Angina Monologue 6

“Our society is systematically enabling deviant and self-destructive behavior. And you Mormons are as bad about it as anyone else.”

Well, then.

Living with His Majesty is sometimes like walking on eggs. Since accepting retirement (an offer he couldn’t refuse, really) he has become the most even-tempered individual I have ever known: He is consistently irritable.

I think what set him off this morning was the latest “Dear Abby” column. Though it probably didn’t help that we had run out of frozen blueberries for his pancakes, and the best I could offer was frozen strawberries in his porridge.* His Majesty is very particular. It reminds me of what C.S. Lewis had to say about peevishness in The Screwtape Letters.

I have joked that he should write a “Dear Palpatine” column to rebut Abby’s advice each morning, but only once. The gleam in His Majesty’s eyes suggested he might actually do it, and I’m not sure I should be encouraging him.

Everyone knows that great civilizations eventually become decadent and collapse. No one agrees on why. I’ve suggested that it’s a failure of cultural confidence, but I am a big enough Sith to admit that this may be begging the question. What causes the failure of cultural confidence? Tainter says that societies become increasingly complex as they seek to mitigate ever remote risks, until they collapse under their own unmanageable complexity. Pendell suggests that the very success of a civilization reduces selective pressure and produces increasingly unfit individuals, leading to a kind of hysteresis loop of rise and fall. You Mormons, Ezra Taft Benson in particular, have tended to blame it on pride, as do many other Christians. Gibbons did the opposite, blaming the fall of Rome on Christianity:

“As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal that the introduction, or at least the abuse of Christianity, had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.”

“Specious demands of charity and devotion.” Oh, I do like that. Gibbons certainly knew how to turn a phrase.

I think none of these answers is wrong but none is complete. Gibbons, much as his writings amuse me, ignores the evidence of the many public works constructed in Rome at its peak, almost all of which were temples to the various pagan gods. Were these not specious demands of devotion?

There’s no question we’ve become risk-averse, and that the regulations put into place to manage risk have made it increasingly burdensome to undertake any new enterprise. Like lack of cultural confidence, though, I think this is a symptom of the rot rather than its cause.

The notion that reduction in selective pressure has enabled the growth of a large population of morons is certainly appealing, particularly as an explanation for the last two Presidential elections.

His Majesty is registered as an independent, but tends to vote Republican.

The problems with the moron theory include the results of the last Congressional election; the unlikelihood that the effects of new selective pressures could be manifest in the mere 140 years since the Industrial Revolution began noticeably increasing life expectancy; and the obvious stupidity of previous generations. I am thinking particularly of recent research showing that a good share of the peasants inducted into Stalin’s Red Army to fight Hitler did not know who Stalin was and had working vocabularies of just a few thousand words. Their extreme poverty, which remained untouched by the Industrial Revolution clear to 1940, had not produced genius.

Also, it seems to me that the drop in working intelligence lags the decline, rather than the other way around. Bad civilizations makes stupid people, though they may then contribute to an increasingly bad civilization, in a vicious cycle.

But if genes do not evolve fast enough to explain decadence, perhaps memes do. This would take in almost all the offered explanations, and I think the answer is, in fact, an amalgam of them all.

It has been suggested that pruning of connections in the brain is actually vital to learning and development of intelligence. I do not know if this is actually so.

Bruce Charlton might know. It will be interesting to hear his take.

But pruning is certainly essential to maintaining vigor in a number of woody ornamental and fruit-bearing flora, and I suggest that pruning of social institutions is essential to maintaining a vigorous civilization.

We have not recently pruned the Tree of Liberty, and it is running rampant as a result.

One manifestation of this is the growth in the number and decrease in consistency of laws and regulations. I do rather like Glenn Reynold’s proposal for a House of Repeal whose sole power is to vote down existing laws. But, of course, you and I and, I suspect, Glenn himself, realize it’s never going to happen.

Another manifestation is the prolonged tenure of so many politicians in office. The easy solution is term limits. Unfortunately, term limits is not pruning; it is shearing. You are taking off the vigorous and healthy growth points along with the weak and unhealthy ones. And none of the term limit proposals I’ve heard include the bureaucracy, so, if anything, you are pruning buds that might still be vigorous in favor of ones that certainly cannot be. Bureaucrats are the suckers of the Tree of Liberty.

I’ve been told the voters are the suckers, but I think the word is being used in a rather different sense.

But the worse manifestation is the subsidy of deviant and self-destructive behavior, which we refuse to prune away.

I speak, of course, of the welfare society. Note that I said “society”; the welfare state is a particularly odious part of it, but not all of it. There is also what some observers have called the therapeutic culture, which so far as I can tell, is a particularly unreflective application of some of Dr. Freud’s more disreputable theories to all facets of human development. No one is evil any more; their deviant behavior merely reflects the imperfect circumstances in which they were raised. Except psychopaths, which are still regarded with repugnance — which is ironic, given that psychopaths are one group for which you can make an excellent case that there really is a congenital cognitive defect accounting for their antisocial behavior. Unfortunately, it’s one we can’t pretend to cure with our present knowledge.

Even the welfare state is more than just the dole. Were the dole all there was to it, that would be bad enough. But the culture of entitlements goes far beyond the world owing you a living. The poor expect to get free beer, yes. But the rich expect subsidized performing arts. Readers expect subsidized libraries. Scholars expect subsidized institutions of learning, and scientists expect research grants.

There is one common denominator to it all, and it is the belief that the world should be organized to allow you to continue going on pretty much as you do now. We not only do not require anyone to change his life; we regard it as the rankest bigotry to even suggest that anyone might do well to change his lifestyle.

For some reason this got me thinking about the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb: Only one, but the light bulb has really got to want to change.

But of course, Lord Vader. Psychiatry actually could do some small good in the world, if it genuinely believed that. If psychiatrists considered it their task to help patients change, really change, in desirable ways, we would quibble only with whether they were actually any good at it. But too many psychiatrists consider it their task to help a patient be happy just the way he is, and compel others through the weight of their professional credentials to comply. Or at least the ones who aren’t simply making a practice out of conducting poorly designed drug trials on their patients.

The clergy, from whom psychiatry has more or less successfully wrested the role of change facilitator (consider how many priests, ministers, and pastors have more formal training in psychological counseling than theology!), have been corrupted by this same attitude. “Jesus loves me just the way I am” is, so far as I can tell, rotten theology even from the perspective of the hard-core Calvinists; but it is clearly the mantra of the liberal Christian churches. And don’t think Mormons get off the hook; you may still recoil at the more obvious moral perversions, but your welfare program subsidizes poor financial choices just as much as any other.

We demand change from no one, which is just as well, since it ‘s not clear anyone believes change is possible. If you are nothing more than the sum of your atoms and those atoms include the hard wiring of your DNA, then Calvin’s only mistake was that he did not go far enough.

At this point, His Majesty glared out the window, scooped up a big spoonful of porridge, and glared even harder at a soggy no-longer-frozen strawberry. It seemed like a good time to make myself scarce.

Anyway, I needed to head over to the ward building. I have been meeting with my bishop regularly. He seems to think I have anger issues that I need to work through. I admitted to him that I have a bit of a temper, but tried to point out that it was all Tarkin’s fault; the man was insane. My bishop told me that Tarkin certainly seems to have been a nut case, but that wasn’t what we needed to talk about. For some reason, that brought some old regrets bubbling to the surface — shouldn’t bishops give trigger warnings? — and I told him that I wondered if I really ought to be holding a temple recommend. He just looked at me gently for a moment, then suggested that the Lord didn’t need one fewer temple recommend holder, but He badly wanted one more long-suffering Saint, committed to wrestling against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

My bishop is often difficult like that.

*His Majesty has a bad habit of occasionally reading over my shoulder. Apparently he saw Bruce Charlton’s question on whether oatmeal is the same thing as porridge, and this amused him so much that he has insisted on calling it porridge ever since. However, he still eats his oatmeal with sucralose, instead of salt.