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Chapter 12:
The Fourth Great Awakening
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With new knowledge comes new illumination and the need for reevaluation. The first shaft of light teaches that helpless immigrants to the city seem to instinctively choose the right strategy to cope with their new environment. They are open to revivalists who invite them to join religious movements that help them convert their impulsive peasant culture to the directed and purposeful culture of the city. In the nineteenth century they actively sought out education for their children long before political activists built a movement to municipalize and nationalize the education of children. In fact, many of them went without food to find the money to pay the school fees for their children. Today they try to find ways around the government school system so they can find the back-to-basics education that city immigrants need. They come, in time, to accept the value of the regime of law that obtains in the city, shedding eventually the culture of subordination and patronage that they lived under before they came to the city. This finding calls into question the legitimacy of the whole maternal/paternal welfare state that has been built on the assumption that city dwellers cannot be trusted to develop the proper social safety net to help the helpless and to educate the ignorant.
The second shaft of illumination provides a new way of understanding the remarkable diversity of Americans, not in the sense of ethnic difference, but in their levels of consciousness. There are Americans struggling in a cesspool of violence and failure in the inner cities; there are dutiful Americans following the rules as the One True Way; there are creative Americans who belief that life is an adventure, a great creative endeavor; there are Americans who long for genuine democracy, a community of caring and sharing, free from power and oppression. The problem is that each community, sealed in its own world of consciousness, wants to create a world safe for them to seek salvation, and experiences other communities as threats that seek to prevent them from achieving their salvation. Many people talk about celebrating diversity, but they mean celebrating the colorful people who think like them. The true challenge of diversity is to create an America that lets others work out their salvation in safety, that helps them achieve their sensible goals without imposing a top-down one-size-fits-all comprehensive and mandatory solution devised by national experts, to recognize, in the words of Clare Graves, that “Damn it all, a person has the right to be who he is.”
Since the industrial revolution, everyone has agreed that the poor, meaning the proletarians of the city, are the group that needs help most urgently. This book has shown that what the proletarians, the red impulsives, need is a firm and solid road to the middle class, that shows them the way to go, gives them a good solid road to travel on, and helps them in their struggle. In the next chapter we shall examine how to help them in this task in the context of the early twenty-first century and the demoralizing culture of the welfare state that lives on the continued problems of the poor.
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Click for Chapter 13: Repairing The Road
Your comments are welcome. Please e-mail to Christopher Chantrill at mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com, and take the RMC test here.
©2005 Christopher Chantrill
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
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
China and Christianity
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
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
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
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”
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
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
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
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
