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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Chapter 12:The Fourth Great Awakening

Chapter 12:
The Fourth Great Awakening