The life cycle of rules: How institutional order breeds stagnation and decadence

“ It is curious how deeply imbedded in ordinary discourse are traces of the conviction that childhood, maturity, and old age, are stages in the corporate, as they are in the individual, life. “A young and vigorous nation,” “a decrepit and moribund civilisation”—phrases like these, and scores of others containing the same implication, come as trippingly from the tongue as if they suggested no difficulty and called for no explanation. ”

“ It is much more material that there should be a rule to go by than what that rule is; that there may be a uniformity of proceeding in business, not subject to the caprice of the chairman or captiousness of the members. ”

“ While it is important that an assembly has good rules, it is more important that it be not without some rules to govern its proceedings. It is much more important, for instance, that an assembly has a rule determining the rank of the motion to postpone indefinitely, than that it gives this motion the highest rank of all subsidiary motions except to lay on the table, as in the U. S. Senate ”

“ But they are not the questions with which I am at present concerned. The decadence respecting which I wish to put questions is not literary or artistic, it is political and national. It is the decadence which attacks, or is alleged to attack, great communities and historic civilisations: which [Pg 7] is to societies of men what senility is to man, and is often, like senility, the precursor and the cause of final dissolution. ”

“ For if current modes of speech take decadence more or less for granted, with still greater confidence do they speak of Progress as assured. Yet if both are real they can hardly be studied apart, they must evidently limit and qualify each other in actual experience, and they cannot be isolated in speculation. ”

“ Civil dissensions, military disasters, pestilences, famines, tyrants, tax-gatherers, growing burdens, and waning wealth—the gloomy catalogue is unrolled before our eyes, yet somehow it does not in all cases wholly satisfy us: we feel that some of these diseases are of a kind which a vigorous body politic should easily be able to survive, that others are secondary symptoms of some obscurer malady, and that in neither case do they supply us with the full explanations of which we are in search. ”

“ It is always complicated with, and often acts through, other more obvious causes. It is always therefore possible to argue that to these causes, and not to the more subtle and elusive influences collectively described as ’decadence,’ the decline and fall of great communities is really due. ”

“ But though the advance of each community is thus limited by its inherited aptitudes, I do not suppose that those limits have ever been reached by its unaided efforts. In the cases where a forward movement has died away, the pause must in part be due to arrested development in the variable, not to a fixed resistance in the unchanging factor of national character. Either external conditions are unfavourable; or the sentiments, customs and beliefs which make society possible have hardened into shapes which make its further self-development impossible ”

“ But should we be better fitted to form a correct conception of the life-history of complex organisms if we refused to recognise any cause of death but accident or disease? I admit, of course, that [Pg 33] the term ‘decadence’ is less precise than ‘old age’: as sociology deals with organisms far less definite than biology. I admit also that it explains nothing. If its use is to be justified at all, the justification must depend not on the fact that it supplies an explanation, but on the fact that it rules out explanations which are obvious but inadequate. ”

“ I am well aware that though the space I have just devoted to the illustration of my theme provided by Roman history is out of all proportion to the general plan of this address, yet the treatment of it is inadequate and perhaps unconvincing. But those who are most reluctant to admit that decay, as distinguished from misfortune, may lower the general level of civilisation, can hardly deny that in many [Pg 35] cases that level may for indefinite periods shew no tendency to rise. If decadence be unknown, is not progress exceptional? Consider the changing politics of the unchanging East [1] . ”

“ Experience has shown the importance of definiteness in the law; and in this country, where customs are so slightly established and the published manuals of parliamentary practice so conflicting, no society should attempt to conduct business without having adopted some work upon the subject as the authority in all cases not covered by its own special rules. ”

“ By general, or unanimous, or silent, consent the assembly can do business with little regard for the rules of procedure, as they are made for the protection of the minority, and when there is no minority to protect, there is little use for the restraint of the rules, except such as protect the rights of absent members, or the right to a secret vote. ”

“ When a motion has been made and seconded, it is the duty of the chair, unless he rules it out of order, immediately to state the question—that is, state the exact question that is before the assembly for its consideration and action. ”

“ While usually he need not wait for motions of routine, or for a motion to be seconded when he knows it is favored by others, yet if this is objected to. it is safer instantly to require the forms of parliamentary law to be observed. By general consent many things can be done that will save much time [see page 202] , but where the assembly is very large, or is divided and contains members who are habitually raising points of order, the most expeditious and safe course is to enforce strictly all the rules and forms of parliamentary law. ”

“ If it is desired to give greater stability to a rule it is necessary to place it in the constitution, by-laws, or rules of order, all of which are so guarded by requiring notice of amendments, and at least a two-thirds vote for their adoption, that they are not subject to sudden changes, and may be considered as expressing the deliberate views of the whole society, rather than the opinions or wishes of any particular meeting. ”

“ Sometimes societies include in their by-laws some rules relating to the transaction of business without any intention, evidently, of giving these rules any greater stability than is possessed by other rules of their class, and they may be suspended the same as if they were called rules of order. ”

“ Evidently we must not consider a diminution of national power, whether relative or absolute, as constituting by itself a proof of national decadence. Holland is not decadent because her place in the hierarchy of European Powers is less exalted than it was two hundred and fifty years ago. Spain was not necessarily decadent at the end of the seventeenth century because she had exhausted herself in a contest far beyond her resources either in money or in men. ”

“ If I answer as I feel disposed to answer—Decadence—you will properly ask how the unknown becomes less unknown merely by receiving a name. I reply that if there be indeed subtle changes in the social tissues of old communities which make [Pg 32] them, as time goes on, less resistant to the external attacks and the internal disturbances by which all communities are threatened, overt recognition of the fact is a step in advance. ”

“ It may be replied that the history of Rome, on which I dwelt a moment ago, shews that arrested progress, and even decadence, may be but the prelude to a new period of vigorous growth. So that even those races or nations which seem frozen into eternal immobility may base upon experience their hopes of an awakening spring. ”

“ Rules of practice and procedure are devised to promote the ends of justice, not to defeat them. A rigid and undeviating judicially declared practice under which courts of review would invariably and under all circumstances decline to consider all questions which had not previously been specifically urged would be out of harmony with this policy. ”

“ If members of any society take advantage of the freedom allowed by considering each regular meeting a separate session, and repeatedly renew obnoxious or unprofitable motions, the society can adopt a rule prohibiting the second introduction of any main question within, say, three months after its rejection, or indefinite postponement, or after the society has refused to consider it. ”

“ Its dwellings are half in ruins. It supports about [68] 2,000 inhabitants, and to-day its surroundings are drear beyond description. Yet it was once a great desert city, on a famous route across Africa of great antiquity, and is said to have once contained 50,000 inhabitants—more than the whole population of the Sahara’s interior to-day.
Verily, ever it comes back to me; the Sahara is a land of decay. To the traveller it holds its principal charm in its strange mystic beauty and wonderful vastness, and in the fact that it is a land of Allah, steeped in inherent sadness. ”

“ They are steeped in the romance and mystery of the Sahara. Over them have passed hard-won pilgrimages to Mecca, cavalcades of slaves fettered and limb-weary and fearful, and rich caravans of merchandise that reached their goal or were looted—a gamble that made or lost a fortune for the masters who sent them forth. To-day they are unused, and the commerce of the Sahara is dead. And this is comprehensible when [67] the poverty of the land is reviewed and the belief held that growing dearth of vegetation has made it well-nigh impossible for large caravans to live to-day on those roads. ”

“ In the belief that the oases and the sedentary people are the mainspring of the Sahara’s system, it may be worth while to bear in mind the state of the people, in picturing any possibility of resuscitating the land, of which we hear projects from time to time. Prolonged immorality brings decadence in its wake, and extreme poverty can do likewise. I see in the oases to-day human life at a very low ebb; human life that has been allowed to go to rot, because, through the ages, the Sahara has had no strong friends to reach out a hand and lift it from “the Slough of Despond.” ”

“ No such sociology exists at present, or seems likely soon to be created. In its absence the conclusions at which I provisionally arrive are that we cannot regard decadence and arrested development as less normal in human communities than progress ”

“ If under the excitement of religion or conquest, or else through causes more complicated and more obscure, this limit has sometimes been left behind, reaction has always followed, and decadence set in. Many people indeed, as I have already observed, take this as a matter of course. It seems to them the most natural thing in the world that the glories of the Eastern Khalifate should decay, and that the Moors in Morocco should lose even the memory of the learning and the arts possessed but three centuries ago by the Moors in Spain. ”

“ We are born for business, therefore an active life is truly life. Idleness is the sepulchre of a living man. By how much the more excellent any creature is, by so much the more active it is; as is evident in the case of angels, of the sun, and of the heavenly bodies—which are in perpetual motion—so also are the fountains always sending forth waters, and the rivers carrying these waters hither and thither for human uses. ”

“ On the contrary, by how much the more torpid anything is, by so much the more useless it is; as a stone, clay, ditch, &c.; do you therefore, that you may not be a stone or a useless weight of earth, but an active sun always shining, or an angel always ministering in place of God to men, use all your efforts. ”

“ It sometimes happens that the active are overwhelmed with business, still activity of life must not on that account be abandoned; for compendious means are available, by which distressing cares may be alleviated. That you may know such, remember these rules:—
1. Put value on time, so that you permit no portion of it to escape uselessly—so, more ample spaces of time of acting will be to you, than to another who knows not how to seize occasions. ”

“ All great social forces are not merely capable of perversion, they are constantly perverted. Yet were they eliminated from our social system, were each man, acting on the advice, which Voltaire gave but never followed, to disinterest himself of all that goes [Pg 51] on beyond the limits of his own cabbage garden, decadence I take it, would have already far advanced. ”

“ Is it seriously to be ranked with religion and patriotism as an important force for raising men’s lives above what is small, personal, and self-centred? Does it not rather pervert pure knowledge into a new contrivance for making money, and give a fresh triumph to the ‘growing materialism of the age’? ”

“ Are we to ignore what religion has done for the world because it has been the fruitful excuse for the narrowest bigotries and the most cruel persecutions? Are we to underrate the worth of politics, because politics may mean no more than the mindless clash of factions, or the barren exchange of one set of tyrants or jobbers for another? Is patriotism to be despised because its manifestations have been sometimes vulgar, sometimes selfish, sometimes brutal, sometimes criminal? ”