Despite my—so to speak—metaphysical biases toward empirical knowledge, I carry with me a human respect for `ideals’, loosely defined, so that I don’t like the idea that liberty is gained and held by a balance of weaponry between the citizenry and their government. I do accept the arguments in the end, partly because the number of innocent human beings murdered by evil or psychotic private citizens is vanishingly small compared to the number murdered at the orders of the political leaders of centralized governments, including the United States as well as the British Empire, the German Reichs, the Tsarist Empire and Soviet Union, Communist China, and so on. For example, retired high-level CIA and U.S. military officers, as well as a handful of journalists with moral integrity, have supported the estimate of 176 children being killed by Obama-ordered drone strikes in Pakistan alone. Maybe if we were more worried about American government crimes, then we wouldn’t have such a problem with large-scale killings in the United States. Europeans should be able to make similar statements.
We Americans, and most Europeans, have been living for generations in an oasis, surrounded by the deserts our own leaders, business and cultural as well as political, were creating throughout many regions and realms of our own countries as well as the colonized or otherwise exploited countries of Latin America and Africa and Asia. We were protected by some sort of magical field that protected us from those who would enslave us in various ways. And then the urbanized, middle-class and upper-class Russians found out what it was like to be a serf. The Jews of Germany and, in a lesser but significant way, the Christians and non-believers of Germany, discovered what it was like to be at the wrong end of the weapons of brutal rulers. Now, to their great surprise, Americans and others—including Germans once again, are learning a brutal truth of history—allow yourselves to become dependent upon centralized powers and those dependencies will eventually be used against you.
We are particularly vulnerable now, circa 2013, to be pushed back into serfdom. There are various reasons for this but one has to do with those guns and other weapons. In Tragedy and Hope, published in 1966, Carroll Quigley said that the modern `democratic’ forms of government as well as the various modern `rights’ of individuals are endangered because the governments of the world can now afford and can use weaponry more expensive and more powerful than that available to the ordinary citizenry. Under this way of thinking, which certainly carries some truth, the American colonists were able to successfully rebel against the British government in 1775 because the weapons available to the British army were, at best, as good as the hunting rifles owned and often used by many the colonists. The British cavalry were mounted on horses, at best, the equal of those ridden by the horsemen under the command of “Light-Horse Harry” Lee or Marion Francis. This is not to deny the general superiority of the British army and the unlikelihood of rebel victory, at that time, without intervention by the French. It is to say that, even if worse had some to worst, the American colonists would have put up a surprisingly good fight.
Nowadays, bands of heavily armed and heavily armored men and equipment can be quickly assembled and sent on missions through Boston, to choose one purely hypothetical event in a city once the center of a struggle between soldiers of a world-spanning empire and farmers and tradesmen with good muskets and knowledge of a landscape suited for partisan fighting.
Yet, a simplistic application of Quigley’s thesis doesn’t work. The Afghans and Iraqis, Hezbollah in Lebanon, have shown that even tank columns and soldiers with expensive, hi-tech weapons and armor are vulnerable to disciplined partisan fighters.
I’ll not go more deeply into the problems we’re facing as Western Civilization breaks down in fundamental ways, though a contemplation of our current economic problems can provide enough material for contemplation of the problems we’re facing and the likelihood that a corrupt power-elite will defend their own wealth and power by impoverishing many in the West who thought that good times had come for time without end. Even so sober a historian as Jacques Barzun speculated in From Dawn to Decadence, published in 2000, that we’re entering a period when the public school systems will be shut down as impoverished children are sent back into factories or onto the farms. What will happen when we are told by militarized IRS agents to hand over more money to the government though our children are hungry, public schools are being shut down, and child-labor laws are being repealed?
We might be returning to the Age of Chivalry. That is, we, or our children, might find out what it’s like to be a serf herded into the factories or mines of fields by warriors mounted on expensive transportation and wielding expensive weapons. Apparently, despite the speculations of modern liberals such as Francis Fukuyama, the reports of the death of Clio have been wildly exaggerated.
Believing that we have enough freedom of a creaturely sort to at least make an effort to make tomorrow’s world as decent as, or better than, the world we inherited, I’ll claim that we are the problem. These problems were developing and began showing themselves as early as the American War Between the States or at least World War I, and we and our ancestors ignored them, preferring to accept any gifts offered by the gods of the marketplace. We didn’t want to stop the rolling good times to contemplate the possible dangers of our growing dependencies upon various sorts of centralized institutions run by technocrats or the complementary dangers of the growing cost and complexity of modern weapons. Even with problems becoming obvious, many I know take, implicitly or even openly, the position that they’ll keep their heads down and try to make it through the remainder of their own mortal life with as few problems as possible. Let the next generations eat moldy bread while working in hell-hole factories.
We have allowed those technocrats serving the central powers to gain nearly complete control over our ways of making livings, our ways of housing and feeding our selves and our children, the viability of our religious organizations so dependent upon tax exemptions and government grants, and so much else. And they have very powerful weapons. We have not, and cannot have, the weaponry to defend our selves and our children against politicians, generals, policemen, bankers, and others in the power-elite. We also have not the toughness to fight in the way of those Asian tribesmen who’ve been willing to die by the dozens, and to see many children die, to kill one American or British soldier. This problem of unmatchable weaponry wielded by those serving centralized powers is a secondary problem, but it likely will play a role in the creation of the next phase of human civilization, complicating and endangering the building of a new Christian civilization.