A Singular Elasticity of Conscience

I'm only certain that nothing is forever. No matter how carefully you design a system, it will go bad and die.

The process is not steady. Rather, it shares the instability of living metabolism and dances always on the same edge of disaster.

The Second Gilded Age was a pyramid built in defiance of the urges of life for change and progress. Or rather a pyramid scheme against senescence. Spengler's blood power is Boulding's society evolving like an organism. The process is not steady. Rather, it shares the instability of living metabolism and dances always on the same edge of disaster. Archaic Egypt's funerary-cult civilization was a sick sort of permanence and bid for eternity, however. They tried to stay the tide and were overwhelmed. The Muslims stripped the pyramids for their limestone.

But the Muse of History does not sleep; she goes on muttering over her laptop. “The Great Grocery Squeeze” that resulted from Reagan’s decision to stop enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act, proves the accuracy of Farrell’s and Blyth’s work. So also Stoller’s discussion of federal judge Carl Nichols. This is all a reflection of civic republicanism being supplanted by liberalism as capitalism developed, allowing “sanctity of private property” to become a more powerful “economic idea” than “promote the General Welfare.”

Clio does not suggest that all lying in high places, all delinquency on the part of upper-class youths and maidens, the jolly nexus of corruption that unites the humblest citizen with the most exalted, can be traced infallibly to the Alger Hiss case. But she does argue, and convincingly, that the nation that finds Whittaker Chambers an acceptable instrument is in trouble, so that a ready wit could fill in the rest of the story from that detail alone. 

Instead she argues that the United States was becoming a one-institution society, and that one overriding institution was business. She writes that today's ethics reflects this fact. Sparta was a one-institution society, the single institution being militarism. Europe in the Middle Ages, before the rise of the nation-states, was similarly organized, the dominant institution being the Church. In such a society, the single institution tends to be so much in the ascendant that there is no place you can go to get away from it. In the United States today, the dominant institution is business.

Business is so ubiquitous that, except to those outside the culture, its ascendancy is almost not visible.

Farming is now a mechanized industry. Education, at least on the college level, has become a threshing floor for the great corporations. Philanthropy is keyed to tax evasion and is dominated by huge foundations set up with industrial fortunes.  Scientific research, even in universities, hardly exists except as sponsored by corporations or by a government that runs interference for business. In politics, the electorate is treated like a body of consumers, not a body of voters, and Eisenhower's backers openly avowed their candidate would be sold "like toothpaste."

Ours is the only culture now extant in which business so completely dominates the national scene that sports, crime, sex, death, philanthropy and Easter Sunday are money-making propositions.

When business becomes the dominant institution, it distorts the moral ecology of society. My call is for a pluralistic framework, where different institutions cultivate different virtues — some profitable, some not, but all necessary.

The traditional ethic that once regulated our public conduct has been replaced by a more useful, more convenient one. That ethic's peculiar utility is that it helps maintain the single institution to which, in America, all private hopes and public plans are assimilated — business. The false ethic has four major attributes and they are worth examining. It looks down rather than up for authority and sanction. That is, the lowest common denominator of taste and conduct is the ideal canon, and whatever is popular is right. It is consistently vague and evasive and depends a great deal on communication by default. That is, the decisions 

our leaders do not take, the events that the older morality would have demanded and that in our day quietly don't happen, are important instruments of public education. It often holds up as desirable behavior what are in effect crazy inversions of the traditional ethic it has supplanted. That is, it's all right to shoot your neighbor in the doorway of your bomb shelter. It is indissolubly linked to, and could not exist without, an external enemy as a domestic issue. That is, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, and nowadays there is only one recognized form of patriotism. 

How did all these good things come about? It doesn't quite do justice to answer bluntly that as we became a one-institution society, and that institution business, and the split-level ethic that sustains our chief preoccupation just growed up like Topsy. But that's the size of it, and I think the theory responds pretty well to our intimations of reality. What began as a remedy to an emergency - the death of feudalism - meant scraping off a foundation laid by the real Jesus and erecting a new self-seeking creed upon it. Jesus was transformed into a tout.

Nevertheless, a couple of observations make me uneasy. Firstly, if our moral tonus is so dangerously slack it can only be restored if we suppress our customary cheap compassion and punish social delinquents with due vigor. 

That, to me, smacks of "Bring back the birch!" 

Deplorable, I think, and otiose; the cure for social disorder on the grand scale is not individual punishment but revolution. You mustn't confounds retribution with redemption. 

Also, the literary demolition of the traditional middle-class ethic as hypocritical and meretricious, was a response to the First Gilded Age. To condemn the subsequent preoccupation of intellectually fashionable writers with drugs, crime, drink, and sex deviations at the expense of a broader view of life, is unfair. The best of those writers are interested in the very values of a producer society and deserve defending. They are portraying (directly and through metaphor) the society they see around them. Their literary output is a symptomatology.

Societies that were dependent upon one single institution were basically somewhat “primitive” like Rome, and the U.S. is such a society because of its dependence upon the single institution of business. 

Our statesmen are, unfortunately, only too representative of us all, that they accurately reflect the sense of values of a national brand, what's-in-it-for-me consumer society that is as monolithic as it is venal. we no longer look for guidance to distinguished examples of rectitude, but rather to what Joe is getting away with, with the result that the Ten Commandments are tacitly bypassed in favor of the more agreeable dictum that Charles Van Doren only did what anybody else would have done.

We have lost sight of the Judeo-Christian ethic, replacing it with a philosophy that says "whatever is popular is right." I know a pagan who is often accused of witchcraft. She's a better Christian than the cross-waving kind. In my search for an alternative word for this kind of Christianity, the name "Ebionite" turned up.

The Ebionites rejected the divinity of Jesus, the virgin birth, and Pauline theology. Instead, they upheld him as a fully human Messiah who fulfilled the Law through righteousness and ethical action. Their gospel resembled Matthew’s — minus the birth narrative—and they may have authored their own now-lost Gospel of the Ebionites.

Ebionites likely preserved the early practices of "The Way” - like communal living, ethical rigor, and Torah fidelity. Nazorean Path: They were sometimes conflated with Nazarenes, and upheld Jesus as a human prophet from Nazareth. Kingdom Praxis: Their rejection of Paul and emphasis on Mosaic Law suggests a lived ethic of justice, not abstract salvation. Galilean Covenant: Rooted in Palestine, they venerated Jerusalem and dramatized covenantal fidelity through poverty and vegetarianism. Sophiac Way: While not explicitly mystical, their asceticism and rejection of animal sacrifice hint at a wisdom-centered ethic. Beatitudinal Order: Their holy poverty (from ebyonim, “poor ones”) echoes the Beatitudes — “Blessed are the poor…”. Fellowship of the Table: Their vegetarianism and ritual ablutions suggest a reimagined table fellowship — purified, inclusive, nonviolent.

Their vegetarianism and ritual ablutions suggest a reimagined table fellowship — purified, inclusive, nonviolent. Vineyard Ethos: Their rejection of imperial messianism (e.g., Bar Kochba) and embrace of ethical labor evoke vineyard parables.

This is better than Congressional reform, innit? And getting closure through the Rules Committee. This aforementioned program, it seems to me, is the articulation of political impotence, a confession, sotto 

voce, of despair. Like the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius.

We are in a bad way, and a revolution — the creation of a multi-institutional society to replace the present business totalitarianism, would be at least a fair chance of initiating reform or, at any rate, an institutional bypass like the kind England used to be good at. A healthy society must be balanced by other institutions that cultivate non-commercial virtues.

Family: A site of emotional generosity, tenderness, and mutual sacrifice — qualities she called “bankruptcy virtues” because they don’t translate into profit.

Education: A space for intellectual development, curiosity, and moral reasoning, not just vocational training.

Religion / Spirituality: A domain for grace, forgiveness, and communal belonging, contrasting with transactional logic.

Art and Literature: Realms of creativity and expression that resist commodification and elevate human complexity.

Democracy / Civic Life: Institutions that demand intelligence, participation, and ethical engagement — 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗶𝗰𝗲.

If we want to rend and deracinate the very basis of our days and ways, rear back and let Trump get his coveted third term. After all, it's strictly business, like the Godfather sez.