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Back to Business as Usual After the London Bombings: What We Can Do

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What Muslims Must Do After 7/7

by Christopher Chantrill
July 17, 2005 at 7:53 pm

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A WEEK AFTER the bombings of 7/7 the British think they have a problem. The bombers were native Britons. They weren’t crazed loners or foreigners but Islamic children of the British nation state, kids who had enjoyed the full benefit of a modern, social democratic childhood as directed down to the last detail by modernizing New Labour functionaries.

Cheer up Brits. You don’t have a problem. It’s the Muslims that have the problem. The mad Islamicist bombers will confine Muslims everywhere to the margins of the modern world unless they do something about them.

But the solution to the problem is not, as many seem to think, that the Muslim community “must” deliver up its dangerous extremists to justice. Even sober American minds, like Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg, have fallen for this approach.

This idea, waving a big stick after years of apology and talk of diversity and inclusion, is hardly likely to succeed.

Instead, we should trade on the need of every immigrant community to rise up in the world and join the in-crowd. We should take the high-handed approach that every desirable club or in-group takes. We should send the same message that the Marines send with their timeless advertisement: “We are looking for a few good men.”

All desirable groups—monasteries, armies, clubs, lawyers, physicians, and even gangs—indoctrinate their applicants with the idea that they must go through a challenging but necessary novitiate to prove their worthiness before they can acquire full membership. To be a full member in the club means something, and it would be wrong to lower the standards just to be nice.

This principle applies in spades when we talk about earning citizenship in the world’s democratic nation states.

But our lefty friends send quite a different message to the many groups, like the Muslims, not yet fully integrated into the western club. Instead of praising the west they apologize—for its racism, its sexism, its classism, and they have rewarded “minority” communities for taking on the role of helpless victim. Why should any minority community want to join a club that is apologizing for its faults?

Fresh from our morning study of Heidegger and Rorty, we conservative postmodernists understand what is going on here. It is power. First of all, our lefty friends have painstakingly constructed a narrative that justifies their power: how they nobly freed the slaves, how they fought for worker rights, for women’s suffrage, for civil rights, for a woman’s right to choose, and for diversity, and how they deserve to occupy well-paid sinecures with lifetime tenure to defend and extend these social gains. One of the interlocking directorates of their vast monopoly is the racial grievance industry, charged with the project of enlarging the natural sense of insecurity in minority communities into a sense of outraged and electorally useful grievance. What a concept!

Of course, our lefty friends do not play this game with their own treasured institutions. In the selection of tenured college professors they operate a system of ruthless exploitation and humiliation designed to select only the best for membership. The system puts tens of thousands of would-be college professors through years of sweatshop wages and tenure-track hell. But it is all worth it, to hope to become one day a member of the academic elite. Even lefties believe that membership has its privileges.

But the 7/7 bombing is not the first attack this year upon the members of the nation state club. Before British Muslims sent the message that they didn’t want to belong to a club that apologized for its members, the French and the Dutch in two elections beat back an attack by the EU elite on their nation states.

These events warn us that the elite project to emasculate the nation state and replace it with supranational institutions is well advanced. The project wants to destroy the nation state by encouraging separatism in minority communities and by subsuming the nation state in supranational organizations accountable only to elites.

The nation state is worth fighting for. It is the miraculous idea that persuades ordinary people to abandon as a primary political loyalty their local blood ties of family and clan and enter into a larger social compact of national identity. It is the difference between Arabia and the developed world. It requires the abandonment of the code of honor, the blood feud, the culture of nepotism. It demands taking up the world of contract, and the rule of law, and extending the circle of trust beyond the boundary of blood and faith.

Let us welcome with open arms the Muslim communities in full partnership in our nation states. But first they need to complete the customary apprenticeship in western ways and western culture. It will be worth it.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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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

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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