I've been reading a very interesting book by one of my favorite scholars, F.A. Hayek, called The Fatal Conceit, so named to describe the illusion that men may completely control their future. The basic premise of the book is interestingly founded in the concept of morality, holding that progress, knowledge, intelligence, etc. are products of traditions of morality that evolved spontaneously (by spontaneous we mean uncontrolled, not sudden). The basic premise of socialism is the reversed causality, that intelligent people create morality, that we can progressively create a moral society with our knowledge and wisdom. I haven't yet read Hayek's argument for why this is wrong and that morality is spontaneously emergent, but it makes sense.
Anyway, the point of this post was to tie this knowledge into our modern society. Moral society emerged as a result of traditions passed on from generation to generation. Specifically, as I believe, a moral code was given mankind of divine origin, and the tradition was held onto by some, and disregarded by others who, instead, created their own moral traditions. But social characteristics such as honesty, charity, trust, and respect for our fellowman produce efficiencies in market transacting. If honesty is not a social virtue, traders would not be able to trade efficiently, and expensive protections would be necessary for all transactions. If there is little respect for fellowman and their property in society, expensive protections must emerge to guard each individual's livelihood from theft. Thus, moral societies excel because of the efficiencies it produces, while the immoral societies flounder. Survival of the fittest allowed the most moral of traditions to endure, while those immoral societies could not.
This brings us to today. The moral system that our founding fathers developed gave us produced such efficiencies as to lead us out of the enduring agricultural system which had us constant fighting for survival. Innovative developments moved us from a society where 90% of us were farmers in order to produce sufficient food for society, to where less than 5% are, and we have far more than any of us need. We do not fear weather, we do not build our own homes, and we are free from the shackles of producing our own sustenance to pursue other life-improving ideas that make everyone better off. We have the time and freedom to pursue knowledge and scientific discovery, which has accelerated our development further.
Yet it is a fragile system, dependent on the efficiencies of the moral traditions of our forefathers. If we begin to abandon those traditions, the costs of economics rises, the profits drop, the costs of food and energy increase because we simply do not trust each other. And it becomes a cycle. We do not trust others, which makes prices high and unaffordable, which creates additional incentives to be dishonest or steal, and so on.
We are in at a precarious point, were we still have trust in our protections, but are abandoning them little by little in the name of the greater good. We take from each other with government force to feed those who do not feed themselves, not by charity, but by theft. We are beginning to eschew the family, the foundation of traditions, for a more "enlightened" society. If the family becomes inconsequential in teaching morality, our youth will grow up with no traditions to hold onto, no moral code to live by, and our society will collapse.
If our society continues to abandon moral traditions that have created our wealth and knowledge, we will have no choice but to separate ourselves from them, and establish a new order by which we may reestablish moral traditions to live by. May it not come to that.
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Here's a quote from a book I listened to recently. I think it supports what you're saying, but adds an element of social trust. The peasants he references have moral standards within their clan (probably even strict moral codes), but the morals aren't shared across villages even within their region.
Quote from "The Social Animal" by David Brooks. pp. 55-56
"Most relationships are bound by trust. Trust is habitual reciprocity that becomes coated by emotion. It grows when two people begin volleys of communication and cooperation and slowly learn they can rely upon each other. Soon members of a trusting relationship become willing to not only cooperate with each other but sacrifice for each other. Trust reduces friction and lowerstransaction costs. Peoplein companies with trust move flexibly and cohesively. People who live in trusting cultures form more community organizations. People in more trusting cultures have wider stock market-participation rates. People in trusting cultures find it easier to organize and operate large corporations. Trust creates wealth."
"In his classic study The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Edward Banfield noticed that peasants in southern Italy shared a great deal of trust with members of their own family, but were very suspicious of people outside their kinship boundaries. This made it hard for them to form community groups or to build companies that were bigger than the family unit. Germany and Japan have high levels of social trust, enabling them to build tightly knit industrial firms. The United States is a collective society that thinks it is an individualistic one. If you ask Americans to describe their values, they will give you the most individualistic answers of any nation on the planet. yet if you actually watch how Americans behave, you see they trust one another instinctively and form groups with alacrity."
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