{"id":3562,"date":"2010-10-13T04:08:30","date_gmt":"2010-10-13T04:08:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3562"},"modified":"2010-10-13T04:12:15","modified_gmt":"2010-10-13T04:12:15","slug":"moral-decay-and-civilizational-rebirth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3562","title":{"rendered":"Moral Decay and Civilizational Rebirth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

John Robb<\/strong> at Global Guerrillas<\/a><\/strong>:<\/p>\n

JOURNAL: Moral Decay?<\/a><\/p>\n

Moral decay is often cited as a reason for why empires\/civilizations collapse. \u00a0The slow failure of the US mortgage market, the largest debt market in the world and the shining jewel of the US economic\/financial system, is \u00a0a good example of moral decay at work. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why is this market failing? \u00a0It’s being gutted — from wholesale fraud and ruthless profiteering at the bank\/servicer level to strategic defaults at the homeowner level — because a relatively efficient and effective moral system is being replaced by a burdensome and ineffective one. \u00a0What shift? \u00a0Our previous moral system featured\u00a0trust, loyalty, reputation, responsibility, belief, fairness, etc. \u00a0 While these features were sometimes in short supply, on the whole it provided us with an underlying and nearly costless structure to our social and economic interactions. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our new moral system is that of the dominant global marketplace. \u00a0This new system emphasizes transactional, short-term interactions rather than long-term relationships. \u00a0All interactions are intensely legalistic, as in: nothing is assumed except what is spelled out in the contract. \u00a0Goodness is solely based on transactional success and therefore anything goes, as long as you don’t get punished for it. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this moral system, every social and economic interaction becomes increasingly costly due to a need to contractually defend yourself against cheating, fraud, and theft. \u00a0Worse, when legalistic punishment is absent\/lax, rampant looting and fraud occurs. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Given the costs and dangers of moral decay, it’s not hard to see why it can cause a complex empire\/civilization to collapse.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

John is drawing on an intellectual tradition\u00a0goes back to Gibbon<\/a>,<\/strong> Ibn Khaldun<\/a><\/strong>, Polybius<\/a><\/strong>, Confucius<\/a><\/strong> and Mencius<\/strong>\u00a0 <\/a>but is mashing it up with modern concepts of social complexity, such as is found in Joseph Tainter’s<\/strong> The Collapse of Complex Societies<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong> This makes sense; when members of a ruling class start to behave in an unethical manner, there is a natural reaction by morally vigilant members of the ruling class to check future abuses of power\u00a0by\u00a0dividing administrative authority, increasing regulations, creating new watchdogs and erecting balancing countermeasures. This is an increase in complexity that decreases rather than improves efficiency. Society pays more for the same level of effective governance and the creep of corruption will soon require another “re-set” and yet another no-value added\u00a0 increase in complexity as the elite multiplies and seeks their own aggrandizement.<\/p>\n

When Robert Wright<\/strong> wrote of\u00a0“ossifying” societies unable to stand the test of barbarians in the ancient and medieval worlds, in Nonzero:The Logic of Human Destiny<\/a><\/strong>, he was explicit that a moral critique often\u00a0correlated with\u00a0economic\/darwinian fitness. Rome, for example, eschewed adaptive technological\u00a0innovation due to it’s heavy reliance on inexpensive slave labor. Oligarchic societies fit the\u00a0moral decay\u00a0theory because\u00a0oligarchies focus on the zero sum game of extracting existing wealth from the population instead of creating and accumulating it.\u00a0The extraction process requires an expensive social architecture of control and this is subject to diminishing returns. At a certain point, any system reaches the tipping point on adding the next level of\u00a0non-productive complexity and begins to unravel.<\/p>\n

What if the historical\u00a0ratchet could be reversed?<\/p>\n

What if the excess complexity could be systemically\u00a0pared back along with the opportunities for corruption and self-aggrandizement that required countermeasures?<\/p>\n

Societies are occasionally\u00a0capable of moral and political renovation, cases in point, the Glorious Revolution<\/strong> and the Meiji Restoration<\/strong>, both of which tied ancient ideals to new political forms while sweeping away a corrupt elite. The American Revolution<\/strong> period, through the adoption of the US Constitution would be another example of societal transformation. These successes, which involve constitutional reforms and a\u00a0rejuvenated political economy are essentially of a social contractual nature and are rare. Failure is more common, as with Sulla’<\/a><\/strong>s bloody reforms that temporarily got rid of bad actors and rebooted the Roman\u00a0Republic to an older, more virtuous model but failed to address the fact that the\u00a0structural\u00a0flaws of the Republic itself were the problem, not the ambition of Marius<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Things are not yet\u00a0too far gone. There is much that is wrong with the United States but we have a\u00a0more resilient and coherent foundation upon which to reconstruct than did the Romans of the 1st century BC.\u00a0<\/p>\n

America has many Mariuses but a better Republic.