Recently we’ve
been reading a few books about the decay of culture and civilization. We mean recent books, although the general
theme and even many of the specifics have been the subject of commentators for
millennia. They all have certain
elements in common:
·
Everything is going to hell,
·
Nothing is as good as it used to be,
·
It’s somebody else’s fault, and
·
If (other) people would either do right or let
us do right, everything would be fine.
Perhaps
shockingly, we agree (mostly), at least about the first two items in a limited
sense. The third and fourth are really
the same thing, failures of social justice, but we’ll get to that in a while. What concerns us immediately is the claim
that everything is going to the dogs.
The books we’ve
been reading, Rod Dreher’s The Benedict
Option (2017), Anthony Esolen’s Out
of the Ashes (2017), and Archbishop Chaput’s Strangers in a Strange Land (2017) all (obviously) came out in the
same year at about the same time and all give generally the same diagnosis, and
the same immediate causes of today’s situation.
What none of the
authors really gets into, however (although Chaput gets very close . . . but then doesn’t make the final connection), are
the causes behind the causes, which our research suggests strongly is the loss
of power by ordinary people — power over their own lives. Institutions that once supported personal economic
power for gaining control over your own life have largely been replaced by institutions
that support personal political power for gaining control over the lives of
others.
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| The Enlightenment: Not all bad ideas. |
The so-called
Enlightenment often comes in for a beating (less of a one from Chaput), and
usually rightfully so. A lot of ideas
that (not to put too fine a point on it) are just plain nutty came out of
it. Few of the critics, however, bother
to separate out the good ideas of the Enlightenment from the bad ideas, or —
worse — wonder why, other than the presumed depravity of those who promoted the
ideas, people even came up with crazy ideas in the first place . . . and why
people believed them.
Answering the
second concern first, people were so ready to believe nutty ideas because they
were desperate. Society was falling
apart and things were spiraling out of control.
Only in America — which had its own problems with slavery and the
treatment of native peoples — was there any semblance of the way things used to
be. Not by coincidence the three authors
noted above, Dreher, Esolen, and Chaput, all cite Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835, 1840).
Oddly, however,
none of the critics seems able to identify the specific problem that caused the
other problems. This is despite the fact
that de Tocqueville mentioned the basis of what made America unique, as did
William Cobbett and a few generations later Frederick Jackson Turner.
And that was?
In America anyone
who wanted to and was willing to take the risk could become an owner of capital. Usually this was in the form of land, but
also technology up to a point. (The
financial system was not very well regulated, to say the least, and the means
for acquiring and possessing capital in the form of technology was open only to
a relatively few people.)
The Industrial
Revolution only really took hold in the United States with the Civil War, which
— not by coincidence — was accompanied by changes in the underlying assumptions
about where sovereignty resides. Prior
to the Civil War, sovereignty was presumed to reside in actual human
beings. After the Civil War, sovereignty
was presumed to reside in the collective.
(That is a general statement of course, based on the changing
interpretation of the Constitution, especially by the U.S. Supreme Court.)
How this came
about is not important for the purposes of this discussion. The important issue for this discussion is
that with the Industrial Revolution, financed largely by the invention of
central banking and the expansion of commercial and mercantile banking, advancing technology began
displacing human beings from production.
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| David Ricardo: Labor Theory of Value |
Despite the
so-called “Labor Theory of Value,” in classical economics there are three factors of production, land,
labor, and capital. To get a better and
more accurate analysis and understand more clearly what happened, in binary economics we consider the
factors of production as two: the human (labor) and the non-human (capital,
which includes both land and technology).
Technology
advances and becomes capable of producing more marketable goods and services
than are put into it, phenomenally so in most cases. That is the whole purpose of technology.
Land, too, can be
improved and made more productive by adding technology, such as better farming
or grazing methods, enriching the soil, and so on. In both instances output far exceeds input —
a profit is intended to be made, or there would be no point in using technology
or land to do anything if inputs exceed outputs.
Human labor is
different. If the meaning and purpose of
life were to be a producing machine to make a profit, human beings would be a
miserable failure. Taken solely as labor
with no addition of or enhancement by land or technology, human labor output is
usually so far below the input required to keep the “human machine” running
that — fortunately — slavery (using people as if they were things) is generally
economic only in low-technology situations.
(The cotton gin created an anomaly, high tech processing combined with
low tech production.)
The meaning and
purpose of life is not, however, material wellbeing so that “anything goes” as
long as it is economically feasible or beneficial in the aggregate. That is the goal of socialism, the material
advancement of humanity in the aggregate, the greatest good for the greatest
number, regardless whether any individual’s or group’s rights are violated.
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| Caiaphas: Better that one innocent man suffer. |
In socialism, if
the Capitalists, Reactionaries, Jews, Blacks, Catholics, Armenians, Japanese,
or anyone else are in the way, or someone in power thinks they might be in the
way, or get in the way in the future, get rid of them. It is, as the High Priest Caiaphas said,
better that one innocent man suffer than the nation perish . . . and he lose power, prestige, and position.
In most
traditional faiths and philosophies, however, the goal of life is not mere
animal comforts and material wellbeing.
That is important, of course, and should not be denigrated. It takes a distant second, however, to the
need to become more fully human, that is, to acquire and develop virtue:
“human-ness.”
The deliberate
violation of the rights of a single innocent human being is such a heinous
offense that all faiths and philosophies acknowledge that it justifies even
overthrowing the State and instituting a more just government. It is why in a justly ordered system someone
is presumed innocent until proven
guilty — not suspected, not rumored, not anything other than actual, direct proof.
It’s also why,
for example, the Catholic Church classes “calumny” (destroying someone’s
reputation by spreading detrimental stories in the absence of proof) as a
“mortal sin,” i.e., one that kills
life in the soul and condemns someone to eternal damnation. (“Backbiting” is pretty bad, too. It’s damaging another’s reputation by
spreading stories that may be true, but that the tattler has no right or
obligation to spread around . . . and not too many people have the right to act as judge, jury, and executioner on their own intiative.)
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| Justice: redefined out of existence. |
And it’s why
socialists are anxious to redefine justice of all kinds. Even they know that a false accusation
knowingly made would destroy their credibility and their claims to
legitimacy. It is essential, therefore, for
socialists to frame mere ownership of wealth as being itself a crime. In this way, confiscation of wealth and
punishment of the capitalist for the crime of being wealthy becomes a virtue
rather than a vice.
Reasoning like
that, however, is what desperate people wanted to hear, not traditional politicians
telling them to remain calm and orderly and things might get better, or
traditional religions promising a good life in the next world if they acted
virtuously in this life. Why, after all,
should they settle for “Pie in the Sky” when they wanted bread now?
So, it is no
wonder that the ideas of the Enlightenment and the “new things” of socialism
and modernism spread so far so fast.
When traditional politics and religion seemed utterly helpless to ensure
life at all, much less a decent life, what good were they? Why not go with Enlightenment ideas or those
of the “democratic religion” of socialism?
What did they have to lose?
Well . . .
everything, but that is what we’ll look at in the next posting on this subject.
#30#