The Elites Undistracted Life - Road to the Middle Class

WHY DO OUR liberal friends all sing with one voice in the matter of abortion? Sam Schulman intuits the reason from the uniformity of the Obama nominees. (Not on race and sex of course, just on ideology.)

What unites these people is their faith in abortion. And what drives their faith in abortion is their need for the dignity of an undistracted life. Undistracted by a baby, you understand. This has gone so far that it has now become a matter of honor.

In nice families there are certain affronts to family dignity that cannot be tolerated. Our notion of family honor demands that nothing interfere with the stately progression of our children from high school to a gap year of social service to a decent college to a respectable career. Various accidents of our biology, such as a high-school pregnancy or a prenatal test that reveals a birth defect are matters that can be handled discreetly and conveniently.

This begins to explain the violent response to the Sarah Palin candidacy symbolized not once but twice a challenge to the modern professional-class family’s sense of honor. First she took a Downs Syndrome baby to term, and then she had her daughter take her teenage pregnancy to term. This is a frightful irruption of the chthonic depths into the nice sensible life of the modern professional elite. And it was outraged.

We conservatives need to understand in the depths of our beings how shallow and superficial is the elite’s view of life.

Life in not about schools and careers and highly prized sinecures. The business of life is life. And don’t let them tell you any different.

This is, as I continually write, a huge issue. A vast area of modern life centers around denying our embodied selves as social animals. We talk of creativity instead of creating life. As if creativity amounted to anything next to a newly-born baby,

Our liberal friends will fight to preserve their illusions and their sinecures’ it ain’t gonna be pretty.

But we conservatives must not retreat from the knowledge that the liberal culture is cruel, corrupt, wasteful, unjust, and deluded.

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

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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

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

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

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

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

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

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

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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

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

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