Perfect Storm In Atlanta

SUPPOSE you were a liberal still deeply afflicted by PEST (post-election selection trauma), reeling from the Iraq election and now deeply disturbed by the Cedar Revolution in Beirut. What would finally put you on the train for Canada?

Imagine a story about a middle-class African American man accused of rape. The 210-pound athlete breaks away from his 5’-0” jailer, a 51 year-old grandmother, kills a bunch of people including a judge, and after an extended manhunt is persuaded to give himself up by a blonde young Bible-quoting widowed mother. It’s a perfect storm.

So, you say, what’s the big deal? Don’t forget that today you are not allowed to show African Americans in a negative light. You are not allowed even to think that there are some jobs that a woman can’t do as well as a man. You should avoid depicting murder and mayhem directed at the nation’s judges, who are in the middle of discovering there is “no rational purpose” to banning gay marriage. And of course, you can’t show a mere amateur talking a dangerous fugitive into giving himself up. Everyone knows that it takes trained psychologists, hostage negotiators, and intervention experts assisted by the full panoply of SWAT teams and their cool gear if you want to talk a dangerous murderer into surrender.

But then Brian Nichols and Ashley Smith broke through the wall of liberal denial like a tsunami. Accused rapist Brian Nichols was a good middle-class kid. On the other hand, maybe not. Back in his college days he was accused of assault after an incident in the dining hall. He played football at two colleges, but was kicked off a team for stealing from the locker room. He’d been in a long-term relationship with the woman he was accused of raping, but she rather went off him after he got another woman pregnant.

So he overpowered his grandmotherly guard, shot a few people, and ended up kidnapping 24 year-old widowed mother Ashley Smith at a convenience store at 2 am on Saturday morning.

News reports about Ashley Smith describe a rather purposeful young woman who, immediately after being kidnapped, started to do something about it. Pretty soon, she was reading the Bible to her captor, and then offered to read from the book she had in her bedroom. It was The Purpose-driven Life “The #1 New York Times Bestseller” by megachurch pastor Rick Warren.

They read Chapter 33 together. For those of you without your own copy to refer to, Chapter 33 is titled “How Real Servants Act.” The epigraph reads: “Whoever wants to be great must become a servant.” Warren writes about how we talk a lot these days about leadership and very little about “servantship,” and that the real purpose to life is to become a good servant. The Point to Ponder at the end of the chapter is “I serve God by serving others.”

Having softened Nichols up with the Word of God and what we may, with pardonable hyperbole, call the modern version of Erasmus’s #1 bestseller Enchiridion, Smith talked to Nichols about her little daughter. If he were to kill her then her daughter, already without a father, would be an orphan, without father or mother. Nichols released her and she immediately called 911.

You can see why the Nichols-Smith saga would never pass the liberal censor. It is full of all the wrong messages. It sets up an over-indulged young Icarus who’s spent his life getting his wings burned against a young woman who is deadly serious about giving her life a purpose. It shows the liberal culture of individual self-indulgence and positive self-esteem up against conservative rules and purpose.

Our liberal friends are proud to claim their commitment to Reason. While they represent the progressive advance of Reason, conservatives are standpatters wedded to superstition. A California Superior Court judge just ruled in favor of gay marriage on the grounds that there was “no rational purpose” to oppose it.

Well, he has a point. But he could argue anything that way. He could also argue that there is “no rational purpose” to preventing a 51-year-old grandmother from guarding an accused rapist who has already been detected with makeshift weapons. There is “no rational purpose” to the idea that women cannot do any job a man can do. The only objection is common sense.

Liberals that hang their hats on Reason don’t know what they are talking about. They are turning back the clock to an exploded Enlightenment myth that thoughtful people regard as a comical superstition. In the twentieth century, the warrant for knowledge is that Reason, or theory, must check out against the facts. And better still, knowledge should, as Karl Popper proposed, be “falsifiable,” unlike the orthodoxy of the established Church of Positive Self-Esteem and the doctrine that sexual differences are nothing but social construction.

Against the orthodoxy of Reason, conservatives champion the warrant of common sense. And a good thing too.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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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

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

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

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

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”

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

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”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

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

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

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