It All Dovetails

IF YOU’VE ever watched The Larkin Chronicles (the Brit TV series that was the breakout hit for Catherine Zeta Jones) you’ll remember the fatuous woman character, Mrs Jerebohm, who kept insisting that it all dovetailed.

But sometimes it really does dovetail.

Here we are in 2007 and we are up to our keisters in problems:

Murdering hordes from south-west Asia
Welfare state that has wrecked the working class
Dumbed-down education
Murdering adolescents in college
Corrosive adolescent music/movie/video-game culture
A corrupt, powerful academic ruling class

At a time like this it always seems that there’s no way out. Except if you are a Republican. Then you have a nasty feeling that Republicans are on their way out—of power.

But usually in the course of human events the solution to our problems is right in front of us. Some people—Christians, Zen Buddhists, that sort—go even further. They say that the solution is always right in front of us.

For people of a literary turn, solutions mean books, and the suspicion that the books are already out there. Indeed they are.

William W. Lewis, The Power of Productivity. Education is important, but not critical for most people. You can train people on the job for most things in this world. So why spend $750 billion on government education that doesn’t care?
David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State. It’s amazing, but the respectable lower-middle and working class built their own welfare state in the 19th century and it worked pretty well. So why spend $400 billion on a welfare system that just doesn’t care?
Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption. Where did we get the idea that children were soft clay in the hands of their parents. Children model themselves on older children, and when we crowd them together in factory schools, we create the adolescent culture that is rotting our youth. That $750 billion again.
Robert Epstein, The Case Against Adolescence. We are shamefully infantilizing our teenagers. Like we used to infantilize blacks and women. We should reverse this and emancipate children as soon as they can pass competency tests.

Books are all very well, but what is in it for conservatives?

Quite a lot. First of all there is the challence of Islamofascism. Do we really think we are going to win the war on terror until we take the beam out of our own eye, the dreadful western culture of dreck? First step in doing that will be to get our children away from their adolescent culture. And how do you do that, make teenagers responsible? Why, you break up the adolescent culture by pitching the adolescents into the adult culture. You give teenagers responsibility as soon as you think they can handle it. Conservatives all all in favor of responsibility, right?

But here’s the kicker. Suppose we emancipate children. Suppose we reduce the years of compulsory education. Suppose we let kids work. Suppose we let them start businesses. Suppose we let them drive, and drink, and smoke, and love, and suppose we abolish the juvenile justice system so that when kids break the law they get the adult justice system they deserve?

Who is going to be really crossed up? Why the Democrats, of course. They are the guys sitting in all those educational, justice, welfare sinecures. If we abolish the adolescent society, Democrats will be out of a job.

Then we’d have purged the corrosive adolescent culture, which will help on the terror front.

And guess what. All those working teenagers will help pay for the baby boomers’ retirement.

It all dovetails, like I said.

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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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