[Today's post has been extensively revised in the last few hours. I apologize for the incoherence of my work from earlier today. I wrote it at 4 a.m. this morning, but that is really no excuse. Anyway, below I offer some more organized thoughts. I hope you enjoy.] 


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I've been writing about the positive and negative effects of the moral codes of the major religions of the world as a way into my discussion of what kind of a moral code the people of the world are going to have to create over the next generation or two. There are reasons for my taking this approach.


                               
                                                                     statue of Krishna 


The moral codes embedded in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all contain some clear flaws, when we consider them as possible moral guides in the twenty-first century. But there is an "other hand" here, and I'd like to switch your attention onto it. Out of all the literally thousands of religions in the history of the world, these few have managed to spread until each of them can claim millions of adherents. The simple conclusion to draw, if one is a moral realist, is that, in spite of their flaws, the major world religions must be getting some things right. In some crucial ways, they must be steering people who follow them toward patterns of behavior that enable their adherents to survive, individually and as communities. That is the view one must take if one is a moral realist. Observable patterns in phenomena must have theoretical explanations. There must be principles or models underlying the patterns in the data, ones that can be stated as generalizations. 

Therefore, since I brought up Islam yesterday, let's examine another of its strengths.

One of the things that deeply offends Muslims, and that they have difficulty communicating to people of other faiths, is their belief that truly moral people should not make images of the things that they call "divine", whatever that "divine" might be. Now the question becomes: "Why is this important?"


  
                                                       statue of Buddha (Kamakura, Japan) 


My take on this matter is that when a church begins to commission and display paintings, statues, and stained-glass window images of God, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, and so on, then in a gradual, insidious way, the priests, pastors, lamas, etc. begin to focus more and more on their church's material things and less and less on the principles that the prophets taught. Giving in to this idol-making is the beginning of materialism, a belief that things and appearances are all that really matter.



                              
                                                 Head of Christ (Richard Hook painting) 



The churches never teach such stuff explicitly; rather, the slip into materialism happens by slow degrees over centuries of time and millions of people. But by degrees, adherents of a religion begin to slip into a mindset that tells them, "If the church can accumulate and show off its things, I can too. If I have enough things, then whether I truly have the qualities my religion claims to value, like humility, honesty, and respect for the rights of others, will not matter."

When the whole activity of idol-making - and that's what it is - is described in this way, then the disadvantages of the activity become obvious. When people begin to care more for stuff than they do for the principles that gave them the economic system that enabled their society to create the stuff in the first place, then they are going to, in a couple of generations, lose that stuff, and the economic system, and probably, for many of them or their descendants, their own lives. What I want to communicate to you today is that the beginning of caring more for stuff than for ideals lies in making material images of the divine. 

Real, effective respect for the rights of other human beings is impossible if we do not have even more general principles of love and freedom written into our mental programming. It is these abstractions, over generations, that then make the concrete wealth of market-based economies possible. It is our placing our primary emphasis on values rather than things that makes the human institution called an "economy of scale", with all of its attached commodities, possible.

The evidence supporting this belief is clear to see. In countries where abstract ideals are given only lip service and high degrees of graft and corruption exist at every level, and in every sector, of society, the building of an economy which makes quality goods available and affordable to the big majority of ordinary people does not happen. Too many hours of labor are squandered as people pay for non-services and unusable goods. Food can't be eaten because inspectors have been bribed to overlook spoiled meat and milk and so on. Gasoline has been stolen and so is never a source of wages for ordinary workers down the chain of production and distribution. Buildings collapse in 4.2 magnitude earthquakes because the building inspectors were paid to pass construction flaws that a smart ten-year-old who plays with Lego could see. "Experts" hold degrees that were bought and paid for. Policemen protect only their families and patrons and persecute everyone else. All of these come when masses of people in general no longer carry a constant awareness of, and respect for, wisdom, freedom, and love. 

The young people in ISIS are right to loathe the addiction to consumerism that is so evident in the West and in their own countries. Deep down, consumerism is a violation of one of the key principles of Islam, the religion that nearly all of the ISIS militants were raised under. These young people long for something to believe in. However, they are wrong in thinking that they can fix the idolatry in the world by blowing up statues of the Buddha or by smashing ancient temples in Palmyra. The problem is deeper than that. The greed for things, when it overrides people's respect for values, makes society inefficient and poor. However, it won't go away just because a few angry young people blow up some old statues. What these young people need to grasp is that there is something much deeper than mere statues going on here.   

Is there an explanation in all of this for the differences between the West and the rest? My point today is that I think there is. The key difference that Christianity made for the nations of the West back eighteen hundred years ago lay in the fact that Jesus' story felt personal. His adherence to principles, and his sacrifice of his own life for those principles, got to people. Not all people, but enough so that adherence to the beliefs that he taught, such as respect for the rights of others, gradually reached levels that then enabled Western economies to rise to their current levels of efficiency. That social capacity for heartfelt honesty passed a kind of critical mass sometime during the Renaissance. Economies of scale then became possible. In the new economies, people who devised better ways of doing things got real returns for their efforts. They were then the kinds of people that re-invested their gains. The wealth generated went into making more wealth. It did not go, as it had so often in the past, to "patrons", who too often produced nothing and squandered everything. 

We can also note other evidence of the inefficiency of systems that accept high levels of graft and corruption. For example, a "hostile takeover" in the developing world is quite different from a hostile takeover in the West. In the West, in such a takeover, one company, without any cooperation or agreement, offers shareholders of another company such a good price for their shares that large numbers of them choose to sell. Company A gets control of the majority of the shares of Company B, elects a new board of directors at the next shareholders' meeting, and then pushes out all management and workers that it deems not loyal to the new order. 

In the developing world, on the other hand, a hostile takeover means that law is whatever the men with friends in government say it is. Sometimes, hoodlums even show up at a company's factories, warehouses, yards, and offices with guns. They tell the managers in these places, "Leave or we'll kill you." Easy choice.

Again, I stress: the crucial difference between these two scenarios lies in the realm of ideas, not guns. The first scenario contains respect for the rule of law; the second does not. Rule of law is founded on the principles of courage, wisdom, love, and freedom - in balance - embedded in the minds of the majority. Values that inform all of the behaviors of every individual in society and that are lived in a way that places principles above products, ideals before idols.    

Will the new "managers" and "directors" who achieve these hostile takeovers know how to run an auto parts plant or a baby food bottling plant or a casino or an oil exploration company? Sometimes. But more usually they don't, and the business goes bankrupt in a few years as project after project yields inadequate or non-existent returns. Wealth, unlike energy, can be created, and it can also be destroyed. 


  
           Billionaire Michael de Groote lost over $100 million financing a Dominican casino


To close for today then, I will sum up by saying that as more and more knowledge of the West and its ways seeps into the non-Western countries and their populations, the ideas of honesty and competence at every level are more and more honored. Not because they sound nice, but because they work. They enable a society to create wealth. Their working has nothing to do with whether they are "Western" or not. 

To tell the whole truth, we need to admit that the nations of the West have often failed in the very ways that they are accused of in the other parts of the world. In the meantime, however, graft and corruptions are far worse in the developing world. And as long as we have gone this far, let us also admit that outrage over graft and corruption is becoming more and more widespread. That outrage started the Arab Spring. It has caused riots in China and India. It even causes riots in the US when black boys are shot by incompetent policemen for activities that simply would not have gotten them killed if they had been white. Times are changing, I believe, for the better. 

The evidence indicates that we are coming to the dawn of a new age of decency and sense. Principles are coming, gradually, to matter more than products. The idols are seductive, but they are not irresistible. We just have to articulate those principles and then spread them to the world. Love and freedom, courage and wisdom, in balance, must be given priority over comfort zones, privilege, and material things. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day.