The American Spectator

Special Report

(Page 2 of 2)

"There's no respect for the community, just respect between friends....There's no discipline from when you're born. I reckon it's about the no-smacking rule. How else are you supposed to discipline them? My mam couldn't discipline me and there was no one else so I thought I was top dog."

br> Like Dr. Daniels's grim narrative, this is both terribly sad and terribly funny. The only bourgeois values which have percolated down to the underclass are such fashionable beliefs as this: that the physical chastisement of children amounts to child abuse. So children are not physically chastised, so they are not disciplined -- for as Dom rightly observes, among those with a thin culture and few disciplinary resources, "how else are you supposed to discipline them?" -- so they easily slip into a life of ignorance, idleness and petty crime, perpetuating the squalid conditions under which they themselves were raised.

How did this view of discipline become a bourgeois value? It never was before the 1960s. But along with all the other evils that decade brought us was the notion of "violence" as morally undifferentiated. The ideology that then superseded the old honor culture and that holds sway still told people that there was no moral difference between the parent or teacher who strikes a child and the child who strikes a parent or teacher -- just as there is no difference between a burglar who shoots a householder and a householder who shoots a burglar. This is now the law of the land in Britain. The same idea lies behind the fashionable and progressive view of the war in Iraq, namely that the British and American effort to remove a tyrant and a mass murderer is morally no better than -- and among the most progressive who hold up signs depicting the President and Vice President of the United States as "The Real Terrorists," it is actually worse than -- the tyrant's murders. You have to work hard to rid yourself of common sense in order to believe such stuff.

topics:
Education, Law, Iraq