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Conservatives and the Creative Impulse: Part II Loosey-goosey Hits the Wall

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Ward Churchill is Right

by Christopher Chantrill
February 16, 2005 at 10:10 pm

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NO SOONER had Prof. Nancy Hopkins of MIT bounced up from her fainting couch upon the prospect of yet another task force to investigate gender inequity in the darkly menacing groves of Larry Summers’ Harvard than conservatives started swooning over Ward Churchill’s remarks about little Eichmanns in the twin towers on 9/11 had it coming. “They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the ‘mighty engine of profit’ to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly.” It’s been that kind of winter.

We conservatives need to get up off our fainting couches too, and realize that Ward Churchill is right. Oh, not about his rude, crude argument ad Hitlerum, but the larger argument.

Let us speak truth to ourselves. The United States is a global empire that is taking over the world, and we conservatives are in favor of it.

Here’s how the American empire works. In 1990, Nike opens a factory in Vietnam. For the first three years, the workers walk to work. Then they start riding bicycles. After another three years, the first motorcycles appear. Last year, when Swedish writer Johan Norberg visited the factory, he found that now a few workers can even afford an automobile.

Let us speak truth to ourselves. The reason the United States dominates the world is not because of our democracy or the rule of law. It is because of our power.

We are much too sensitive about this, and the left takes full advantage of us. Let’s end the denial and admit it. The last half millennium has been an age of breathtaking world conquest, an achievement unimaginable even to great world conquerors like Alexander and Genghis Khan. This world conquest began with the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and the Portuguese flanking movement around Africa to cut the Middle East out of the spice trade. Then the Spanish conquered Central and South America, the British East India Company took India from the Mughals, and the Puritans and their willing accomplices from mainland Europe conquered North America.

Despite all this bloody conquest, the secret of western power is not military, however. Nor will you find its secret in the rational power of big civilian bureaucracies. The west is powerful because it is a Hayekian spontaneous order, the result of millions of decisions by millions of little men and women. It is the American settler moving west and compelling the U.S. cavalry to come and rescue him from irate Indians. It is the humble clerk of the East India Company who got a military friend to teach him a bit of soldiering and then went out and conquered Bengal. It is the young bookkeeper getting interested in the barrels of Pennsylvania oil being traded by his employer, Hewitt and Tuttle, commission agents of Cleveland, Ohio.

This sort of Hayekian thinking has even seeped into the military. Western generals now train soldiers to be “self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility” instead of just food for powder.

Let us speak truth to ourselves. Our double-entry bookkeeping, our self-government, our rule of law, and our limited-liability companies are more than mere wonders of the world. They are more than innocent inventions; they are terrifying force multipliers that made us into world conquerors.

We should thank Ward Churchill and his ilk—the Chomskys and Zinns, the firm of Hardt & Negri, and even No Logo’s Naomi Klein—as they luxuriate upon their government sinecures and pettishly expose the little lies we Americans tell ourselves to avoid confronting our world-historical consequence. They are right. America is an empire, and we are all imperialists. And a good thing too.

Let us adopt the psychobabble of our liberal friends. The 9/11 attacks were a cry of help from Saudi little rich kids begging us to come and release them from the cruel and depraved rule of their fathers. Just think of American soldiers as helping professionals that want to help people.

Ward Churchill is right, but so what? Does he think he can set the world ablaze by riling up some little Saudi rich kids and the Ruckus Society? Let him wait till the Indians get their act together. Ever since Jinnah and the Muslim League they’ve had it up to here with Islam. Then there are the Chinese. Their house church people are planning to launch 100,000 Christian missionaries upon the world. They have developed a narrative about Christianity as a westward moving religion. It got started in Palestine and then moved west to Europe, to America, and to Asia. The destiny of Chinese Christians, they believe, is to bring Christianity westward across Asia and “Back to Jerusalem.” As a famous American said: “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

That will teach Ward Churchill a lesson.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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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

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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