The Lesson Of New Orleans

NOW WE KNOW. Your average American inner city is about one day away from anarchy. This is a remarkable achievement, when you think of it. It takes careful work to fray the social bonds so thoroughly that they can be snapped on the instant after the removal of the guardians. After all, societies down the ages have put a lot of work into the socialization of young men, by sending them off to war, by working them in their father’s fields, or by apprenticing them to a master until the volatile spirits had been sweated out of them. To undo all that takes talent.

So why, as Mark Steyn observes, were we privileged last week to attend the debut of “re-primitivized man” in New Orleans?

If Karl Marx is right that the history of the last millennium can be understood as a progression from feudalism to capitalism to socialism, then we can best understand each era through the class interests of its powerful elite: the princes of the land in the feudal era, the captains of industry in the capitalist era, and the New Class of “bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians” in the socialist era. The quote is from George Orwell’s 1984.

The feudal barons liked a certain competence in their peasants, enough at least to gather in a good harvest, and the industrial robber barons liked their workers to develop the skills and responsibilities that could help maximize profits. But the modern elite of bureaucrats and professional politicians likes to keep the people helpless and dependent. Their power and their amour de soi—what we now call positive self-esteem—issues from the continued helplessness and dependency of the lower orders.

So it is not surprising that the liberal economist Robert William Fogel in The Fourth Great Awakening admits that

Such problems [in cities] as drug addiction, alcoholism, births to unmarried teenage girls, rape, the battery of women and children, broken families, violent teenage death, and crime are generally more severe today than they were a century ago.

Of course problems are “more severe.” All those social pathologies create jobs for experts.

For the past 50 years American conservatives have felt rather cranky about all this. Like President Bush they suffer from the disorder of mental rigidity, believing against all the evidence in an utopian ideal of self-government—even for the poor.

Conservatives believe, for a start, in the self-governing benefit of faith. Faith is what brought African-American Jesse Peterson From Rage to Responsibility. As a young man he had found that “$300 a month, plus rent money, food stamps, and vocational training” from the government was enough to fuel ten years of partying, drugs, sex, and rage. One day he learned from a minister “about human hatred and the destructiveness it brings to peoples’ lives.” He started praying and pulled his life together.

Conservatives believe in education. Back in the 1830s, Americans were about 90 percent literate, and they mostly educated their children at fee-paying schools. Then along came education expert Horace Mann with the promise to “Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities… and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete.” Today universal, compulsory, “free” government education delivers something like 20 percent of adults as functionally illiterate. Crime and the penal code are flourishing.

Conservatives believe in the little platoons. A century ago most Americans of modest means belonged to (and helped run) a neighborhood fraternal lodge that provided death benefits, insurance, widows’ assistance, and sick pay. In Britain about 75 percent of the working class belonged to a “friendly society.” Then the experts took over and turned mutual aid into government-run social services and ordinary people into recipients.

Conservatives believe in the rule of law. That is, they believe that the people should not need the protection of a powerful patron but should be able to trust the law enforcement authorities to keep the peace and keep predators at bay, living under a law that is stable and predictable.

Imagine a New Orleans where nearly all the poor belonged to the local church, or volunteered at a little school down the street, or belonged to the local fraternal lodge, or volunteered at the local fire station. When the going got tough and the salaried, tenured, pensioned government functionaries turned in their badges (wait for the movie “You Can Keep Your Stinking Badges”) they would have had a local infrastructure of little platoons to take up the slack.

But they didn’t. And that was by design. Because our modern New Class functionaries like the people re-primitivized and incapable of self-government, to remain what the American philosopher Lee Harris calls “children of nature.”

When the people are incapable, the New Class has jobs.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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