naked capitalism

DownSouth says:

Was it this one?

“Best joke about prostitution ever done was by Bernard Shaw. He was at a party once and he told this woman that everyone would agree to do anything for money, if the price was high enough. `Surely not, she said.’ `Oh yes,’ he said. `Well, I wouldn’t,’ she said. `Oh yes you would,’ he said. `For instance,’ he said, `would you sleep with me for… for a million pounds?’ `Well,’ she said, `maybe for a million I would, yes.’ `Would you do it for ten shillings?’ said Bernard Shaw. `Certainly not!’ said the woman `What do you take me for? A prostitute?’ `We’ve established that already,’ said Bernard Shaw. `We’re just trying to fix your price now!’ “

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/george-bernard-shaw-and-the-bestever-prostitute-joke-1200316.html

DownSouth says:

Dave of Maryland said: “Religious fundamentalism was the rock that could not be bribed or blackmailed or corrupted.”

A similar phenomenon to what you describe happened in the city of Geneva in the 1500s. As the eminent religious scholar Alister McGrath explains:

Events in the absence of Farel and Calvin had demonstrated the close interdependence of reformation and autonomy, of morals and morale. Although the city council was concerned primarily with the independence and morale of the city, the fact that Farel’s religious agenda could not be evaded gradually dawned. The pro-Farel party probably had little enthusiasm for religious reformation or the enforcement of public morals; nevertheless, it seemed that the survival of the Genevan republic hinged upon them.

Calvinism was essential for the survival of the city. As David Sloan Wilson puts it:

McGrath was suggesting that for the citizens of Geneva to have a strong morale, they must have a strong and unified sense of right and wrong. Like the much smaller hunter-gatherer groups described by Chris Boehm, they needed to be a moral community. That was evidently what the religion provided and that even a strong, democratically elected government lacked…

Above all, the social practices specified by the Ecclesiastical Ordinances appeared designed to prevent the all-important problem of cheating from within. Martin Bucer, another Protestant reformer and contemporary of Calvin, put it this way: “Where there is no discipline and excommunication, there is no Christian community.” My translation: if you can’t get rid of cheating by excluding the behavior (discipline) or the person if necessary (excommunication), you can forget about creating a cooperative society.

But even though you get some of the facts straight, yours is a partial truth. You conclude:

So one solution, perhaps the only one, is to turn matters over to the fundamentalists. We have our own home-grown sorts. Let ‘em take over the Republican party. I’d vote for them in a heartbeat.

The evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Haidt, writing in The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, gives a much more nuanced, and complete, presentation of the facts than you do:

When it [the virtue hypothesis] is evaluated in the way that Ben Franklin meant it, as a claim about virtue more broadly, it becomes so profoundly true that it raises the question of whether cultural conservatives are correct in their critique of modern life and its restricted, permissive morality. Should we in the West try to return to a more virtue-based morality?

Franklin may be right that leadership on virtue can never come from the major political actors; it will have to come from a movement of people, such as the people of a town who come together and agree to create moral coherence across the many areas of children’s lives. Such movements are happening now. The developmental psychologist William Damon calls them “youth charter” movements, for they involve the cooperation of all parties to childrearing—-parents, teachers, coaches, religious leaders, and the children themselves—-who come to consensus on a “character” describing the community’s shared understandings, obligations, and values and committing all parties to expect and uphold the same high standards of behavior in all settings. Maybe youth charter communities can’t rival the moral richness of ancient Athens, but they are doing something to reduce their own anomie while far exceeding Athens in justice.

Are Americans so far gone that they cannot even agree on values that are almost universally shared by all cultures throughout the world, such as honesty, justice, courage, benevolence, self-restraint, loyalty and respect for authority? Is it necessary to sacrifice justice in order to achieve other virtues, as the resort to fundamentalism you urge would entail?

I personally like what Michael Allen Gillespie had to say on the subject:

Natural necessity, chance and contingency, subconscious passions and drives, the structure of economic and political life, and many other factors determine us in ways we do not understand and cannot ultimately control. At our best and most courageous, we confront the questions this world poses and in our own limited ways seek to answer them. This quest, however, is not without its dangers. Questions disrupt and unsettle our lives and we are often all too ready to accept partial truths and gross simplifications to escape from their perplexity. The tragedies of our own century have taught us, however, that it is better to suffer the anxiety that questions engender than to give overhasty answers to them. With these difficulties and dangers in mind, we must still attempt to give at least tentative answers to the perplexing questions that punctuate our existence.