Young Men Want To Fight For The Tribe

YOUNG MEN LIKE to fight. That is a truth that has been obscured over the last generation as advocates of “peace” have monopolized the public square. But whatever they say, young men like to fight. Even left-wing young men like to fight. They call it “activism.”

So it can’t be surprising that young men are signing up to fight in the War on Terror. The surprise is that anyone would expect otherwise. Here we have a generation of boys that have been tranquilized on Ritalin but that have spent every waking hour engaged in violent warlike video games. Here we have a generation of boys that, given a choice on TV, watch sports and the History Channel rather than the relationship fare of the sitcom. And we are surprised that they choose to join the armed forces?

W. Thomas Smith Jr. gives us the details. Recruitment goals in the regular armed forces are generally being met although the reserves are not doing so well.

"There is a sort of vendetta because of 9/11," says Staff Sgt. Jose Guerreiro, a senior drill instructor at Parris Island. "Some recruits have even had family members killed in Iraq. We tell them chances are they’ll be going," the sergeant said. "We explain to them that not everybody’s going to be kicking down doors up front, but they know combat is likely for all Marines."

This is as old as the hills. The way that young men serve their tribe or nation is by stepping up to offer themselves as the ultimate sacrifice. That has always been the way, for studies show that until recently only about half the young men in any generation got to project their genes into the next generation.

A lot of people think that the age of war and violence is over. That we have entered a new era in which the lion will lie down with the lamb. Chances are they are wrong. Humans are animals, and animals live by killing. Some animals only kill vegetables, but all animals are in the business of killing to stay alive and to feed their young.

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

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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

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[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.
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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

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Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

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David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

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Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

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Conservatism's Holy Grail

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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.
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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

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Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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