Rising In The East

Barack Obama in India, David Cameron off to China.

Obama supports a permanent Indian seat on the UN Security Council. Who is to give up theirs? America has supported a United Europe since the 1940s. From London to Paris, let the alarms bell ring, even as the champagne corks are popping from Brussels to New Delhi. America clearly sees India as a bulwark against Islam, and may well have a point. But alliance with those Indian politicians who are most strongly of that view is not only alliance with those who could politely be described as least Anglophile and who have lately become least progressive socially, the latter also something to watch out for on the Israeli Religious Right, but it also involves saying "too bad" to those, such as Christians and Dalits (who are often Christians), who are threatened by the rise of Hindutva.

China still makes things, builds things and mines things, putting the jobs, heat and light of her people first. She is emerging from the gangster capitalism that always follows Communism by returning to her own culture, which is firmly centred on the family and the local community, reveres tradition and ritual, upholds government by moral rather than physical force, affirms the Golden Rule, is Agrarian and Distributist, has barely started an external war in five thousand years, and is especially open to completion by, in, through and as classical Christianity. And she takes Africa seriously, even going there to secure the food supply necessary for her to give up the extremely anti-Confucian one child policy.

The correct response to the rise of China is therefore a return to making things, building things and mining things. To prioritising jobs, heat and light. To the family and the local community. To tradition and ritual. To moral rather than physical force. To the Golden Rule. To Agrarianism and Distributism. To a pronounced aversion to war. To the classical Christianity that completes and transcends Confucianism, in no way destroying it. To a very Classical and Patristic openness to, and interest in, Africa. And to the glorious celebration of the fact that the very last thing wrong with the world is that it has people in it.