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MIDDLE CLASS
Chapter 14:
The Problem of Power
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The conservative movement has always been a simple thing at heart. It seeks to restore the dignity of lower-middle-class respectability to modern society. This stolid middle-class culture was marginalized by the left-wing elites when they constructed the welfare state. With their visionary plans for the elevation of the working class from penury to decency, they knew there would be no need for the cramped respectability of the skilled working class and their dogged Methodism. The working class would soon surpass all that and join their benefactors, the intellectual elite, in a more educated and, of course, secular culture. There was a flaw in this plan, a flaw that conservatives never quite managed to articulate, but which is brightly illuminated in the AQAL matrix. The red impulsive proletariat cannot jump straight into a universal society of green compassion dreamed of by the socialists. They must toil through the blue purposive consciousness and orange creativity before they can lose their creative ego in contemplation and sainthood. This is the truth that Robert William Fogel recognizes in The Fourth Great Awakening. The poor need not just the material improvement that the enlightened elite so proudly poured on them. They need to acquire a “sense of purpose,” a “sense of the mainstream of work and life,” a “strong family ethic,” and all the other values of purposive blue consciousness.
Fogel understands that the poor need to be allowed to get on with it, take control of their lives from the nanny state and build the competence and character that will equip them for success in the city. But he cannot quite bring himself to let go of the reins of power. Its temptations are too great. The poor will find purpose and a strong family ethic, he writes, but we liberals are still going to be needed to help them and instruct them.
It is the world-historical role of the conservative movement to help liberals take the step they cannot quite bear to make, to take the first step away from the intoxicating seat of power and let people live their own lives and learn their own lessons. Our destiny is to take the liberal ring of power back to the mountain and toss it back into the primeval flood of molten lava.
And after the conservative movement has smashed anti-religious bigotry, moved the working class from infantile dependency of the government monopoly welfare state to proud competence, and curbed the radical social agenda of the imperial judiciary, and become master of all it surveys, it will also be corrupted by the temptations of power, wander into decadence, and eventually decline and fall.
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Click for Chapter 15: The Worldwide Explosion of Pentecostalism
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©2005 Christopher Chantrill
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
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
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
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
Class War
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”
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
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
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
Democratic Capitalism
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
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
