Postscript

Albert Einstein, “though not of an orthodox faith,” believed there was an order to the universe that beggars chance. He credited that premise to the “harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that compared with it all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.” Those objective standards make individual and hence societal improvement possible. (Charles Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict, paperback, p. 95)

The 1983 Nobel Prize winner for literature William Golding understood the necessity of individual goodness when he described his novels as “an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system, however apparently logical or respectable.” So when Jean-Jacques Rousseau “insisted that human misery was rooted in the structures of society. Change the structures and you change the man,” he was wrong. Though the founders created checks and balances to protect us from ourselves institutional strength of character is ultimately determine by the people inhabiting them. (ibid, p. 110)

(This is the same self styled moralist who sentenced all five of his infant children to death in a Paris foundling hospital where consistent with historical observation infant deaths were a norm.)

The historical fall off can be seen in the contentious umbrage taken by Americans during the XYZ affair when French officials tried to extort culturally approved bribes and a loan from American emissaries as the price of access to the officials with whom they could pursue their diplomatic mission. The French had normalized graft. Today so have the United States. Formerly it outraged Americans. Today barely an eyebrow is raised.