Economics and Biology

Supply and demand is in conflict with the bell curve. The one argues demand will bring into existence supply; the other posits there are limits on supply. Gresham’s law suggests in those situations where demand outpaces supply, not only will poorer quality supply appear, but it will attack that which is genuine so it alone can flourish.

The laws of Mendel show that, if there were such a thing as a good/evil gene, then one quarter of the population would be saintly, one fourth would be devils, and the rest of us would be middling, neither one nor the other, but willing to follow the bidding of whoever was in power.

If you want good men, and the demand exceeds 25%, you’re not going to get them, no matter how hard you recruit. They simply do not exist. But, it you persist in your demand, the larger population of lesser people will put themselves forth as good, and persecute those who might expose them by comparison.

The Roman Catholic church put artificial restraints on the population of priests by demanding celibacy. Metaphorically, the ability to be a man of faith requires a different gene than the one to be asexual, but when the one trait is used as a filter to define the other, the available supply shrinks.

For centuries the two requirements for the priesthood were not a problem, although folklore and pornography are filled with stories of bawdy friars. Sometime in the last century, either the demand for priests increased with population growth, or supply declined as young men saw other opportunities to escape poverty than joining the church, and the reports of bad priests began to increase.

After Vatican II, two more factors influenced the composition of the pool from whom priests were drawn. More left the church or didn’t enter, and allegiance to a conservative ideology like that reinforced by the current pope became more important. The already skewed gene pool was further altered by social factors.

The badness we’re seeing now that’s shocking isn’t the reports of men who molested young boys, but the blindness of the church hierarchy, which was probably always filled with a combination of the good, the mendacious, and the mediocre. Now it seems the good have disappeared, and only the ambitious survive, men who don’t understand the feelings of ordinary people towards the predatory sexual problems of a few fathers and see only their personal survival, and that of the institution that supports them, as important.

We’re seeing the same dynamic in politics. Campaigns have always been ugly, and the noble few. However, since Richard Nixon’s senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, attacks grounded in ideology, not simple partisanship, have so increased in viciousness one wonders who would become a politician.

The answer isn’t nobody, but judging from the headlines, it’s the vain, the ambitious and the greedy who fill the vacuum left when honorable men are driven from the public square by men like Rush Limbaugh.

Democrats seem plagued with the vain, from FDR, who ran for a third term because he believed the country couldn’t do without him, to the easily flattered John Edwards. For many, including Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton, the vanity was associated with a refusal to recognize society’s limits on the sexual freedom of married men.

Both parties attract the ambitious who abuse power for personal ends. On the one side, there’s New York’s governor, David Patterson, who asked the state police to intervene in a domestic violence dispute to protect an aide. On the other, there’s Sarah Palin, who wanted the state police to take sides in a divorce dispute of a relative when she was governor.

The Republicans seem to have the current monopoly on men who don’t understand the boundary between personal and public money. There’s John Ensign, who’s being investigated for asking donors to hire the husband of his mistress. There’s Jim Greer in Florida, who’s accused of using party donations to a business he secretly owned. There’s the Republican National Committee that used party funds to pay for an outing at a questionable nightclub and lists alcohol as an office supply.

However, Detroit’s financial problems reveal greedy Republicans are only more visible right now, and Mark Sanford shows the Democrats aren’t the only ones who are self-centered.

Many claim Jimmy Carter was a failure, but, in retrospect, he seems to be one of the few genuinely good men who entered politics. He may have been naive about Washington, but, one suspects that that’s not why he was hounded from office. The good are an offence to the wannabe’s, and the current crop of wannabe’s are an offence to the rest of us.