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ROAD TO THE
MIDDLE CLASS
Road to the Middle Class
Contents
Chapter 1: After the Welfare State
What will come after the welfare state?
After 120 years, at the turn of the twenty-first century, it is clearly
showing its age.
Chapter 2: Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn
The conventional wisdom among western cultural elites is
that God is dead and we are well rid of him.
Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism
The surprise of rednecks debouching from the Appalachians
into the Atlantic plain and the explosion of Pentecostalism in the inner cities
has unnerved those who had convinced themselves that religion was a thing of the
past, now that God was dead.
Chapter 4: The Nineteenth Century From the Top Down
The great event of the second millennium was the rise of
the world-historical middle class.
Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century From the Bottom Up
To the upper crust, the nineteenth century was a
never-ending worry. The old order
was coming to an end, the cyclical world of agriculture and its wealth in land.
Chapter 6: Popular Religion in the Nineteenth Century
As we have seen, the nineteenth century was a great age of
religion. While the elite in Europe
and the United States experienced the death of God as their spiritual needs fell
away from the gospel of Jesus Christ, ordinary people in America flocked to
churches and responded in their millions to the preaching of modern prophets.
Chapter 7: The Best Schools
Everyone is in favor of education. But what do they mean? When
Mary Johnston talks about education she thinks in terms of “the best schools,
first grade to college” for the education of her children.
Chapter 8: Mutual Aid
According to the myth of the modern welfare state, the
nineteenth century was a lethal battleground in which the poor and the unskilled
wandered unprotected and forlorn against the power of employers and landlords,
men who occupied the commanding heights of the economy through their two-pronged
strategy of laissez-faire economics and Social Darwinism.
Chapter 9: Living Under Law
In the country, people live under power.
In the city, people live under law.
Chapter 10: Explaining the Culture War
The previous five chapters have described the world that
ordinary people created for themselves in the city before the advent of the
welfare state.
Chapter 11: A Likely Story
Knowledge begins with a problem, with the need to make
sense of the world.
Chapter 12: The Fourth Great Awakening
During the last half of the twentieth century, the United
States experienced a period of unusual spiritual ferment and renewal.
Chapter 13: Repairing The Road
The Fourth Great Awakening gave us a wakeup call.
It called Americans to witness a new generation of people struggling on
the road to the middle class, worthy people acquiring for themselves through
enthusiastic Protestantism, an education, and a rigid regard for rules the
earnest culture of respectability that beckons like a shining city on a hill to
those who struggle in the shanties and the slums of the industrial city.
Chapter 14: The Problem of Power
The project of restoring the road to the middle class is not just a question of ideas, but of assembling
and using political power to implement ideas.
Chapter 15: The Worldwide Explosion of Pentecostalism
IN 1909, Charles W. Eliot addressed the students of Harvard on
the “Religion of the Future.
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Your comments are welcome. Please e-mail to Christopher Chantrill at mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com, and take the RMC test here.
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
Responsibility
Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050
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