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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Guest Post: The Twin Pillars Of Civilization

Courtesy of Tyler Durden

The next post in a continuing series (most recently “RIP, Homo Economicus“) by Free Radical

The Twin Pillars Of Cilivization

Gold is the child of Zeus.
– Pindar, circa 500 BCE

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.
– Confucius, circa 500 BCE

Without money, there can be little in the way of economic specialization, or what is commonly known as the division of labor. And without the division of labor, there can be little in the way of civilization. In pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer society, labor is primarily limited to these two endeavors, the hunting generally done by men and the gathering by women. So, too, is labor limited in early agricultural society, the men generally doing the farming and women the domestic work. And while proto-money might be involved, economic exchange is generally limited to barter, which requires a coincidence of wants that is far too inelastic to allow for the manifold exchange of goods and services that is the lifeblood of civil society. 

Money, in other words, is essential to any society that we would call civil, prompting us to ask what, in fact, money is and how it comes to be. The answer, simply enough, is that money becomes what it is through the very same process of exchange upon which civil society depends:

If one good is more marketable than another – if everyone is confident that it will be more readily sold – then it will come into greater demand because it will be used as a medium of exchange. It will be the medium through which one specialist can exchange his product for the goods of other specialists.

Now just as in nature there is a great variety of skills and resources, so there is a variety in the marketability of goods. Some goods are more widely demanded than others, some are more divisible into smaller units without loss of value, some more durable over long periods of time, some more transportable over large distances. All of these advantages make for greater marketability. It is clear that in every society, the most marketable goods will be gradually selected as the media for exchange.  As they are more and more selected as media, the demand for them increases because of this use, and so they become even more marketable. The result is a reinforcing spiral: more marketability causes wider use as a medium, which causes more marketability, etc. Eventually one or two commodities are used as general media – in almost all exchanges – and these are called money.

Money, then, is simply a commodity that, as an inherent store of value, is used as a medium of exchange. And given its considerable attributes – e.g., beauty, density, indestructibility, malleability, homogeneity, divisibility, transportability – it is little wonder that, over time, gold became the commodity of choice, the preeminent medium of exchange the world over. Nor is it any wonder that with the subsequent emergence of banknotes and other fiduciary media, which greatly facilitated indirect exchange and therefore the division of labor, it was gold that usually backed them up.

Gold, then, is a good that is especially good as the money upon which civil society depends. So good, in fact, that if something is said to be “as good as gold,” it is receiving what is understood to be the highest possible praise, just as that which is described as “golden” – a golden moment, for example – is understood to be “of the greatest value or importance.”  And thus does it come as no surprise that the ethic of reciprocity, all but unknown in this terminology, has been accepted the world over as the golden rule:

The nearly universal acceptance of the golden rule and its promulgation by persons of considerable intelligence, though otherwise of divergent outlooks, would seem to provide some evidence for the claim that it is a fundamental ethical truth.1

The preeminent moral precept of virtually every major religion and culture in human history, the golden rule is indeed a fundamental ethical truth that is as precious to civil society as the metal itself is. Thus, it is not too much to say that as gold has historically been the foremost currency of commerce, the golden rule has been the foremost currency of morals, the ethic that civil society has always “banked on” in one form or another. Nor is it too much to say, then, that together, gold and the golden rule stand as the twin pillars of civilization – the means by which individuals have traditionally cooperated to improve their lot in life, there being no other reason for civil society to exist:

The idea that anybody would have fared better under an asocial state of mankind and is wronged by the very existence of society is absurd. Thanks to the higher productivity of social cooperation, the human species has multiplied far beyond the margin of subsistence.

Indeed it has. And if left to its own devices – i.e., if its members are allowed to interact freely and of their own accord – the human species will use its commodity money and its common morality to continually improve its overall wellbeing.

But let us ask, what is so important about acting freely, and why is this so vital to the advance of civil society? 
We address this question in my next submission: “The Metaphysics of Freedom.”

 

 


 

1. Marcus G. Singer, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, MacMillan Publishing, 1967, p. 366

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