Diatribes of Jay: The Decline of Rules-Based Civilization

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Our Species’ Rise under Rules
Today’s Trend
China under Xi
Britain under Brexit
The US under Trump
Conclusion: Our Species’ Possibly Dismal Future

Our Species’ Rise under Rules

The thing that once made Anglo-American society “exceptional” was faithful adherence to written rules.

It all began in the year 1215, with Magna Carta. King John and the Barons had deployed their forces in the fields of Runnymede, ready to rumble. King John saw he was badly outnumbered. So he made a choice: better to bargain and make a deal than submit to a bloody battle he would likely lose.

The “contract” that King John made with the Barons looks strange to us today. It’s all about the rights, responsibilities and future acts of the King, the Barons, other nobles, and the clergy. It didn’t even mention the “common people.” But it was a start.

Magna Carta was a set of agreed rules for people to live by—at least the people who mattered then. And it was in writing. So although people might interpret it differently, no one could credibly lie about it or conveniently “forget” what it said. It prefigured our written American Constitution by 576 years.

Magna Carta was thus a giant leap forward towards rules-based civilization. But it was not the beginning. Written rules go back at least to the Ten Commandments. According to legend, we got them from God between five and six thousand years ago. They prohibit such things as murder, theft, adultery and lying. Their substance, if not their letter, are part of any civilization founded on “law and order” rather than rude force, strength and guile.

There are other rules, too. Extraordinarily insightful people figured out that the “natural” world also has them. Rules or “laws” govern the physical, chemical, biological and social worlds to which we humans belong. Those who “discovered” these rules were some of the smartest thinkers of our species and the noblest contributors to human advancement. Today we call them “geniuses.” We give some of them Nobel Prizes.

Brits were the first people to write down specific rules for their own civilization. (Ancient Greece and Rome had constitutions of a sort, but they were customary, not written.) So not surprisingly, three of the four greatest thinkers about natural rules were also Brits. Isaac Newton co-invented the calculus and discovered the rules of gravity, planetary motion, and the motion of physical objects near Earth. Adam Smith, a Scot, discovered the rules of markets and the rudiments of microeconomics. Charles Darwin discovered the rules by which biological organisms, including us, evolve through natural selection—rules that today we know undergird all of biology.

The only one of the Four Greats who wasn’t a Brit was Albert Einstein. He was a German Jew who became an American to escape the rule-free horror of Nazism. He explained the physical rules that now make solar panels, nuclear power and nuclear weapons possible. He also explained the “general” relativistic effects that underlie long-distance astronomy and cosmology, i.e., how our whole Universe formed and how it’s slowly changing.

Britain has been an amazing society. It’s an island nation, isolated by geography. So is Japan, which has more than twice Britain’s population. Yet Britain, not Japan, gave the world everybody’s favorite second language—with some help from the Roman alphabet. Britain, not Japan, wrote the rules of business, commerce, government and international cooperation that have swept the globe—a tradition continued by Britain’s “daughter” society, the United States. Ever since our species’ most terrible war, rules derived from Britain and the US, widely adopted by consensus and bargaining, have kept the peace and promoted a productive and growing global economy.

Today’s Trend

Rules work well for advancing civilization. So does understanding the “natural” rules that humans can know and exploit but can’t change. But rules don’t seem to be part of our biological evolution. They are part of our social evolution, our tiny recorded history. So they can weaken, recede or entirely disappear in times of war, stress or simple human folly. Ours may be one of those times.

A well-known phenomenon proves that rules are not “natural” or biologically inherent in us. Every human child must be specially introduced and trained to rules. Parents know from hard experience just how relentlessly children break rules, and how cleverly they rationalize doing so. Rules are not “natural” to the human organism, but once children are “broken” to them, as horses to saddles, we can build a truly human civilization.

Sometimes rules can be hard for adults, too. Our global civilization has waxed so powerful that individuals who achieve great wealth and power within it easily develop delusions of omnipotence. When you are über-rich and have multiple homes on different continents, assistants, servants, a yacht, a private plane, and numerous sycophants, it’s easy to forget that it was society’s rules and taxes, which declare and pay for your defense and “law and order,” that enabled you to acquire all those things in the first place. This truth applies all the more if you merely inherited them.

So it’s easy for the wealthy and powerful to push hard to cut rules and taxes. In the long run it’s counterproductive, but it’s perfectly natural. Shortsightedly, the wealthy and powerful prefer to rely on their current status, wealth and power to maintain their good lives and their influence over others.

History shows how dangerous a game that is. Wash away the rules, and everyone’s life, status, wealth and power roll with the dice. If nothing else, the French and Russian Revolutions proved that. So did the great world wars. How did the “elite” fare when Nazism and Communism came home to roost?

Today we are right on the cusp of that sort of catastrophe. When and if it comes, it won’t be confined to a single nation, as in France or Russia during their respective bloody revolutions, Germany during Nazism, or the Soviet Union and its satellites during Communism. This time, the chaos of broken rules is likely to be global.

The reason is simple: rules seem to be going out of fashion worldwide.

In China, Egypt, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey and Venezuela, leaders who found elections and/or existing rules inconvenient have changed the rules. They’ve done so by using rigged “elections,” by co-opting the military and bureaucracy, or by simple guile or force. They’ve extended their own terms, declared themselves leaders for life, changed the rules of government, and weakened or eliminated the separation of powers. They’ve removed, emasculated or co-opted separate legislatures and law-enforcement organs, including prosecutors and the courts. They’ve overcome popular opposition by force, repression, imprisonment and selective assassination.

China under Xi

Because of its huge population and growing economic and military might, China’s changes may be the most consequential. Before Xi Jinping, a nine-member committee ruled China. China’s top two leaders were each limited to two five-year terms. Each also had to serve at least a five-year “apprenticeship” on the committee before assuming either of the two top jobs.

Xi cut the committee to seven members. He declared himself “chairman,” a title unused since Mao. He dropped the time limits on his own term of office and packed the committee with his cronies. All that was not hard to do in China, which, like Britain, has no written constitution.

Today Xi is a talented and skillful leader. But people change, as have Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Powerful men usually age like unrefrigerated eggs or meat, not like wine. Witness Mao, who liberated and unified China in his prime. In his dotage, he nearly destroyed China with bizarre spasms of absurdly destructive policy like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Anyway, succession works best through meritocratic competition. It works worst when a crony gets anointed successor by a discredited old lion such as Mao or Mugabe, let alone as he falls after a long period of failure. Xi’s erasing good rules has almost certainly condemned China’s people to a long period of struggle and suffering, no matter how clever or effective Xi may seem in the near future.

Britain under Brexit

Yet by far the greatest threat to global peace, prosperity and security is what’s happening to rules right now in Britain and the United States. More than any others, these two nations, working together and globally, have helped construct the international rules-based order that has kept the peace among major powers and assured economic progress since 1945. That same global order has raised almost a billion people out of extreme poverty, most of them in China. It has helped make China and the EU what they are today.

But right now, as I write this, Britain and the US are busy dismantling the great gift of rules-based civilization that they have given their own people and mankind. Each is dismantling it in a different way, but both ways are terribly destructive.

Brexit is, of course, Britain’s own way.

Born of war, privation and utter devastation, the European Union is one of mankind’s greatest rules-based achievements, the other being the United States. I’ve devoted two essays (here and here) to outlining just how unusual and important the EU is.

Yet Britain—the prime progenitor of rules-based civilization—now wants out. At least it thinks it wants out, based on a hasty and partly misinformed referendum that its pols, with a dreadful lack of imagination, have taken as a master rule.

If you search the Web and recent history carefully, you will find only two coherent reasons why a bare majority of Brits voted out in 2016. They dislike “too much” immigration by foreigners, and they don’t like foreigners having power to make rules for Brits. The English were happy having rules set by people from four very different cultures—England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales—but now they don’t want to expand the club.

Poke beneath the surface, and these “reasons” begin to feel like an adolescent’s rationale for refusing to do her homework. Border-free migration works both ways. It lets some foreigners take some jobs from some Brits—mostly the jobs that Brits won’t do. But it also gives Brits access to jobs and civilized living in an economy six times bigger than Britain in population and seven times bigger in GDP.

As for the rules of trade, they let goods flow in and out of Britain without customs or other restraint. Curtailing those rules will slow or halt the flow. It will restrain and maybe halt the imports of medicines, fresh fruits, vegetables and flowers, as well as other, less urgent, foods and supplies that Brits have come to expect. It will hog-tie Britain’s exports and puts its native industries at a disadvantage. The more PM May tries to create a “soft-Brexit” that re-creates the EU’s benefits without the burdens, the more complex and impossible her job becomes. And the more understandably recalcitrant become the EU’s other members, who accept the burdens with the benefits because they understand the greater benefits of rules.

But enough of the contradictions and magical thinking that underlie what may be just a transient desire for Brexit, until Brits’ historically clear thinking kicks in. A pundit named Ian Dunt has poked fun at Brexit far more cleverly and thoroughly than I can.

Suffice it to say that the modern nation that has given the world the greatest gift of rules-based civilization from Magna Carta on is having a probably-temporary tantrum of adolescent rebellion in which its people don’t really know what they want, but just want their own way. It’s all a little late, don’t you think, after the Brits lost their Empire, barely survived their World War II “victory” financially, have kept only a handful of globally competitive companies (such as Rolls-Royce, for the jet engines, not the cars), and have been lauded by their own liberal economic spokes magazine, The Economist, for making banking, Russian oligarchs and other immigrants the mainstays of London’s economy?

The US under Trump

However silly or nasty Britain’s temporary insanity may seem, it’s nothing compared to what’s transpiring here in the United States. At least PM May is polite, truthful, civilized, and a hard worker. Our president is not just grousing about a particular set of foreign rules. He’s making a sustained, multi-front assault on the very concept of rules and law.

One of the oldest rules of civilization comes from the Ten Commandments: “thou shalt not bear false witness.” In modern terms, it reads simply: “don’t lie.” Yet according to one of the United States’ few remaining independent newspapers, President Trump has broken this rules 7,645 times in his two-plus years in office.

But Trump’s personal transgressions of written rules hardly stop there. Already in his mere two years in office, he has taken (or planned and threatened to take) our nation out of three painstakingly negotiated sets of international rules: (1) the Paris Climate Accord, (2) the Iran nuclear deal, and (3) the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a key disarmament pact with Russia. His disdain for the Climate Accord and the climate science underlying it also reflects his consistent disregard for the rules of science that global society—with the Brits, Europe and US in the lead—have built up during the four centuries since Galileo’s near-excommunication.

But that’s still not all. Trump’s Cabinet and sub-Cabinet of ex-lobbyists and lackeys have made a practice of repealing or curtailing regulatory rules protecting the American people and their environment from toxic chemicals and effluent, including rules governing coal-fired power plants. Worst of all, Trump has deliberately and systematically ridiculed and maligned the national organs of intelligence and law enforcement that enforce our rules. He’s repeatedly and relentlessly slandered their officers, including those of the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, the FBI and the DOJ. Why? Because they want to hold him to the rules, too.

As a recent exposé in the New York Times reveals in excruciating detail, Trump’s goal in this sustained assault is to reduce the written rules of law and the written procedures of investigation, in the public mind, to no more than optional and willful political action. He wants to make rules that may have arisen out of politics, but that now govern life every day, seem only aspirational, like a political party’s platform. He thereby hopes to escape impeachment while serving as president, and to avoid indictment for his crimes after he leaves or is forced from office.

Trump is making a concerted and collusive effort to reduce our rules to the appearance of political whim, thereby undermining political and social support for having any rules at all. He wants to take us all back to rule by caudillo, dictator or king, with himself as Number One. And his efforts have had some success among some 40% of our American people.

Sometimes it’s tempting to dismiss Trump’s drunken roundhouse punches at rules as the ravings of the child’s mind that oft seems to inhabit his adult body. But to his mouthpiece Rudy Giuliani, to many Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officers, to his loyal followers in Congress (mostly the House)—and to the 35-40% of American voters whom he has entranced—it’s all a deadly serious business. It’s all part of a design to allow Trump and the GOP to break and evade, without consequence, the rules written and established over the last 250 years, including many in our written Constitution.

In essence, it’s all an attempted coup by short-sighted, selfish and self-centered but now powerful people, who never think of the chaos or revolution to come. Après nous le déluge.

If successful, they will bend our rules-based democracy toward a Mafia-style system in which loyalty to the top dog is the only rule, and his whim is both the law and its rationale. What Trump is doing with his needless Wall on our Southern border is just the first of many silly, useless, wasteful and oppressive things that his Mafia-style system could bring.

Our Species’ Possibly Dismal Future

If that rules-free system ever takes hold here, and if Britain does make Brexit, the world will change forever. The European Union will replace Britain and the United States as the last best hope of mankind. It will become the sole remaining repository of Enlightenment values. Standing alone, without Britain, it will become the bulwark of rules-based civilization.

The rest of our world will descend into precisely the oppressive global dystopia foreseen by George Orwell in his famous novel 1984. It will degenerate into a rules-free free-for-all among Chinese, Russian and American empires, which will crush human rights and aspirations with all the power of nuclear weapons, Big Data, and AI. The EU, whose importance Orwell did not foresee, will become the only significant wild card and the only hope of human civilization, perhaps for a millennium.

Nothing in our species’ history or biology prevents this from happening. We humans have free will, which includes the freedom to be stupid. Only if we Americans and our fellow Brits wise up, and if we both do so in time, does our species stand a good chance of leaping the pitfall that now yawns before us.

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Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

Diatribes of Jay

28 February 2019

The Decline of Rules-Based Civilization

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Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

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