Values, Virtues, and the New American Testament.

• Author: MONTANYE, JAMES A.

A sense of social and moral malaise overhangs America amidst unprecedented economic prosperity. It is reflected in popular books lamenting the nation's "death of outrage" (Bennett 1998), its "slouching toward Gomorrah" (Bork 1996), and its tendency toward "civic disengagement" (Putnam 1995 and forthcoming). The malaise is reflected also in media stories that spotlight disaffected individuals, some the victims of grinding bureaucracy, others concerned about such woes as increasing social violence (for example, school shootings and road rage) and the fish of state's stinking from the head. Suggested prescriptions for this malaise run the gamut from the inculcation of "traditional values" to a return to prayer in public schools, the use of television's V-chip and the Internet's software equivalents, and state-brokered censorship of information and entertainment.

Every generation imagines that society is descending. Ambient malaise is the background noise of society. The translator's preface to Karl Mannheim's classic treatise on the sociology of knowledge is as apropos today as when it was written in the 1930s:

It seems to be characteristic of our period that norms and truths which were once believed to be absolute, universal, and eternal, or which were accepted with blissful unawareness of their implications, are being questioned.... We are witnessing not only a general distrust of the validity of ideas but of the motives of those who assert them This situation is aggravated by a war of each against all in the intellectual arena where personal self-aggrandizement rather than truth has come to be the coveted prize. (Mannheim 1936, x-xi) The relevant question, then, is whether today's malaise is objectively worse than yesterday's. Are appearances merely a product of heightened awareness; a consequence, perhaps, of increased media coverage and professional whining? The conjecture of this essay is that social and moral malaise has indeed become worse, and empirical work broadly confirms this prediction.

A derivative question asks whether the trends noted by Bennett, Bork, Putnam, and other scholars are the cause of the malaise (as these scholars suggest) or are merely artifacts of some other social process. The argument here is that they are artifacts; the cause lies much deeper.

The present period can be distinguished from the past by one key point: Today's prescription to remedy social and moral malaise rests, to a greater extent than ever before, on an implicit belief that every social ill can be cured painlessly and costlessly by using positive (statutory) law to fine-tune private behavior, maximize public wealth, promote fairness, and create social harmony. That this approach has proven unsuccessful so far is dismissed a priori by its proponents on grounds that positive law is fundamentally restorative; only the dosage has been wrong.

The essence of today's malaise and its prescriptive consequences are aptly characterized by a recent editorial in the Economist:

In its determination to be fair, America has introduced law into every corner of life: the lone consumer can get even with the biggest corporation, the lone citizen can humiliate the mighty government in court. And yet, time and again, America is nagged by a sense that the law has made life less fair, not more so: the rich know the loopholes that protect their riches, the powerful work the rules so as to amass more power. And this nagging pessimism gives rise to a lament that has gained currency recently. Perhaps America should rely less on legal codes, and more on common-sense morality. Perhaps the whole attempt to make America fair and decent by amassing written rules of conduct needs to be rethought. (Economist, March 8, 1997, p. 32) Perhaps? I shall argue that the proliferation of positive law, which is deeply rooted in predatory rent-seeking (public fraud) and coercion, creates, rather than ameliorates, social and moral malaise by driving out of circulation the traditional virtues of cooperation, reciprocity, integrity, trust, and reputation--virtues that have guided civilized society for centuries and whose disappearance presently is being lamented. The problem is exacerbated, I shall argue, because the proliferation of law proceeds without careful regard to the collateral sacrifice of subjective private utility and to the public and private disutility of coercion. The resulting burden (cost) to society is enormous, but because it is more easily felt than measured, its extent goes unrecognized by policy makers, who proceed as if a cost ignored is a cost avoided.

Ordinary individuals, on the other hand, easily recognize the burden created by the proliferation of positive law: compliant individuals increasingly are denied legitimate opportunities to build private utility; individuals choosing not to forgo those opportunities bear a substantial risk that the punitive state will take away their property (through fines or forfeitures) and liberty (through incarceration or required community service). From this double bind arises malaise rooted in disaffection, frustration, social polarization, anger, and hatred, all in the midst of economic plenty. These symptoms give resonance to, and eventually find vent through, incivility and violence (both virtual and real), which in turn create a clamor for more positive law, thereby intensifying the spiral.

Attacking social problems large and small, real and imagined, with positive law is the hallmark of what I term the New American Testament. It resembles the Bible's Old Testament in its plethora of rules and paucity of mercy, but differs from it by replacing a benevolent and wise, if vengeful, God with a venal and unwise, but comparably vengeful, state. I shall argue that today's social malaise is a consequence of America's move toward an Old Testament-style social and political structure, and that the proper remedy for it is to reduce the scope of positive law to the point where the spontaneous virtues of human nature, which were recognized by the New Testament and brought to fruition by the Protestant Reformation, can reemerge.

I begin by discussing the nexus between morality and the state and examining some ways in which quantitative thinkers (economists and others) have dealt with it. I then derive economically based definitions of values, virtue, and moral sense and explore religion's traditional role in promoting those concepts. Finally, I show how the New American Testament undermines traditional virtues, giving rise to social and moral malaise in the process. I conclude with some corroborative evidence and a prescriptive comment.

Morality and the State

The allusion to religion in this essay's title emphasizes the state's arrogated role as understudy to an omnipotent God. The linkage between religion-based morality and the American state was contemplated long ago by Alexis de Tocqueville ([1835] 1988), who wondered "how could society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened" (294). Tocqueville correctly noted that political ties and moral ties are substitutes; they compete over a wide range of human activities. One implication is that political ties must be strengthened when moral ties flag; that implication underpins much of present social practice. I shall explore a more subtle implication: moral ties strengthen spontaneously when political tics are relaxed, and weaken when political ties proliferate. The dissolution of moral ties that appears presently to be sapping the energy and degrading the quality of American society is a consequence of political ties knotted by positive law.(1)

Substitutability between religiously based morality and politics implies a substitutability between God and the state. The sociologist Helmut Schoeck (1966) considered this relationship by characterizing the modern state as an egalitarian deity that acts in response to the private envies of its constituency. The economist Ludwig von Mises ([1949] 1996) took a stronger view, characterizing the state as acting out of a desire to be God:

The terms "society" and "state" as they are used by the contemporary advocates of socialism, planning, and social control of all the activities of individuals signify a deity. The priests of this new creed ascribe to their idol all those attributes which the theologians ascribe to God--omnipotence, omniscience, infinite goodness, and so on. (151) Both views are of a "rent-seeking" society that uses state power to capture and redistribute private wealth: Schoeck characterizes the state as an instrumentality of a rent-seeking citizenry; Mises, as an instrumentality of rent-seeking "priests" who act in the capacity of the state.

Public-choice theory teaches that both views are essentially correct (Buchanan and Tullock 1962; Buchanan, Tollison, and Tullock 1980). In Christian theology, not a single sparrow falls without God's knowledge. Public choice shows that, in contrast, the government has no comparably benevolent incentive to concern itself so intimately with the life, death, and prosperity of its citizens. Rather, the incentive of public decision makers is to capture private benefits through a marketlike political process, wielding the state's coercive power in Godlike fashion to distribute wealth and build private utility in ways that benefit themselves and a competitively determined set of constituents (Stigler [1971] 1975; McChesney 1987, 1997). Statutes and administrative regulations represent enforceable, long-term contracts between public decision makers and private factions (Landis and Posner 1975). The inescapable consequence of these political dynamics is long-run economic decline (Olson 1982), preceded, predictably, by increasing social and moral malaise.

No competing theory of political economy surpasses this overarching view in its explanatory and predictive power. Perhaps the closest contender is a "theory" of...