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Filling the Education Vacuum Disaster: When You Want Solutions

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The Lesson of New Orleans

by Christopher Chantrill
September 04, 2005 at 1:13 pm

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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 americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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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

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

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

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

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”

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

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

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

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

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

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

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

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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