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Conservatives and the Creative Impulse: Part II Loosey-goosey Hits the Wall

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Ward Churchill is Right

by Christopher Chantrill
February 16, 2005 at 10:10 pm

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NO SOONER had Prof. Nancy Hopkins of MIT bounced up from her fainting couch upon the prospect of yet another task force to investigate gender inequity in the darkly menacing groves of Larry Summers’ Harvard than conservatives started swooning over Ward Churchill’s remarks about little Eichmanns in the twin towers on 9/11 had it coming. “They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the ‘mighty engine of profit’ to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly.” It’s been that kind of winter.

We conservatives need to get up off our fainting couches too, and realize that Ward Churchill is right. Oh, not about his rude, crude argument ad Hitlerum, but the larger argument.

Let us speak truth to ourselves. The United States is a global empire that is taking over the world, and we conservatives are in favor of it.

Here’s how the American empire works. In 1990, Nike opens a factory in Vietnam. For the first three years, the workers walk to work. Then they start riding bicycles. After another three years, the first motorcycles appear. Last year, when Swedish writer Johan Norberg visited the factory, he found that now a few workers can even afford an automobile.

Let us speak truth to ourselves. The reason the United States dominates the world is not because of our democracy or the rule of law. It is because of our power.

We are much too sensitive about this, and the left takes full advantage of us. Let’s end the denial and admit it. The last half millennium has been an age of breathtaking world conquest, an achievement unimaginable even to great world conquerors like Alexander and Genghis Khan. This world conquest began with the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and the Portuguese flanking movement around Africa to cut the Middle East out of the spice trade. Then the Spanish conquered Central and South America, the British East India Company took India from the Mughals, and the Puritans and their willing accomplices from mainland Europe conquered North America.

Despite all this bloody conquest, the secret of western power is not military, however. Nor will you find its secret in the rational power of big civilian bureaucracies. The west is powerful because it is a Hayekian spontaneous order, the result of millions of decisions by millions of little men and women. It is the American settler moving west and compelling the U.S. cavalry to come and rescue him from irate Indians. It is the humble clerk of the East India Company who got a military friend to teach him a bit of soldiering and then went out and conquered Bengal. It is the young bookkeeper getting interested in the barrels of Pennsylvania oil being traded by his employer, Hewitt and Tuttle, commission agents of Cleveland, Ohio.

This sort of Hayekian thinking has even seeped into the military. Western generals now train soldiers to be “self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility” instead of just food for powder.

Let us speak truth to ourselves. Our double-entry bookkeeping, our self-government, our rule of law, and our limited-liability companies are more than mere wonders of the world. They are more than innocent inventions; they are terrifying force multipliers that made us into world conquerors.

We should thank Ward Churchill and his ilk—the Chomskys and Zinns, the firm of Hardt & Negri, and even No Logo’s Naomi Klein—as they luxuriate upon their government sinecures and pettishly expose the little lies we Americans tell ourselves to avoid confronting our world-historical consequence. They are right. America is an empire, and we are all imperialists. And a good thing too.

Let us adopt the psychobabble of our liberal friends. The 9/11 attacks were a cry of help from Saudi little rich kids begging us to come and release them from the cruel and depraved rule of their fathers. Just think of American soldiers as helping professionals that want to help people.

Ward Churchill is right, but so what? Does he think he can set the world ablaze by riling up some little Saudi rich kids and the Ruckus Society? Let him wait till the Indians get their act together. Ever since Jinnah and the Muslim League they’ve had it up to here with Islam. Then there are the Chinese. Their house church people are planning to launch 100,000 Christian missionaries upon the world. They have developed a narrative about Christianity as a westward moving religion. It got started in Palestine and then moved west to Europe, to America, and to Asia. The destiny of Chinese Christians, they believe, is to bring Christianity westward across Asia and “Back to Jerusalem.” As a famous American said: “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

That will teach Ward Churchill a lesson.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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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

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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