Tearing Up The Last Half Millennium - Road to the Middle Class

The mass murder nearly 3,000 innocent people on American soil forced open my eyes to the Islamic holy war against the West, freedom and modernity. The battle has raged not for years or decades, but for centuries -- well before the Crusades.

If you want to know how the holy war works, writes Malkin, just go down the list: Jihad, Infidels, Sharia, Caliphate, Taqiyya (deception), and Dhimmitude (inferiority of non-Muslims under Islam).

The striking thing about the Muslim agenda is how it hasn’t changed over the years. But the striking thing about the West is how much it has changed.

After the religious wars of the seventeenth century, a generation of thinkers tried to think up a society in which these poisonous conflicts over divine truth could be avoided. They came up with the separation of church and state and the idea of tolerance for people you didn’t agree with.

In the first demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences, something extraordinary happened that nobody had thought about. The market economy grew like topsy in the space afforded by the new, if imperfect, tolerance (which was good because it spread prosperity).

But this sudden explosion of markets and trading had a frightening effect. It seemed that it would utterly destroy the old and the familiar, the organic institutions that people had lived under for centuries. What should be done?

“What is to be done” is the watchword of the last two hundred years. Should the market be encouraged? Should it be eliminated? Should we build new institutions to bind people into a sense of belonging? Or should we let everyone just hang out and figure things out for themselves?

But this vast dialogue has not occurred in the Islamic world. There was no reformation, no Enlightenment, no centuries-long dialogue about what we do now. Yet now we see Islamic hot-heads saying that the West has got it all wrong and they are going to clear it all away with jihad, with sharia law, a new caliphate, and dhimmitude.

Sorry fellahs. An agenda like this just doesn’t sound like it will end happily.

It sounds more like a bunch of ignorant teenagers on the lookout for mischief. It sounds like the sort of project that adults put a stop to right now before it gets out of hand and people get hurt.

However flawed and corrupt the West, it must be agreed that real knowledge was gained in the last half-millennium about how to construct a global society.

Tearing it all up isn’t going to solve anything.

But hey, maybe all this mess would never have happened without President Bush and his war on terror.

Oh, I forgot. The war on terror came after 9/11.

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

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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

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