Interesting piece here from Spengler in Asia Times Online.
Spengler is commenting on a 1985 paper on ethics and the marketplace wiritten by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
Spengler’s recurrent theme is “nihilism“:
The Europeans are paying for their own nihilism. Having invented the perfect post-Christian society with cradle-to-grave services, they have not found anyone willing to live in it, except for the immigrants who well may inherit it from the disappearing locals.
In this latest piece he applauds Ratzinger for identifying the moral emptiness of the market-driven, consumerist, low-birthrate society.
Underlying the crisis is the Western world’s repudiation of life, through a hedonism that puts consumption or “self-realization” ahead of child-rearing … Economics simply never has had to confront a situation in which the next generation simply failed to turn up.
It’s always tempting to respond to Papal scoldings about our reluctance to breed in the manner of a U.S. politician of forty years or so ago: “You no play-a da game, you no make-a da rules.” And the then-Cardinal does not seem (on Spengler’s account) to take up the issues that underlie the underlying issues Spengler claims he identified, e.g.
- Should the human race return to pre-modern levels of reproduction? Given the life-preserving powers of modern medicine, that would get you a generation-on-generation multiplier of four or five. So for each person alive today, there would be 256 or 625 alive four generations later, bringing the U.S. population to something in the range 80 to 200 billion. Is this a desirable goal?
- Given that the cratering of European birthrates has been most sensational in the most traditionally Catholic countries (Spain, Italy, Ireland), possibly the Catholic church may not be the most effective instrument for restoring demographic vitality.
- As Heather keeps pointing out, the connections between religiosity, social order, and moral behavior are, to put it mildly, not clear. The least religious state of the Union is Oregon, 18 percent of whose inhabitants declare themselves as having no religious affiliation. For murder (2007, per 100,000), births out of wedlock (1995, percentage), and persons living with AIDS (2007, per 100,000), Oregon’s stats are 1.9—28.9—76. The most religious state is Mississippi, with only four percent having no religious affiliation. Mississippi’s stats are 7.1—45.3—109. If it’s responsible, ethical behavior you want, religion may not help.
- How do you re-religionize a de-religioned populace? Ratzinger’s paper is a generation in the past, so obviously learned articles by eminent church intellectuals don’t help much. My guess would be that the one thing that does help is seriously hard times. “In good times you don’t burn incense; in bad times you hug Buddha’s foot,” say the Chinese, who know a
thing or two about bad times. Getting people to believe the things that you believe, when they currently don’t, is quite a trick. In our age, when the top three IQ quartiles, at least, have gotten used to legal and scientific standards of evidentiary demonstration, it isn’t easy. And if only the bottom quartile gets persuaded and starts pumping out kids, you get Idiocracy.
These are the dilemmas of our time. Certainly they are nontrivial. That Ratzinger’s paper, on Spengler’s acoount, offers any help, or even gives a full analysis, is not obvious to me.
Our economic order, like our political order, is built on the notion that if you get the structures right, self-interest will keep your system afloat, and the lower human instincts will be restrained, or at least will never go so unchecked as to sink the system. That’s a democratic ideal. It was appealing to the 18th century in part because of the horrors of the preceding age, when moral authoritarianism ruled.
Ratzinger’s position is — and must be, since he is a functionary in an authoritarian church — that a return to moral authoritarianism is what we need. (How these clerics hate the Enlightenment!) He also believes that his brand of moral authoritarianism, based on the “truths” of Christianity, is just the ticket. Those truths are a hard sell in a skeptical age, though; and Ratzinger does not, probably cannot, confront the fact that the 18th-century arrangements, the ones that got us where we are, were better, in every way, than the moral-authoritarian order that came before.
Those arrangements are throwing up problems now; but a return to the earlier, failed synthesis is neither desirable nor (probably) possible. We need to work on the structures, that’s all. Ratzinger’s notion that we should get everyone going to Mass and making babies, isn’t going to happen; and if it did, it would in very short order create problems far greater than those we now face.
Spengler is right, though, that the current economic system, as it applies in advanced countries, is based on some demographic assumptions that no longer apply. This needs figuring out.
A-Bax and Thule:
Very simply put, we got “here” from “there” along a route characterized by a general belief in “higher authority.” That’s “prima facie” evidence of a certain social utility.
We have no evidence whatever of arriving “here” from “there” by any other route. We do have some evidence that attempts to dramatically change the route in order to secure further advance has had deleterious consequences for very many and no offsetting benefits.
Conservatism as a generality is not retrogression; it is simply a disinclination to dispense with something that is and is, to some degree, desirable with only a theoretical and, as-yet unproven change in procedure. In this wise, it is emphatically not dogmatic. Melioration is a universal goal; it is the means which are in dispute.
Grant Canyon:
I have no more belief in the story than do you; neither of us knows anything about whether it is true, partially true, or wholly made up.
But, with modern historical (and economic) knowledge as to the lower productivity of unfree (as opposed to free) labor and the difficulty of making slave-based enterprise “pay” in the face of competition from the labor of free men, we are definitely in a position to say that, if the story were generally true, those in positions of ownership of the times might very well have also been in position to judge that it didn’t seem a very good deal. That probability has a bit more to recommend it, dontchathink, than the likelihood of a series of God-sent plagues and miseries to bedevil the Egyptians on behalf of the Israelites?
I think a better idea than re-Christianizing Europe is to bring the Enlightenment to Islam.
Now that I’ve come up with this, I leave it to the rest of you to work out the details. 😉
No, it’s just an area that economics has traditionally not considered because people didn’t bother assigning easily-measured value units to them.
How much did it cost Edwardian England to have such terrible smog that people developed rickets from the lack of vitamin D? In lost productivity, caring for those made ill from it, etc? But did they even try to put a monetary value on those costs? Of course not.
We know the worth of water once the well is dry. We do not know the worth of our functional ecologies because we’ve always taken them for granted. Their value will only be appreciated when we start to lose them in ways we can’t ignore – and then it will be too late.
@gene berman
I wasn’t arguing against your point, I was just commenting on the historicity of the point. Or being snarky. Or something.
For the record, I don’t have the economic knowledge or training to analyze the question of whether and under what circumstances that slave labor can or cannot out-compete free labor, but I suspect that, putting aside the moral dimension, there are conditions where it could be a stable system. It would seem to me that such a stable system might persevere, even in the face of more productive free-labor systems, if the transition cost was or was deemed to be greater than the projected benefit under the free-labor system. But, like I said, I don’t have the knowledge to investigate beyond speculation.
“That probability has a bit more to recommend it, dontchathink, than the likelihood of a series of God-sent plagues and miseries to bedevil the Egyptians on behalf of the Israelites?”
Well, given the fact that the odds that the plagues and miseries occurred is so close to zero that labeling it anything other than “zero” would be a gross exaggeration, the former naturally has more to recommend it. 8)
@ gene berman. “Noble Lie”, Plato / Strauss, et al.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie
Hard to say, but you’re likely right (given that religion is a peculiar outgrowth of ubiquitous, natural cognitive modes, etc.)
Makes me think of Bradlaugh’s observation, though, that even if religion is a necessary “midwife” for various societal/cultural “fruits”….well, we don’t need to keep the midwife around after the baby is born. 🙂
Best,
Grant Canyon:
The “accuracy,” of course, of all historical accounts is on a somewhat flimsy base: what people of the past have asserted with respect to such events, existences, etc. And, of course, revisionism of many sorts has grown into a major industry of sorts.
But the passing down of some things, I’m persuaded, can (in the absence of countervailing evidence) be taken as at least provisionally “true.” In that sense, the ancient writings and orally-passed traditions that have been transmitted can form a set of at-least-plausible accounts of actual conditions at various times, even when is realized the tenuousness of such acceptance. Especially in those narratives in which events are described, it is relatively easy to identify some aspects to which more “grains of salt” must be applied (as opposed to those dismissed out-of-hand on account of their non-conformity with scientific realities). Thus, it is easier to believe (or to accept as not unlikely) that a guy named Joshua actually did attack the town of Jericho, while at the same time dismissing out-of-hand the idea that he actually got the sun to stand still so he’d have more light for maneuvres. Etc. Just because a lot of something is BS or fancy or one-sidedly opinionated doesn’t render it useless as a historical event (again, with the aforementioned salt dosage). At the furthest opposite end of the belief spectrum, of course, are those who, reading that something or someone has been summoned “from the four corners of the Earth,” concludes that, therefore, Earth must be flat.
If you are actually interested in learning something about Economics, I highly recommend Henry Hazlitt’s ECONOMICS IN ONE LESSON. I don’t think it will bore or mystify you–and it msay awaken an appetite for more.
I only became interested in Economics in 1972 as the result of some unusual circumstances and the statements I’ve made about slavery are derived from acquaintance dating from that time.
Curiously enough, however, I once wrote a “term paper” titled “Economic History of the Confederacy” in 1956 (because someone paid me $100–a lot of money in those days–to do so). My very superficial skimming of the source material acquainted me with the fact that, in the entire South of the day, there were hardly any holdings not very deeply in debt. Even the banks holding the loans (mostly in the North) were unaware of their
fundamental insolvency because they included in “assets” the market
valuations of the slaveholdings (most frequently the greatest part of ‘assetts.”). At the time, I was surprised but not equipped to understand the “why?” of the matter–and would not be until many years later.