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Chapter 15:
The Worldwide Explosion of Pentecostalism
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American philosopher Lee Harris tells us with surpassing clarity what is going on when Christianity erupts somewhere in the world. It means that a people has declared itself ready for self-government, just like the burghers of Germany around 1500 who
Had learned to handle an enormous complexity of human interactions without the continual appeal to the decision-making authority of some outside agent… What happened was that one day, in their great pride as their achievement, they noticed what they had done, and they decided to turn their spontaneously evolved ethos into a consciously articulated and explicitly confessed principle. (Harris 2004 p187)
What they had discovered was conscience. This Protestant conscience was the faith of people who had learned to control their behavior into an ethos of professional respectability. It is the autonomous self-regulator in a man whose well-being depends upon his reputation as one who can be trusted. It is what makes sense of the priesthood of every man that would seem to be a recipe for anarchy. “If the ultimate law was God’s Book, and the ultimate authority on this law was you, who was in a position to contradict you?” Only your conscience.
The problem with a trustworthy, self-governing middle class is that it leaves no role for powerful political leaders. That is why it has been necessary for left-wing activists to drill with inexhaustible ferocity into the edifice of bourgeois trustworthiness. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels punch all the buttons. Not only were the capitalists shamefully oppressing the proletarians but they were swapping wives and dishonoring their female servants. This accusation is a constant theme of the war on the middle class. Businessmen are exploiters, they are robber barons, they are monopolists, they are price fixers, they are unsafe at any speed, they are killing little birds, they are raping the earth, they are exporting jobs, they are exploiting Third World peasants.
Every coin has two sides. Capitalism is built upon the notion of buying low and selling high. That means giving jobs to young teenage girls just off the farm at very low wages (but indoor work that is much easier than planting rice in all weathers). But capitalism is also the world of the self-governing, conscientious, creative team. It worships the aggressive, creative, reliable individual who can leverage his skills across a team and deliver services to the world. Entwined with world capitalism is world Protestantism. Together they form the road to the middle class.
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©2005 Christopher Chantrill
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
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
