Road to the Middle Class - Chapter - by Christopher Chantrill

With new knowledge comes new illumination and the need for reevaluation. The first shaft of light teaches that helpless immigrants to the city seem to instinctively choose the right strategy to cope with their new environment. They are open to revivalists who invite them to join religious movements that help them convert their impulsive peasant culture to the directed and purposeful culture of the city. In the nineteenth century they actively sought out education for their children long before political activists built a movement to municipalize and nationalize the education of children. In fact, many of them went without food to find the money to pay the school fees for their children. Today they try to find ways around the government school system so they can find the back-to-basics education that city immigrants need. They come, in time, to accept the value of the regime of law that obtains in the city, shedding eventually the culture of subordination and patronage that they lived under before they came to the city. This finding calls into question the legitimacy of the whole maternal/paternal welfare state that has been built on the assumption that city dwellers cannot be trusted to develop the proper social safety net to help the helpless and to educate the ignorant.

The second shaft of illumination provides a new way of understanding the remarkable diversity of Americans, not in the sense of ethnic difference, but in their levels of consciousness. There are Americans struggling in a cesspool of violence and failure in the inner cities; there are dutiful Americans following the rules as the One True Way; there are creative Americans who belief that life is an adventure, a great creative endeavor; there are Americans who long for genuine democracy, a community of caring and sharing, free from power and oppression. The problem is that each community, sealed in its own world of consciousness, wants to create a world safe for them to seek salvation, and experiences other communities as threats that seek to prevent them from achieving their salvation. Many people talk about celebrating diversity, but they mean celebrating the colorful people who think like them. The true challenge of diversity is to create an America that lets others work out their salvation in safety, that helps them achieve their sensible goals without imposing a top-down one-size-fits-all comprehensive and mandatory solution devised by national experts, to recognize, in the words of Clare Graves, that “Damn it all, a person has the right to be who he is.”

Since the industrial revolution, everyone has agreed that the poor, meaning the proletarians of the city, are the group that needs help most urgently. This book has shown that what the proletarians, the red impulsives, need is a firm and solid road to the middle class, that shows them the way to go, gives them a good solid road to travel on, and helps them in their struggle. In the next chapter we shall examine how to help them in this task in the context of the early twenty-first century and the demoralizing culture of the welfare state that lives on the continued problems of the poor.

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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
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

Chapter 12:The Fourth Great Awakening

Chapter 12:
The Fourth Great Awakening