A moral rubric is needed

Our culture is in a serious decline. If there is any talk to be had, it must be substantive towards effective action to abate it.

I spent this early morning reading the transcript of Richard Hanania’s conversation with Prof. Amy Wax, touching on many peaks of a vast landscape of knowledge, history, and ultimately divergent assessments of strategy that all appear futile and wrong.

These posts are the kinds of things where authors love to get into each other’s strategic minutia, almost nerding out together about this or that, yet hopeless as ever about the grand scheme unfurling. They often say in a very logical tone that they are worried, or that the trends are scary. I don’t have the space for that kind of quartered emotion. It is clear to me that our way of life is dying.

Values that have proven themselves against the mettle of history are being thrashed about by those who know not what they do. It helps nothing to sit in distress or disarray about this.

People call it a culture war, but to me the term is laughable, because there is hardly a resistance to speak of. If there is a culture war, it has not even started yet.

Further reading has moved me to a point where I feel compelled to make a code of sorts. I don’t yet know what it will entail, but it has been clear to me for at least a year by now that a strong and well-stewarded construction of parallel institutions is necessary, both public and private, both market and social. In seeing the level of logical and strategic disarray at hand here in anyone who feels the need to stop the defilement of the values that make our societies great, I realise that it is probably necessary to devise a general moral rubric for the public that lays down what exactly is needed and how people should proceed about obtaining and defending it.

I don’t yet see a better way to remedy this situation. I estimate in a year’s time, this rubric will be fully formed and more or less finalised, ready for deployment into the arena. I don’t care about people’s dinner table politics or their aversion to impoliteness in guise of manipulation and other cowardly antisocial tactics. I want to protect the bulwark of scientific work and the dignity of all people of modest means with respect to the self-evident moral history of the world. However it is done is a matter of business.