The Next Generation Of Fatherless Boys

IT ISN’T MUCH fun, but someone has to report on the pestilence unleashed by the culture war, the plague of fatherless boys. So here’s a report from England by Shaun Bailey, a youth worker in London.

Bailey lives and works in a neighborhood where a lawyer, Thomas ap Rhys Price, was recently robbed and then brutally murdered.

The individuals concerned bear total moral responsibility for their crime. No one made them do it. But we should also look at the failure of our society. For I witness every day a generation of young people who live in a culture that celebrates violence openly. They - and many other young adults - have grown up in a world where there is little censure, where no one - no teacher, no parent, no friendly face in the community - tells them what is right and what is wrong.

What is wrong? Well, we conservatives already know. Single parenthood, for a start. A generation ago, Bailey writes, young women were positively encouraged to venture into single-parenthood. But of course, then they find out just how hard and discouraging it is to raise children on your own.

The government encourages it. Young girls know that if they get pregnant and have a baby, “they will get a flat.” So single motherhood is an opportunity. In the United States, the sixteenth birthday of a young woman, the day she could qualify for a government-subsidized apartment, was called “liberation day,” according to George Gilder in Men and Marriage. It was the day she could get liberation from the chaotic household of her mother and the dangerous young men there and get her own place, and her own baby.

It is the same with benefits. These people are not stupid. If the state offers them money for doing something, they will do it. It is as simple as that. I hear them talking about it, I hear them discussing how much they can get. And I see them change their behaviour. Why have the father move in with you if it means that you will get less from the Government?

You have to feel that people are not stupid. The people ensnared in the welfare trap are eventually going to do something to get out of it. And the people who have built the welfare system are going to realize that it was all a dreadful mistake.

Aren’t they?

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

TAGS

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
César Graña, 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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