Have It Your Way!*

A key to the success of fast-food franchises isn’t outstanding food or gourmet accoutrements. It is consistency.

You can pull into a McDonald’s, Burger King, or Wendy’s drive-thru almost anywhere in America and reasonably expect the same basic experience. The burger, fries, drink, ordering process, and service will conform to an established standard. That Big Mac, Whopper, or Dave’s Double is not supposed to taste radically different in San Diego than it does in Bangor, Maine. You aren’t going there expecting a gourmet meal. You are going because you know what you are going to get.

It is interesting that even Burger King’s old slogan of “Have it your way” comes with limitations attached.

That predictability is not accidental. It comes from common processes, standardized supply chains, training, quality controls, and rigorous adherence to established standards. The companies certainly experiment with new products and procedures, but experimentation occurs outside the normal system until it has been tested and demonstrated to work. Only then does it become part of the standard.

Civilization isn’t a fast-food restaurant, of course, but I believe the underlying principle is remarkably similar.

A successful culture, nation, or civilization requires a common code of conduct: a set of principles that people understand, recognize as legitimate, and generally agree to follow. It doesn’t require everyone to think alike. It does require enough agreement about fundamental right and wrong that people can predict how others will behave and trust that certain boundaries will be respected.

For generations of Americans (and for the colonists who preceded them) that common moral framework was heavily informed by Judeo-Christian principles. Those principles did not exist in isolation; American political thought also drew from English common law, classical philosophy, Enlightenment ideas, and other traditions. But Judeo-Christian morality provided an enormously influential foundation for concepts such as individual responsibility, the sanctity of life, honesty, charity, family obligation, personal restraint, and the distinction between right and wrong.

Much of that code was enforced without the government standing over everyone’s shoulder because families, schools, churches taught it and communities reinforced it. Neighbors knew one another and their reputations mattered. People understood that certain behaviors were unacceptable not merely because a law prohibited them, but because the community regarded them as morally wrong, and that is a key distinction that matters greatly.

Laws can regulate behavior, but laws alone cannot create a moral society. No government possesses enough police officers, courts, regulations, or prisons to supervise every human interaction. A functioning society depends upon people voluntarily restraining themselves because they believe certain things ought not to be done.

The more difficult question is what happens when the common moral framework begins to disappear.

My observation (and it is just that, an observation) is that America’s increasing abandonment of its Judeo-Christian heritage has coincided with a decline in the quality and consistency of governance and an extraordinary increase in political acrimony. I cannot conclusively prove that one caused the other in a society filled with near infinite variable of many contributing factors, from social media and partisan news to economic dislocation, institutional distrust, demographic change, and the fragmentation of American communities.

However, I think the inverse relationship between the decline of religious affiliation vs. the increase in radical sociopolitical change is worth consideration. Walking away from some basic generational controls would seem to be a causal factor in the redefinition of morality

If a society no longer agrees on the basic principles that define acceptable behavior, then disagreement eventually moves beyond policy. People begin disagreeing about the rules themselves. What one group considers justice, another considers oppression. What one regards as moral responsibility, another regards as intolerance. Even the institutions responsible for resolving disagreements become objects of suspicion.

At that point, consistency begins to disappear and when consistency disappears, trust can’t long survive. A civilization where the rules and standards change on a whim will cease to exist.

The lesson isn’t that every American must become Christian or that political disagreement is inherently destructive. A free society requires disagreement. The lesson is that constructive disagreement works only when it occurs within some shared framework of rules and principles.

The challenge facing America may therefore be less about finding agreement on every political question and more about recovering agreement on the fundamental question beneath all of them: What do we owe one another, and what principles are we willing to uphold even when doing so is inconvenient or politically disadvantageous?

A civilization can survive disagreement; it can’t survive the abandonment of the very basis of its social contract. It has a much harder time surviving when its people can no longer agree on the rules of the game.