It All Dovetails

IF YOU’VE ever watched The Larkin Chronicles (the Brit TV series that was the breakout hit for Catherine Zeta Jones) you’ll remember the fatuous woman character, Mrs Jerebohm, who kept insisting that it all dovetailed.

But sometimes it really does dovetail.

Here we are in 2007 and we are up to our keisters in problems:

Murdering hordes from south-west Asia
Welfare state that has wrecked the working class
Dumbed-down education
Murdering adolescents in college
Corrosive adolescent music/movie/video-game culture
A corrupt, powerful academic ruling class

At a time like this it always seems that there’s no way out. Except if you are a Republican. Then you have a nasty feeling that Republicans are on their way out—of power.

But usually in the course of human events the solution to our problems is right in front of us. Some people—Christians, Zen Buddhists, that sort—go even further. They say that the solution is always right in front of us.

For people of a literary turn, solutions mean books, and the suspicion that the books are already out there. Indeed they are.

William W. Lewis, The Power of Productivity. Education is important, but not critical for most people. You can train people on the job for most things in this world. So why spend $750 billion on government education that doesn’t care?
David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State. It’s amazing, but the respectable lower-middle and working class built their own welfare state in the 19th century and it worked pretty well. So why spend $400 billion on a welfare system that just doesn’t care?
Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption. Where did we get the idea that children were soft clay in the hands of their parents. Children model themselves on older children, and when we crowd them together in factory schools, we create the adolescent culture that is rotting our youth. That $750 billion again.
Robert Epstein, The Case Against Adolescence. We are shamefully infantilizing our teenagers. Like we used to infantilize blacks and women. We should reverse this and emancipate children as soon as they can pass competency tests.

Books are all very well, but what is in it for conservatives?

Quite a lot. First of all there is the challence of Islamofascism. Do we really think we are going to win the war on terror until we take the beam out of our own eye, the dreadful western culture of dreck? First step in doing that will be to get our children away from their adolescent culture. And how do you do that, make teenagers responsible? Why, you break up the adolescent culture by pitching the adolescents into the adult culture. You give teenagers responsibility as soon as you think they can handle it. Conservatives all all in favor of responsibility, right?

But here’s the kicker. Suppose we emancipate children. Suppose we reduce the years of compulsory education. Suppose we let kids work. Suppose we let them start businesses. Suppose we let them drive, and drink, and smoke, and love, and suppose we abolish the juvenile justice system so that when kids break the law they get the adult justice system they deserve?

Who is going to be really crossed up? Why the Democrats, of course. They are the guys sitting in all those educational, justice, welfare sinecures. If we abolish the adolescent society, Democrats will be out of a job.

Then we’d have purged the corrosive adolescent culture, which will help on the terror front.

And guess what. All those working teenagers will help pay for the baby boomers’ retirement.

It all dovetails, like I said.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

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

mysql close 0