Journal Community

Jim O. 

I found your latest post to me towards the top of the previous page distressing.  I came to this blog a year ago.  After a few posts Zach got me pegged saying that I was a pessimist.  I thought I'd keep trying to find reason for optimism.  The people contributing to this blog are among the elite of society yet there has been absolutely nothing resolved or any progress of any kind made.  That and your latest post give me little reason for any optimism.  

The world is changing.  A consequence is that new rules are constantly required. What I heard you and others in the prior page say is that there is little hope that any of those new rules can be generated by us at our level, with the help or not of Christianity. At best Christianity help us cope and through personal responsibility at least not add new problems that create the need for even more rules. 

If that is true then We the People, Christian or not, are willing to default the making of all of those new rules that change requires to the most powerful among us.  Ultimately that is the central government. Franklin famously said that the form of government the Founding Fathers were giving us was a republic "if we could keep it."  To keep it we all have to work hard.  Apparently few are willing to do what it takes.

The result is not only that little by little the making of new rules by default is being left to the central government.  In turn the people, exemplified by even a libertarian like Zach, increasingly want just their pleasure and to take as needed from a government ready to satisfy those needs and even pleasures if it helps its members maintain their power.

You know that my training is as an engineer and I have devoted my efforts to finding ways to empower people through an analysis of how complex systems function, in this case societies.  I have identified ways of empowering people and have applied some of them successfully. Such systems, however, have a dynamic of their own that is immensely difficult to change. Once empowered and able to satisfy their more basic needs people have a tendency to become centered on themselves and rely on others to do any additional heavy lifting required. And the more others do, despite protestations to the contrary, the more people come to rely on those others.  Historically all such societies, indeed all societies for they all exhibit the same dynamics, collapse.

When even professed libertarians like Zach in practice rely on the government to solve problems, I know that Franklin knew of what he spoke and that his words were prophetic. I'll go happy for the many lives I helped make better abroad but distressed about leaving my beautiful grandchildren in a society increasingly dedicated to satisfying its pleasures and dependent on its government, while the pie and party last.  I'll continue working to make them strong, resilient and self-sufficient, yes, including Christianity, while I can.

Zach,

For the record since you got so bent over my saying you were dismissive with your proposal for a sin tax, etc. to deal with obesity.  Before posing to you the original question I went to great pains to find and quote your thesis of moral behavior.  I didn't do that just for fun but to help you reference your proposal to it.  When I said you had been dismissive I also said "Much more important, how do you justify any action by the government against your a, b and c criteria?" Maybe I wasn't clear but what I meant, after having quoted back to you your thesis, was how should society react taking into account each and of the three elements, which you summarized yourself as,

"My thesis is that moral behavior is a combination of three elements, which I will explain in detail later in this post: (a) innate moral behavior we have inherited genetically from our ancestors, (b) learned moral behavior that we acquire by spending time and learning in our relatively advanced social groups, and (c) a deep-rooted emotional understanding of empathetic concern that our relatively advanced brains have the capacity to produce. Generally speaking, when a member of our species displays immoral behavior, I believe they are doing so because they are deficient in one or more of those elements."

Keeping in mind the thousands of other areas that seem important, if it is the government that acts, which or what combinations of the three elements should it address and how. Lest you think that is a trivial problem, we are talking here about influencing behavior through action on morality as per your thesis. You have insisted man does not intrinsically lean towards doing bad things. Wouldn't you then want to know precisely what is the problem(s) that lead to obesity so you can address them correctly?  Is the problem genetic or of learning, since in this case I suppose it has nothing to do with empathy.  But it is your thesis Zach, so surely you know better than any of us how to apply it.

Wouldn't you have two entirely different programs, one to deal with genetics and the other with learning?  And for learning wouldn't you further want to know the roots of the problem? It may be that it is a simple problem of knowledge of nutrition but it could go much deeper to the problem of the breakdown of the family unit. If the latter would you not then need an entirely different program, perhaps a program that goes well beyond obesity and might even simultaneously  cover many other behaviors that have been going awry?

Zach, society already has a program to cover the whole waterfront of moral behaviors. That program is slowly being abandoned and you personally want to accelerate its demise. To your credit you offered a framework for its replacement.  Okay, with obesity I fully expected that you would begin to show us how you propose to begin filling in the details of that framework.  But obesity needs to go next to a whole host of other undesirable behaviors ranging from not texting while driving to financial advisors not abusing their real estate clients to an endless list of abusive behaviors that somehow need constraining.  

You suggested various forms of education yet we know the biggest offenders tend to be lower income youngsters from broken families that drop out or graduate from high school with a very subpar education.  There are many  problems Zach and your framework has to deal with all of them simultaneously.  You wanted me to make deals with Catholic leaders when what society needs to do urgently is work with all leaders willing to cooperate to develop and put on steroids a program to bring to the whole of society a revitalized package of moral norms; I've spoken before about this need many times.  Either We the People work closely and intensely with community leaders to address this problem or the government will.  How do we put your framework to work helping the former?