Will Tanner’s article in Islander VI points in the right direction. Stopping modernity’s downspiral requires a radical societal restructuring. Fundamentally, this restructuring must be a reformation of mechanism, incentive, and motivation. All three must be re-aligned in totality with God’s law and His prescription and thus with His blessing. We cannot be content with shifting one or two, neglecting the third; such half-measures get only temporary results. We must deal with all three, and thoroughly.

(This article is more of a parallel to its prompting article than a review.)

Motivation

Motivation is the highest-level of these three, being produced by and producing the other two (for they are a symbiotic triad). Motivation is the society’s direction, what it wants. On the highest scale, our motivation ought to be to love the Lord and thus to love His image, particularly His people (Mark 12:28-32; Luke 10:37). But we should be more concrete than this, lest we fall into the trap of mysticism, throwing pearls before swine and forgetting reality. What are the characteristics of a healthy society’s motivation-in-action? What characteristics describe a healthy society’s state of mind?

A healthy society- a Godly society- thinks in the long-term, places justice and charity as equals and harmonious priorities, and carries out its duties in hierarchy. We think in long-term because we are eternal beings with a responsibility to an eternal God, stewarding a world longer-lived than our physical participation in it, and with a duty of care towards those who will come after, as well as a duty of honor to those who came before. We place justice and charity as our equal and ultimate aims because we know that when rightly understood they operate in perfect harmony and that both are pleasing to God (Mic. 6:8), being both the means of our love towards our neighbors (Rom. 13:8-10; Ex. 22:25). We carry out duties in hierarchy because we know God has given us duties of different natures towards different persons and parts of our lives and that to fulfil a duty except in accordance with its nature is to not fulfil that duty (Lev. 20:10-21), an omission or commission constituting sin.

We can now determine mechanism and incentive on the grounds of these motivations, setting their fulfillment and prompting as our goal (for virtue should produce and be produced by virtue).

Incentive & Mechanism

Incentive derives from two directions at once. On the one hand, we create incentives in order to create the motivation. On the other hand, the motivation requires us to produce certain results, including justice in reward, and the just reward for righteousness (as prompted by right motivation) is desirable, creating an incentive. So we produce incentives not as a cynical ploy to induce proper motivation (or the semblance thereof) but as a side-effect of creating the mechanisms of carrying out our mechanism. Nevertheless, incentives operate as shapers and reinforcers of motivation; God himself models their use in passages like Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21, urging us to righteousness by showing us its pleasant fruit.

Mechanism creates incentives; incentives promote motivation; motivation shapes mechanism and incentive. A harmony of the three produces longevity, if they are harmonious in virtue, as each reinforces the other. If one is broken, however, it swiftly induces flaws in the other two, as we see in our own society. The mechanism which makes debt our economic backbone produces horrific incentives, inducing bad motives and discouraging good ones, investing power into those with the bad motives (who responded to the bad incentives) so that they work to perpetuate and even worsen the mechanism.

Orania, as Tanner lays it out (assuming accuracy in his depiction), is an example of what results from shifting incentives, mechanisms, and motives towards good, even if only part-way. With, it seems, the long-term in mind and an emphasis on near-bonds (family (children), culture, and worldview (religion)), they have developed mechanisms of local control that allow the utilization of outside resources in a way which neither cedes local control nor operates as a theft of those resources. These mechanisms, combined with the long-term motivation and the biasing of their mechanisms towards the long term (such as in preferring specific perspectives in new arrivals, providing paths to home ownership, and the like), create rewards (incentives) for uplifting the health of the society.

Sin

Sin can ruin all of this, however. No matter how exceptional our motives, incentives, and mechanisms, sin will be present (1 John 1:10). Sin, being a hatred of God who is fundamental to reality, presents a flaw in all societies which can develop into more and more dysfunction, into eventual destruction (Lam. 1-5). When we work to create a reformed structure on this earth, therefore, we must include in our motives and mechanisms and incentives, in what we teach to our children, the continual pursuit of reformation according to His law: Semper reformanda.

Our society current suppresses good motives, punishing them and rewarding their opposite. The mechanisms are aligned against virtue. Tanner is right, therefore, to point to a need to develop alternate power structures not so compromised (or at least less compromised). Developing a societal structure biased towards the long term, towards justice, and towards good relationship would be a major victory in the reformation of our world, a seed-crystal (direct or by inspiration) for other, similar reforms. We must recognize, however, that utmost efforts will be taken to suppress such; we must recognize that the mechanisms of our society are also designed to prevent the development of a competitor or opponent.

Seeding Reformation

Christians should, therefore, remember that God promised to be with us against the world and start building, knowing that often our worldly fruits will be crushed and destroyed, even as He gives us treasures in eternity (Matt. 6:19-20). We should develop in community with other Christians a webwork of Christian endeavors which interact with each other on Christian terms, not according to the worldly mechanism, except where practice presents no choice (e.g. the government will force you to adopt certain un-ideal financial practices).

The decentralizing capacity of modern information and transport technology will be of great aid here, particularly in the early stages, but eventually it must include some geographic crystallization, as we men still live in the geographical world and may not dispose of the organic necessities of relationship- face to face, eye to eye; by long association and labor alongside; by interchange of charity and duty; by habit of hard love (Rom. 13:8-10; Jam. 2:10).

We must be prepared, also, for treachery from within, for dysfunction, for sin within the church. John 13:34-35 establishes love for the brother as a sign of salvation and of a church’s reality, but we are very imperfect Christians, and our institutions are plagued with the nominal, those who know themselves such and those who do not. While our incentives and mechanisms are still the counterculture, the foes of the society’s orthodoxy, many will seek to sponge off and pervert them; many will also introduce such perversions and falsities by import from the external society, not recognizing what they bring with them. We must continually purge our own selves of such errors; we must also continually guard against and reform away such impurities.

The Eschaton

In the end, God will give blessing to His people. Our responsibility is not to decree the result, as He has already given that; our responsibility is to work the field. Working the field, however, means working it in the best way we know how. Wisdom is the path to fruitfulness (Gen. 1:28; Prov. 1). So we should work towards a society whose motives, mechanisms, and incentives are all according to His law, knowing that thus we will be far more fruitful (and far more joyful) than otherwise. While in our lifetime it’s not likely to come about, the fruit of this in the end will be a complete conquest of this world by a people so Godly as has never been seen before, of whom God says, “… they shall all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest” (Jer. 31:34), after which His coming, the conquest of death (1 Cor. 15:26), and the final blessedness immeasurably more glorious, wherein He rules and all is according to His law (Rev. 21-22), on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:10).

God bless.