After Vt Gun Control Doesnt Bark - Road to the Middle Class

First of all, has nobody thought about just what a cruel place the modern university is? It is perhaps the epicenter of privilege and injustice in the modern world. You cannot just walk into a university like a Wal-Mart and say, here’s my $50; I’d like to take a course. Oh no. First of all, you put on your knee pads. And that’s just the beginning of humiliation.

OK, so we learn that dozens of people knew about the killer Seung Cho. And they had told the administration and the campus police about him. And the powers-that-be did nothing.

This is where conservatives have something to say. About the mediating institutions between the megastructures—like government and big research universities—and the individual. Healthy societes have a vibrant space for the mediating institutions. Welfare states and the like are constantly attacking the mediating institutions because they believe in top-down control by the educated elite ensconced in government.

We conservatives mourn, deeply mourn, that we haven’t done enough to get this message through. Why not? It’s so obvious, so self-evident. People are social beings, they need to be embedded in social networks. And social networks mean mediating, voluntary institutions free of the dead hand of government.

Second, did you notice the dog that didn’t bark? Democrats like Sen. Harry Reid are saying: Gun control? What gun control?

What is going on here?

Democrats are soft-pedaling gun control because, as Roger Simon writes, Democrats believe they lost the 2000 election because of gun owners.

Had Gore won his home state of Tennessee, Clinton’s home state of Arkansas or the Democratic state of West Virginia, he would not have needed to win Florida in order to gain the presidency. But he lost them all. And guns had a lot to do with it.

We conservatives believe that the gun control issue is an epiphenomenon. It stands for something much bigger, that people should be responsible for their own lives. That the government cannot promise to make everyone safe with its big programs and its reckless promises. People must look to their own resources. They must build and maintain their own networks of mutual aid and security.

And not the least of the value of these networks is to fold adolescent loners into the social network of community.

So for conservatives the spectacle of an adolescent loner going berserk in a government megastructure like a government university makes complete sense.

For us the question is: why doesn’t it happen more often?

It is our job and our sacred mission to tell the world how to walk back from the dreadful anti-social society that the educated middle class has built in the last century. In this society everything has been stripped away except government power and individual helplessness.

We know better. And we live with the awful truth that we have failed to make our voices heard. We have failed to break through the wall of liberal power to demand an end to the monstrous society of alienation and privilege.

So today we start again. Break down the megastructures! Shatter the privileges! Grow the human-scale mediating institutions like families, churches, associations, and clubs!

And above all connect the adolescent loners back into society.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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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

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