Can We Afford Liberalism Now?

摘要

The financial crisis, detonated by greed and reckless-ness on Wall Street and in the City of London, is for the West a deep, self-inflicted wound. The beneficiary wont be Russia, which, with its fragile, energy-based economy, is likely to suffer more than we shall; it will be India and China. They will move into any power vacuum left by the collapse of Western self-confidence.rnIf we seriously wish to repair the damage, we need to accept that this is fundamentally a moral crisis, not a financial one. It is the product of the self-indulgence and complacency born of our ultraliberal societies, which have substituted such pseudo-religions as political correctness and saving the planet for genuine distinctions between right and wrong and the cultivation of real virtues.rnIndia and China are progress-loving yet morally old-fashioned societies. They cannot afford liberalism. Their vast populations have only recendy begun to emerge from subsistence living. Their strength is in the close, hard-working family unit in which parents train their children to work diligently at school and go to university when possible so they can acquire real and useful qualifications to then go out into the world as professional men and women determined to reach the top.