the full benefit of a modern, social democratic childhood as directed down to the last detail by modernizing New Labour functionaries.

Cheer up Brits. You don’t have a problem. It’s the Muslims that have the problem. The mad Islamicist bombers will confine Muslims everywhere to the margins of the modern world unless they do something about them.

But the solution to the problem is not, as many seem to think, that the Muslim community “must” deliver up its dangerous extremists to justice. Even sober American minds, like Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg, have fallen for this approach.

This idea, waving a big stick after years of apology and talk of diversity and inclusion, is hardly likely to succeed.

Instead, we should trade on the need of every immigrant community to rise up in the world and join the in-crowd. We should take the high-handed approach that every desirable club or in-group takes. We should send the same message that the Marines send with their timeless advertisement: “We are looking for a few good men.”

All desirable groups—monasteries, armies, clubs, lawyers, physicians, and even gangs—indoctrinate their applicants with the idea that they must go through a challenging but necessary novitiate to prove their worthiness before they can acquire full membership. To be a full member in the club means something, and it would be wrong to lower the standards just to be nice.

This principle applies in spades when we talk about earning citizenship in the world’s democratic nation states.

But our lefty friends send quite a different message to the many groups, like the Muslims, not yet fully integrated into the western club. Instead of praising the west they apologize—for its racism, its sexism, its classism, and they have rewarded “minority” communities for taking on the role of helpless victim. Why should any minority community want to join a club that is apologizing for its faults?

Fresh from our morning study of Heidegger and Rorty, we conservative postmodernists understand what is going on here. It is power. First of all, our lefty friends have painstakingly constructed a narrative that justifies their power: how they nobly freed the slaves, how they fought for worker rights, for women’s suffrage, for civil rights, for a woman’s right to choose, and for diversity, and how they deserve to occupy well-paid sinecures with lifetime tenure to defend and extend these social gains. One of the interlocking directorates of their vast monopoly is the racial grievance industry, charged with the project of enlarging the natural sense of insecurity in minority communities into a sense of outraged and electorally useful grievance. What a concept!

Of course, our lefty friends do not play this game with their own treasured institutions. In the selection of tenured college professors they operate a system of ruthless exploitation and humiliation designed to select only the best for membership. The system puts tens of thousands of would-be college professors through years of sweatshop wages and tenure-track hell. But it is all worth it, to hope to become one day a member of the academic elite. Even lefties believe that membership has its privileges.

But the 7/7 bombing is not the first attack this year upon the members of the nation state club. Before British Muslims sent the message that they didn’t want to belong to a club that apologized for its members, the French and the Dutch in two elections beat back an attack by the EU elite on their nation states.

These events warn us that the elite project to emasculate the nation state and replace it with supranational institutions is well advanced. The project wants to destroy the nation state by encouraging separatism in minority communities and by subsuming the nation state in supranational organizations accountable only to elites.

The nation state is worth fighting for. It is the miraculous idea that persuades ordinary people to abandon as a primary political loyalty their local blood ties of family and clan and enter into a larger social compact of national identity. It is the difference between Arabia and the developed world. It requires the abandonment of the code of honor, the blood feud, the culture of nepotism. It demands taking up the world of contract, and the rule of law, and extending the circle of trust beyond the boundary of blood and faith.

Let us welcome with open arms the Muslim communities in full partnership in our nation states. But first they need to complete the customary apprenticeship in western ways and western culture. It will be worth it.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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