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Thug Week: The Pity of It All

by Christopher Chantrill
September 25, 2006 at 11:19 am

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YOU COULD TELL the point at which Thug Week at the United Nations got a bit out of hand. It was when Democratic leaders took a look at the overnight polls and declared that politics ends at the waters edge.

But what did they expect? After six years non-stop trashing of the president, they are surprised that a couple of street bullies decided to join in the fun?

The spectacle of thug dictators riling people up with their thuggish slogans dredged up from thuggish writers and radicals is nothing new. We’ve seen it again and again during the modern era.

What is remarkable is that the West has enjoyed a counter tradition that has tried to understand the apparent chaos of globalization and market-based society instead of trashing it as the thugs like to do.

In 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years War, Central Europe looked much like today’s Middle East. It had been fought over in the great religious wars of the previous century, the toy of Great Powers and the victim of religious extremists. But then something unexpected happened. Rene Descartes built a philosophy on doubt, and then Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza began a tradition of political philosophy that marginalized religion as the binding force for political power. It was the beginning of a tidal wave of European skeptical thought that brought everything under critique: traditional society, traditional economy, religion, reality itself.

The result was also unexpected: the most astonishing civilization the world has ever seen, and the first one that ever freed the poor from the edge of starvation.

People couldn’t believe their eyes. They immediately started worrying that the whole edifice would collapse in chaos and return the world to misery and want.

Half a century ago the Egyptian Sayed Qtub, the spiritual father of Al Qaeda, came to the United States and saw, one fateful night at a church dance in Greeley, Colorado, lips meeting lips and chests pressed together. It seemed like the very essence of a world flying apart. As Arnaud de Borchgrave writes,

He viewed the world, as he saw it in 1950, as decadent, corrupt, oppressive and generating endless violence and war because of capitalist greed that was destroying Allah’s creations.

Been there, written that, Sayed. Jerry Z. Muller in The Mind and the Market looks at the ideas of fifteen European cultural critics—chaps like you—who worried about the market and its impact upon the human condition. They generally agreed that the only way the new chaotic market would work is if people like them were given more power. For Edmund Burke, scion of an Ireland suffering from the rapacity of absentee landlords, the solution was an improving nobility. For Hegel, scion of German civil servants, it was an improving civil service. For Matthew Arnold, the cultural brahmin scandalized by the Philistine middle class, it was an improving professoriate. For Marx, radicalized by the chaos of 1845 Germany, it was a revolutionary cadre that would do more than improve: it would transform utterly.

The pity of it is that while these worriers were polishing up their manifestos the object of their concern, the rising working and middle classes, were developing a vast web of new and authentic social institutions to meet the needs of the age, and the center of the web was the United States, as Tocqueville discovered in 1831. They built churches to give meaning to their lives; they built fraternal associations to collectivize the risks of industrial-age life in a convivial lodge; they built unions to enjoy the comforts of solidarity; they built political machines in the city to help immigrants get a start. Farmers out on the great plains wrote the law of homesteading, and miners in California wrote the mineral laws.

All in all, it was an astonishing achievement, so the elite worriers immediately put a stop to it. They trashed the lodges with their welfare state, they nationalized the city machines into the elite-run Democratic Party, and they froze ordinary people out of lawmaking. The churches they left alone because they knew that religion would soon die out.

The result of a century of elite supervision, as Robert William Fogel relates in The Fourth Great Awakening, is that while the material condition of the poor is much better than a century ago,

Such problems [in cities] as drug addiction, alcoholism, births to unmarried teenage girls, rape, the battery of women and children, broken families, violent teenage death, and crime are generally more severe today than they were a century ago.

As the Islamic world encounters modernity it is making every mistake that the Europeans made. It has Wahhabis sowing back-to-basics religious fanaticism. It has the Iranian Revolution trying to ape the wonders of the French and Russian Revolutions. And it has the writings of thinkers like Sayed Qtub inspiring radical whack-jobs to anarchist violence.

The one thing the elites of Islam (and Bolivarian South America) won’t do is leave their people alone to make their own practical step-by-step journey into the modern world. The temptation for thug dictators to rile them up into a frenzy is just too great.

That is already leading to a century of horrors in the Islamic world and of annoyance for everyone else.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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