The Liberal Culture Of Compulsion

IF YOU LISTEN to your liberal friend she will tell, perhaps, of a wonderful program at the local community college that is helping in the fight for literacy in adult women. Probably she heard about it on NPR.

It is a wonderful thing to have adult literacy programs. Only, of course, there’s no way to tell if they do any good. And there is no way for you to opt out and say “no thanks, I’d prefer to contribute to Bill Gates’s literacy programs instead.”

Our liberal friends are also apt to roll the soft-focus shots when it comes to our kids. They are big on the celebration of the “common school,” the euphemism for government child custodial facilities invented in the 19th century in the campaign to centralize of local schooling under state government administration. Said Horace Mann, the father of the common school:

Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged.

Mann’s timing was impeccable. His system went into effect just in time for the big crime wave of the 1840s.

In recent weeks, we’ve been experiencing the reality of all this feel-good effort to help the kids. Apparently the need to help the kids is nothing compared with the need for government teachers to unionize. You would think that, if the moral urgency of teaching kids is so great, that teachers would be glad to teach for almost nothing, as in fact the teachers in Catholic schools, the proverbial nuns memorialized in The Blues Brothers, really did.

Why did the Catholics build their own school system, and why did they inspire generations of young women to become nuns and teach in those schools? It was because the liberals in the mid 19th century, Harvard Unitarians like Horace Mann, in unholy alliance with Protestant leaders, declared that only the Protestant Bible could be used in the public schools for non-sectarian religious instruction. They had an agenda, of course. They figured that they would cure the Irish Catholics of their popish ways and turn them into real Americans. The Catholics, led by chaps like John “Dagger” Hughes, an immigrant gardener who became the first Catholic Archbishop of New York, rioted in Philadelphia ovre that issue, and then determined to build their own schools rather than allow their children to be polluted by the Protestant Bible.

Nothing has really changed. Today’s liberals want to cure America’s children of any Christianity, and if they haven’t succeeded by the 12th grade they have a college for your kid that specializes in remedial secular instruction in between the parties. And so today there are parents who would rather educate their children at home than send them to be polluted by union teachers in the government schools.

Samuel Johnson famously asserted that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. But that was in simpler times, and cannot be applied to today’s complex interconnected society. Back in the 18th century the most that an average scoundrel could get from his patriotism was a chance to riot every now and again, as in the Gordon Riots of 1780. These days people pour into the streets over more substantial issues than the Papists Act of 1778. They riot over their government pensions.

Notice the beautiful symmetry of the liberal philosophy. First they were determined to force the taxpayers to pay for education. Then they determined to force parents to send their children to the government school. Now they want to force us to pay for their pensions, just because some crooked politician promised them a pension in every garage years ago.

I will tell you what I call a political culture that turns every social problem into a government program. I call that a culture of compulsion, and I want no part of it.

Yes, but we must have a system to educate the children. That’s what my liberal friends insist when I utter heretical thoughts about the failures of government programs.

Yes we must. But why on earth would we do it with a system of government force? Why on earth does it always have to be done upon compulsion? Why is this “system” always a centralized government system of compulsion designed by liberals, run by liberals, and why does it always need to pay pensions to liberals? I say that liberals should get their own pensions.

We conservatives have a better idea about all of this. We’ll tell you about it, America, if you’re interested.

Let’s have a national conversation about America’s corrupt culture of compulsion.

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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