Back To Business As Usual

ALTHOUGH the 7/7 London bombings, coming a day after the award of the 2012 Summer Olympics, were immediately interpreted as a cruel trick upon Londoners, It was really an appropriate culmination to a week of modern ephemera. The week of 7/7 began with a Live8 concert at which young people could blame their parents for tolerating world poverty. It continued with demonstrations by the usual crew of lefty anti-globalists and a meeting at which the world’s leaders endeavored to prove that their concern for Africa was at least as great as Dickens’s Mrs. Jellyby’s concern for the natives of Booriaboola-gha. Then there was the award of the 2012 Olympic Games to London, and finally the bombs-in-subways artistry of the terrorists.

Consummate political actor that he is, Prime Minister Blair hit his marks flawlessly right through the week, culminating with a sad but firm insistence to the terrorists that “It’s through terrorism that the people [who] have committed this terrible act express their values and it’s right at this moment that we demonstrate ours.”

By the weekend things had returned to normal and The Guardian was relieved that nobody had

spoken of retaliation or reprisals against other countries or sections of society. For it is crucial not to indulge in the rhetoric of a clash of civilisations, legitimising revenge attacks on Muslims and driving the many into feelings of marginalisation that will breed despair and strengthen the hand of hatemongers who find their recruits among the weak-minded.

We could now get on ordinary life leavened with a “rigorous and fair implementation of existing laws combined with heightened public vigilance” and sidestep any question of a bigger conflict.

The editors of The Guardian are right. Even the American philosopher Lee Harris admits it:

After the London bombing, I feel more than ever that the war model is deeply flawed, and that a truer picture of the present conflict may be gained by studying another, culturally distinct form of violent conflict, namely the blood feud.

The blood feud is not a fight to the death but rather a form of private justice in which “you are avenging yourself on your enemy for something that he did in the past.”

But there is another way to understand war on terror and the actions of the Islamic terrorists, namely in the rebellions of the Plains Indians and the Chinese Boxers against the western imperialists in the nineteenth century. The frustrated young men of the North American plains developed a cult of Ghost Shirt dancing and the young men of the East Asian plains developed a cult of Spirit Boxing as magical ways to stop the bullets of western rifles. But of course the western rifled bullets were the least of their problems.

The real power of the global capitalist democracies is not in their weapons or their wars on terror but in the power of their social organization and social technologies. From this view the war on terror is a tactical diversion, part of an ongoing effort to keep the Middle East’s oil resources out of the control of a single despot. Meanwhile the advance of global capitalism rolls on, with the real action taking place in China and India.

The great drama of the last millennium is the gripping tale of the global shift from a human economy based upon the ownership of physical capital, principally in control of arable land, to a new human economy based upon the ownership and deployment of human capital, principally through the agency of the limited liability company. At the center of this global shift has been a revolution in the relations between the people and their rulers.

In the old days the land was central and the people were a cost, subjects useful only in keeping the land productive. But now the people are a resource, citizens valued for their productive power, and the resources are a cost. Modern powers compete in an arms race of human resources and global productivity.

It took a while for the two great centers of human culture to cotton onto the new world order, and the cost in human misery has been great. For India it meant two and a half centuries of humiliation under the tutelage of the British, and forty years of subsequent misdirection. For China it has meant a two-hundred-year time of troubles.

But while the peoples of India and China have got with the program, the rulers of oil rich Arabia have not. To them the terroristic young men of Islam are surplus population, an unnecessary cost.

The genius of the United States has been to take the surplus populations of the world and transform them into a global middle class. The world waits upon Europe to get on with the business as usual of doing the same for the surplus populations of Arabia.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

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

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, 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

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

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

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

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

Home

American Manifesto

Chapters

Chappies

roadtothemiddleclass

presented by Christopher Chantrill

Follow @chrischantrill • Contact