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02/20/2005: "Good from the Misdeeds of Others"

"It is found by experience that admirable laws and right precedents among the good have their origin in the misdeeds of others." -- Cornelius Tacitus (55 AD - 117 AD). This is perhaps a more perceptive version of Santayana’s famous (and inconsistently quoted) “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” from The Life of Reason, I, Reason in Common Sense. What I admire about the Tacitus quote is his recognition that, over time, recurring problems find recurring solutions. This happens to be the theme of my first book. Societal evolution creates new connections and possibilities, and some of these turn out to be possibilities for misdeeds. The web has created wonderful opportunity (I would not be so immodest to claim that your reading this is such) but also opens Pandora’s box. Case in point: phishing. These kinds of crime become temporary impediments as the promise of new opportunity becomes the mother of the inventions that eventually defeat opportunists. These solutions then become woven into the social fabric. Consider double entry accounting, invented four hundred years ago to defeat embezzlers. While such lowlifes continue to make the news, their apprehension should be viewed as a success of accounting standards rather than a failure. There used to be a class of people in the US who believed in the lessons of history, who believed in the wisdom of social norms developed over the course of millennia. These people were called “conservatives,” a species now extinct in the continental US. Not that there aren’t those who call themselves by that name, but the resemblance ends as soon as the fouth syllable leaves their lips. Where it was once considered conservative behavior to ensure that money going out was matched by money coming in (something that embezzlers by definition cause not to happen), those calling themselves “conservatives” delight in each new tank car of red ink. Where the term “conservative” once had a connotation of preservation, it now means accelerated consumption. Where the special brand of American conservatism meant preservation of constitutional liberties, it now means hostility to organizations whose sole focus is protecting these liberties. Modern technology has given western society enormous power. With that power comes the responsibility to heed Tacitus, to recognize that society developed a preference for balanced books because of financial disasters wrought by unbalanced books, that prejudices against preemptive war developed from the misery of innocent victims, and that concern for preserving the balance of nature sprung from many instances of societal dissolution as documented in the book I just finished, Jared Diamond’s Collapse. The extreme right has preferences for installing a set of laws and precedents they admire, but these are not the wisdom of the past but are in fact nothing more than the codification of misdeed.