In the Long Run, It's Either Conscience or Cops

A fascinating piece.  Go read the whole thing.  Excerpts:

...Colson’s Law is science rather than sermon, empirical rather than ideological. We can see the law at work in the history of any body, individual or collective, and we can predict its future on the basis of this law. Any individual human body that loses its internal immune system will die, unless propped up by many artificial, external aids: pills, operations, prosthetics—and even then, it’s only a matter of time. The same is true of social bodies: Police states without consciences are brittle. The “Thousand-Year Reich” lasted twelve years. The longest-lasting societies in history were all highly moralistic: the Confucian (over 2,100 years), the Roman (about 700 years), and the Islamic (almost 1,400 years). The longest-lasting moral order in history has been that of Mosaic law: It has structured Jewish and then Christian life for 3,500 years (though not as a continuous civil society)...

A corollary of Colson’s Law is that a community’s longevity is proportionate to its morality—and to its religion, for no society has yet existed that has successfully built its morality on any other basis than religion. In theory, the natural law can be known without knowing the divine law, but in practice, it is very rare; there has never been a whole society of Platos and Aristotles. It is a massive and obvious fact of history that religion has always been the primary source of morality. This fact is so massive and obvious that no age ever ignored it except the one so blind and arrogant that it labeled the era lit by the Christian faith “the Dark Ages” and called its own time of darkness the “Enlightenment...”

We seem to have caught the disease during the Enlightenment, which closed our eyes to God. This linguistic irony is not surprising, for language is one of a dying society’s first organs to be infected, as Confucius clearly saw. Asked to name the single most important of his many social principles of reform, he answered, “the restoration of language,” that is, calling things by their proper names...