RSS
TOP NAV
BOOK
ROAD TO THE
MIDDLE CLASS
Chapter 12:
The Fourth Great Awakening
| | <<prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | (5) | |  print view |
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.
| | <<prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | (5) | | print view |
Click for Chapter 13: Repairing The Road
Your comments are welcome. Please e-mail to Christopher Chantrill at mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com, and take the RMC test here.
©2005 Christopher Chantrill
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
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
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
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
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
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
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
