The website LewRockwell.com has as its slogan "Anti-State, Anti-war, Pro-Market" with the explanation given that its founder "is an opponent of the state, its wars and its socialism." Given the founder's association with the Mises Institute, the site has come to be known as a "libertarian" website. Of course, one needs to dig a little deeper to discover the true mission of the site, and it's contained in what is not opposed in the motto. Reading Human Action, for example, reveals not simply a political or economic theory, but Mises as an erudite writer well versed in fields outside those realms, able to pun and quote at will in Latin and French with the expectation that the reader will have the education to understand or seek out the meaning. As such, he epitomizes the "older" model of education within what C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man has called "the Tao." One can dispense with such terms if one simply understands that the cause of the website, as with the Austrian school of economics, is the advancement of civilization itself; the website serves as a port in the storm that besets civilization.
Civilization is a gradual process. As Gary North notes, it results from the accretion over time of the 2–3% increase in productivity, year over year, brought about by the division of labor working in a society that respects property and features honest money. It is not a "leaps and bounds" process, but must proceed anew with each generation, just as education must do.
The opposite of civilization is not barbarism or savagery, both of which can aspire to civilization, but instead the process of decivilization. Austrian economics focuses on money and credit for one chief reason: the real interest rate is that rate of exchange of the most marketable good that balances the needs of borrowers and lenders, and sound money will maintain a society's time preference for long versus short-term investment; monkey with the interest rate or currency, and you will shift a public's time preference towards short-term returns and instant gratification. Given that much of the work that supports a modern civilization has a duration that extends over years, if not decades, a society that is unable to undertake long-term investment is a society unable to maintain or grow its civilization, and it is in fact one that is in the process of decivilizing.
Although it seems most obvious that long-term investment is needed in an industrial society, it also formed the foundation of agricultural societies. It used to be said that "no man plants an olive grove for himself," given the long time between establishment and first harvest. A man had to establish such for his offspring, and the society in which he lived had to recognize the property rights of his children to even allow him to consider such an undertaking that would never profit him directly. Indeed, this is one reason why the olive branch is a symbol of peace, and why destruction of olive groves is so troubling to it.
Another example is offered by the fortified wine industry of Portugal. Tawny ports are commonly sold as 10, 20, 30 and even 40-year-old blends of wines from different vintages. Even older are the Madeira wines, with some only drunk (and first drinkable!) more than 100 years after their creation. No one would work to create a Madeira if he expected that his great-grandchildren's ownership of it might be terminated, and so the fact that we can continue to drink ancient Portuguese fortified wines today is testament to Portugal's maintenance of civilization over the centuries (not coincidentally, Portugal managed to avoid the two World Wars.)
The king of Portuguese fortified wines, however, is the vintage port, another wine that will last for years. As the Vintage Port site explains: "A ‘Declaration’ takes place when the producer believes that he has an outstanding port. Nature plays a major role in this decision. For this reason, a Vintage Port is only declared about three times every ten years." The 1990s were good years for port, with 1991, 1992, 1994 and 1997 unequivocal vintage years, with 1995 usually included as well.
As civilization is a gradual process, so too is wine maturation. Indeed, it was custom in certain English families to understand that it takes as long for a boy to mature as it does for a good bottle of vintage port, and so they would buy a vintage from his birth year for father and son to drink on his 21st birthday. As with mythological ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny in which an embryo retraces the steps in its evolution, so the child must recapitulate the civilizing process, again with the gradualism with which civilization advances.
It would seem that father's day would be a good time to reconnect to this ancient tradition. So if you're wondering what to get that man with a child born in 1988, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1995, 1997, 2000, or 2003, buy him the gift that promises a sweet reward at the end of a long and tedious process. The promise that he will share it with his child is the hope that war, strife and disease will leave both unclaimed, and that the process of civilization, the work of the Austrian school, will continue.
June 14, 2008
