Taking The Cultural Temperature

AFTER A WEEKEND when the temperature of the culture war was reading Fahrenheit 9/11, it’s a good moment to recall what it’s all about. Why can’t we all just get along?

Exactly. The culture war is a disagreement over the fundamental basis of human society. Are we humans creative, peace-loving creatures that just want to get along, or are we, at bottom, ruthless killers engaged in a brutal struggle for existence?

The disagreement over the “is” extends immediately to the “ought.” Should we organize society to remove the irritating source of conflict and violence, or should we work to contain and channel eternal conflict and violence from destruction into creativity?

The Michael Moores of the world know the source of the problem. It is inequality. Some people have more stuff: more property, more power, more education, more money, more food. Yet many people don’t have enough. How could this be? Obviously, if these good things were only shared out more equally, there would be less suffering in the world. Simple arithmetic shows that there is enough for everyone.

Since the United States has not shared its wealth, or not shared it enough, it is a small step to realize, as Michael Moore does when safely abroad, that Americans are stupid.

There are, of course, people who disagree with this philosophy. They are called conservatives and they believe that all humans, indeed all animals, are ruthless killers engaged in an eternal struggle to survive. Some animals survive by “only” killing grass. Others kill insects. Still others kill little baby ducklings. Humans are called omnivores. They will kill and eat anything.

But humans are social animals; they have discovered that cooperation enhances their chances to survive and to thrive. They also know that cooperation is hard work. Why not cut corners and cheat?

The choice between cooperation and cheating has been symbolized in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. What is best for me? Should I cooperate with or should I cheat the next person I see? The answer is simple. If I will never see that person again, the best strategy is to cheat. If I will see him again and again, the best strategy is to cooperate.

Humans are resourceful creatures, and they have developed a sophisticated social system for encouraging long-term cooperation and discouraging cheating. This system is called democratic capitalism. It attempts to put people into long-term relationships that will strongly encourage them to cooperate instead of cheat. In the personal sphere it champions monogamous lifelong marriage to encourage men to commit to sexual cooperation rather than sexual exploitation.

In the political sphere democratic capitalism has created a combination of rule by the many, rule by the few, and rule by the one that differentiates government into three branches: legislative, judicial, and executive. In separating these powers it has cunningly set the naturally combative people of the world into a situation where they must usually cooperate with each other to get the adulation they crave.

In the economic sphere democratic capitalism rewards people who offer products and services that other people are eager to buy and consume. Its breathtaking inventions of contract, double-entry bookkeeping, the limited liability corporation, common law, risk management, and financial markets are the modern wonders of the world.

All in all democratic capitalism has transformed the world. It has shrunk the extended family into the nuclear family, and replaced the tribe with the team.

But democratic capitalism is human. It is utterly ruthless. Ever since it first emerged as a world-historical force five hundred years ago, it has spread across the world in imperial conquest, sweeping all the peoples of the world into its orbit. It has indeed, as Marx complained, imposed on all the world its “cash nexus.”

In the Americas it annihilated the existing agricultural empires and hunter bands. In West Africa, limited by disease, it entered into a shameful trade in slaves. In Southern Africa it enserfed the Bantu tribes. In India it transformed, in China it humiliated.

Today its votaries are streaming into the last stronghold of the old order, where the extended family and the tribe still rule: the house of Islam. Provoked by the terrorism of the well-born sons of Islam the forces of democratic capitalism have commenced their last great conquest, sweeping the sands of Araby into its orbit, once more transforming tribes into teams, and status into contract.

Provocation followed by conquest: it is the democratic capitalist way, a tradition that began with Cortez, and continued with Clive, the Trail of Tears, the Opium War, the Zulu War, only to be interrupted for a century by the Great European Civil War.

Its ruthless expansion is, of course, an outrage, and sensitive people like Michael Moore are right to be outraged. But democratic capitalism will win. It will win and keep on winning until the Next Big Thing hoves into sight.

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

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

Home

American Manifesto

Chapters

Chappies

roadtothemiddleclass

presented by Christopher Chantrill

Follow @chrischantrill • Contact