Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
Merker “Perishing Promise”: My Takeaways
I was thinking that, at the conclusion of my study of Björn Merker’s Perishing Promise I ought to deliver my judgment on the book.
And then I thought: No.
What I read books for are ideas. And not just ideas, but good ideas.
So, for me, the point of reading Perishing Promise and commenting on it is to mine it for good ideas.
Mind you, Merker has put together a good narrative. That he regards the “other-regard” morality launched by Christianity as a bit of a problem, and a real problem after it got secularized by the Continental Enlightenment thinkers. The Continental thinkers all have a tendency to be “partisans of overthrow” and politics with everything. Hey, whatabout the Brits in the 19th century that created a society that doubled its population and tripled its per-capita income in the utter transformation of the Industrial Revolution. All without a serious political breakdown or revolution?
So let’s review some of the good ideas in Perishing Promise.
“Other-regard” Morality. For Merker this is a problem, because it focuses peoples’ minds on “doing good” for others rather than getting on with their own lives. Dickens made a joke about this in Bleak House with Mrs. Jellyby. Her entire life was focused on helping the natives of Borrioboola-Gha in Africa while ignoring the needs and the sufferings of her own family. In the modern welfare state “other-regard” has created the culture of victim politics which, no doubt, future historians will regard as the most vicious idea since witch-burning.
Victorian era in Britain. Merker shows us what a remarkable achievement it was, to convert an agricultural society of people living in villages to an industrial world power in which most everyone lived and worked in cities. And the population doubled. And per-capita income tripled. He chides us for celebrating the “partisans of overthrow” rather than studied why Victorian Britain succeeded and what we can learn from its success.
Marx didn’t want to get a job. Daddy kept telling him to get a job, but still kept up his allowance. But the Widow Marx pulled the allowance. So Marx latched onto rich kid Engels for support. One wonders whether this is repeating itself with our modern educated rich kids.
Two cultures of human society. We humans are a uniquely unique species. We have two cultures: ritual and instrumental. Ritual culture is doing things “because that’s the way we do it.” The point is to reduce the time and resources devoted to arguing about the right way to live life. Human language is ritual culture, and perhaps the most important thing a child learns. Instrumental culture is about observation and learning from others.
The secret of culture. The “capacity to shape, unbeknownst to its carriers, their behavior in adaptive ways”. And “any model behavior that enjoys any kind of advantage… even the slightest statistical edge, will end up disproportionately represented in the population aggregate in the long run”.
Population replacement. Needless to say, humans as a species start and end with replacing each generation with a new generation. The current situation where many cultures in the West are not having enough children to replace the population will end in extinction. However, normal people living normal lives of work, marriage, and children are replacing themselves. It’s the folk that believe in leftist ideology that aren’t having children.
Society as a “zoo or farm”. The rulers of our current “benevolent” or welfare state behave rather like the managers of a farm or a zoo. “In either case, ‘the management’ has total control and responsibility for the lives and welfare of their denizens.” When is a society not a society?
Knowledge about “what actually works”. Society survives by the slow discovery of things that work. This is perhaps sped up by conscious science, learning about what works and why. The politics of overthrow does not operate on this principle. It just implements a political idea from on high and forces society to conform.
There’s more, of course. Much more. But these are my takeaways Your mileage may vary.
But here is where to start if you want to read the whole thing.
| Tue, 15 Sep 2026 22:29:30 GMT |
Merker: What Is To Be Done
At the end of Perishing Promise Björn Merker titles his final section “Civilizational whisperings” as he summarizes his argument.
Our situation, he writes, is that our “civilizational ethos” has been divided ever since “the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment”.
[It] did not bequeath to the West a genuine secular ethos by which to replace its Christian one, but a dual ideological inheritance that has split Western political discourse into two camps, at odds with one another for the past two centuries.
This split into two camps that Merker describes as Ethos 1 and Ethos 2, and he details them as follows:
The whole argument of Perishing Promise is that:
Ethos 2 is inherently incapable of founding a just and prosperous societal order. As long as Ethos 2 is in play against Ethos 1… the West cannot consummate its civilizational promise in a just and prosperous secure order of human relations.
and
[Ethos 2] replaces the negative rights (immunities) of Ethos 1 with its own positive rights (entitlements).
To illustrate the fundamental divide between the two ethoses, Merker uses the issue of free speech. Currently, the partisans of Ethos 2 believe that “they have a right not to be be publicly exposed to speech that offends them”. With that, “freedom of speech, and… freedom of thought and of conscience, would be abolished”.
Or take special interests. People go about their daily business “according to their own lights and inclinations… In doing so they are pursuing special interests that are their own”. A special interest is only a problem when it advances its interest by way of “the state’s power of compulsion.”
For Merker, the justification of “the state’s power of compulsion” are two-fold:
to ward off foreign aggressions and to secure citizens against violation at one another’s hands [including fraud].
or again:
protecting citizens from force and fraud, or, put differently, from predation and parasitism.
Thus, the meaning of life for humans under “self-governance”:
to govern themselves under freedom from compulsion and oppression, given safeguards against force and fraud provided by the state.
But then why has state power grown in parallel with the expansion of the franchise? Let us just say that special interests are much better at directing traffic than voters. And of course each electoral victory adds “another piece of legislative, legal, or administrative machinery that serves a special interest” and is almost impossible to remove.
Thus
everyone ends up living with — and paying for — deployment of the state’s power of compulsion on behalf of interests that are not their own.
We may call the result the “benevolent state”, but it is in fact a “despotism with a putatively human face”.
The state cannot be benevolent, because the state is all about and only about power and compulsion. And benevolence, morality, “is personal, and cannot be delegated… to a faceless bureaucracy”. And yet we all, or almost all, believe that the government is benevolent. Or trying to be.
Merker thinks we should understand the benevolent state as a “farm or zoo”.
In either case, “the management” has total control and responsibility for the lives and welfare of their denizens. Given competent management, those denizens have been relieved of responsibility for the conduct of their lives… it has foreseen and provided for all their needs, from food, to shelter, stimulation, exercise, work, health care, and procreation.
This, he writes, “affronts the dignity of the adult human person” and makes them “wards of the state.” The net effect is to “divert us from our path to maturity, to full adulthood” and encourage us to leach off others for our needs. But no problem, the “credentialed and the wealthy” are doing fine with their “capture of… agencies and other forms of rent-seeking”.
Will the advance of Ethos 2 achieve “full hegemony in the West”? Maybe, but Merker believes that it is the culture of Ethos 1 that caused “the ascendance and accomplishments of Western civilization”. It is devoted to improving “the world as it is” rather than ushering in “the world as it ought to be”.
Merker’s faith is in the slow working out of science. Not The Science of the latest fad, but “insights into the workings of nature” that convert “into science and technology that actually works.” But it will not be a “Human Utopia.” Why? Because Hayek:
functioning human societies, cultures, and civilizations are not thought out and designed by brilliant minds, but grow through slow accretion[.]
This slow accretion requires a “goes without saying” culture that “does away with the need for constant negotiation of innumerable options.” It is the opposite of the “intersectionality construct of current identity politics” that makes its members into “orphans of modernity”.
And there is the question of “other-regard,” because “for most Western minds the notion that morality can be anything other than kindness to others is incomprehensible”.
Eventually, the slow grind of science will show us the way. But meanwhile there is the little problem of the failure to reproduce in the West. That would take care of Western civilization if nothing changes.
The change will not be due to “a reformer, prophet, warlord, or revolutionary”.
An ethos worth its name is not a product of design… It emerges over long temporal horizons from the process of squeezing human experience through the learner bottlenecks of multitudes.
Merker proposed the idea of “closure beliefs” that “forestall endless argument” about cultural values so that people can get on “with the real business of life, which is living and reproducing”. In the old days, we humans used “spirits, gods” to justify closure beliefs to stop endless argument. But suppose the development of science about human nature presents us not with “closure beliefs” but “closure truths”?
There is the “demographic closure truth” that you better keep fertility rates above replacement. There is the monogamous nuclear family. There is patriarchy. And never mind if lefty heads explode. Meanwhile, under the influence of Ethos 2 we live in an era of
gleaming visions of unheard-of possibilities, lurid portents of impending doom, and ideological justificatory schemes that appealed… to a false morality [other-regard] that is endemic to the West.
Merker’s belief is that we have to return to the beliefs of Ethos 1 to the extent that they are confirmed in the developing science of human nature. For the benevolent mega-state of Ethos 2 is clearly heading for disaster.
| Tue, 15 Sep 2026 02:57:43 GMT |
Switch to Substack for more blog posts
Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
I guess you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggheads — @liptonnick
People that deny they have a religion are the most religious of all.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: How the Germans invented everything, from Kant to Jung.
