What Will The Brits Do Next - Road to the Middle Class

EVERYONE IS hanging out the British Union Jack today in solidarity with our British friends after the Tube Tragedy on 7/7, and so we should. But we’d better not expect the Brits to be sticking their necks out any more in the War on Terror. Actually, as official pessimist John Derbyshire suggests, we won’t really have a real war on terror until a western city gets hit by a nuclear device. Only then will things get “tribal.”

Ever since World War I the Europeans have believed in appeasement and a quiet life guaranteed by the welfare state. The British got tricked into going the distance in World War II and they won’t make the same mistake again. And they have developed a good expertise in appeasement in their dealings with the IRA.

The excellent Mark Steyn agrees. The British government. Tory and Labour, did a real appeasement job on the IRA—after all, who really cares who governs Northern Ireland? Bottom line for Steyn:

This is the beginning of a long existential struggle, for Britain and the West. It’s hard not to be moved by the sight of Londoners calmly going about their business as usual in the face of terrorism. But, if the governing class goes about business as usual, that’s not a stiff upper lip but a death wish.

The New York Times’s man Thomas Friedman reminds the moderate Arabs that this is their problem. Hardly, old chap. They will be saying that they really don’t have a dog in this fight.

But the wise Lee Harris thinks that we are in a blood feud. Our Islamicist adversaries do not think in terms of the Clausewitean decisive battle but in punishing the West for its insults and its crusades.

For what it is worth Thomas Sowell, in his Race and Culture trilogy, observed that the immigrants that struggled to thrive in the United States were those who had not known law and self-government and who had lived in a culture of force and feud. But, of course, every immigrant wave thus far ended up assimilating to the American Way of law and self-government. Even the Hatfields and the McCoys got over their blood feud and moved to the suburbs.

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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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