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| Who Was Betty Friedan? | The Cultural Colonialism of the Left |
Torino: Europe's Last Hurrah?
by Christopher Chantrill
February 12, 2006 at 9:54 pm
ON FRIDAY NIGHT in Torino Luciano Pavarotti, close to the last gasp of his career, sang the last gasp of grand opera, Puccini’s glorious “Nessun Dorma.” You have to wonder: Will this Winter Olympics prove to be the last gasp of Europe, the big blowout before the Islamic hordes engulf it?
It seems impossible to believe that the cheerful young Euro-Olympians who passed before the cameras are really intent upon demographic suicide the pundits predict. They all seemed so alive, so optimistic, so vigorous, so free. And yet if they go on like their parents and don’t make more babies...
But let us not forget Stein’s Law: “If it can’t go on forever, it will stop.”
It is right to be concerned about the challenge of the Islamists and their fascist threat.
But we should be careful about using the Nazi comparison. When Hitler came to power the Germans had just finished reinventing philosophy and physics. They had discovered the Otto and Diesel cycles, and they led the world in the military arts. With these advantages the expansionist Nazis could adopt a seize-and-hold strategy and dominate the whole of Europeâ€â€for a while.
Compare the Nazis with the Islamists. The London Spectator has a cover this week showing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a superpower scorpion scuttling across the Persian Gulf with a rocket in his tail. It’s a great artist’s concept, but think about the reality. Is this scorpion thinking about an amphibious assault across the Persian Gulf, in the face of the US base on Qatar and the Seventh Fleet cruising just below the horizon? Or is it planning a right hook through southern Iraq and expecting the British squaddies there to salute as they drive by?
No such luck. The Iranian president’s strategy is only a raiding strategy, fomenting civil war or national demoralization by killing civilians with roadside bombs and suicide bombers. The best the Islamists can do is to seed Europe with seething young men organized into criminal gangs and hope that they will rise up in a generation or two and take over. They are reduced to this strategy because they do not have the power to do anything else.
Essayist Theodore Dalrymple has been thinking about the Islamists, and has realized that they have a culture just like the alienated underclass youths in Britain in his Life at the Bottom. In National Review, he wrote that the Muslim extremists in Europe and the Middle East in the front lines of the Cartoon Wars:
are like the inhabitants of our ghettoes who demand something that they call “respect,” and which they extort by fear for lack of any other means by which to earn it.
We Americans know about this too. It is the problem we have had with every new wave of immigrants since the Irish started tumbling out of the coffin ships onto the docks of Boston and Manhattan around 1850. Each wave frightened the daylights out of the propertied classes with its criminal, threatening behavior. But each immigrant tsunami, up to now, has ended up thoroughly Americanized and suburbanized, reduced to Starbucks foam by chickens in every pot, cars in every garage, jobs jobs jobs, and, of course, freedom and self-government.
The Iranians are hoping that their Islamic gangs in Europe will not succumb to the Great Satan. They are betting that the rational Euro-experts and their beloved Social Model will continue to bungle things forever, in violation of Stein’s Law.
Unfortunately for the Axis of Evil the west has a secret weapon. It was incautiously revealed a few weeks ago in a World Bank report “Where is the Wealth of Nations?” The bank came up with a wealth estimate for each nation using the magic of compound interest, computing the present value of each nation’s annual consumption expenditures. But when you subtract capital in natural resources and in businesses and factories from the national wealth you are left with a residual: Intangible Capital. The residual turns out to be the precipitate of efficient justice, secure property rights, freedom, and self-government.
How big do you think the value of this residual would be? Let us line up the numbers from the report’s Appendix 2 for a few representative countries.
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So that’s why those angry US immigrants aren’t angry any more, and why those Euro-Olympians in Torino are so happy. They are all heirs to a vast hoard of intangible loot: efficient justice, secure property rights, education, and tons of “global best practice” employers.
Anyone can think up scenarios in which the Europeans just go on as they are, throw away their birthright, and submit themselves to a bunch of excitable oil-meter readers from the Middle East. But really, could anyone be that stupid?
Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.
Buy his Road to the Middle Class.
To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.
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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