As a boy who grew up in South Africa, I retain fond memories of trips on South African Railways. If I concentrate, I can still smell the morning coffee, the green leather seats, and the thick smoke from the big Garrett class steam locomotive as I traveled with my family from our home in Johannesburg, happily clickety-clacking over the well-maintained rail joints to a seaside vacation in Cape Town. Today, many of the train trips I enjoyed are no longer possible because the rail beds have deteriorated beyond usage, and the once pristine coaches are abandoned and rusting on remote sidings.
The sad story of South Africa’s infrastructure decline is further illustrated by thousands of miles of once top-class roads, that are today impassable because of vast numbers of huge potholes, many of them big enough to swallow a small passenger car. In my childhood, like any first-world country, South Africa possessed a thoroughly modern and entirely reliable electrical grid. I never saw an electrical service black-out until I was in California during the summer of 2000. Today, most parts of South Africa lose power for several hours every day. Likewise, with ample supplies of clean fresh water, South Africa never used to impose water use restrictions. Again, I first saw that in California. But today, almost all South Africans live with constant shortages of water. What happened to South African trains, roads, electricity, and water systems? People stopped maintaining them, and normal wear and tear along with natural entropy, destroyed them. That’s what happened.
None of this is unique to South Africa. Aging infrastructure and utterly neglected maintenance have given us undrivable roads in New York and have turned a ride on Amtrak into a perilous adventure of 19th century travel. It has all but destroyed water systems in Michigan and allows dangerously deteriorated bridges and dams all over the country. The less said about California, the better.
Almost from its founding, American infrastructure was the envy of the world. This was true up until about 1960, at which point local and federal governments decided that the word ‘maintenance’ was an archaic relic of Old English, quite irrelevant to their job of governing.
In most cities and sometimes in rural areas, you will find homes similarly afflicted. Peeling paint, unmowed grass, immobile cars up on blocks in the yard. Are these sad instances of no maintenance the result of poverty? No, they are actually the result of cultural behavior that also caused the poverty in the first place.
Failure to maintain your possessions, whether you are a country, a state, a city or an individual homeowner, is a bad character flaw. You see, it is just plain fun to spend money on baubles and luxuries. It is quite delightful to hire your friends onto the city payroll and it is equally pleasurable to go on “important fact finding” trips to foreign countries–going first class all the way. Fixing potholes? Not so much. As Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass recently demonstrated, spending city money on an all-expense paid trip to Ghana is just more fun than spending it on making sure fire hydrants have water pressure.
Since human nature is human nature, why did the dull but vital chore of maintenance seem to occur reliably in the United States until the 1960s, and in South Africa until the mid 1990s? What changed?
What changed is that American culture shifted from religious to secular. From its earliest days, the invisible but potent spiritual matrix protecting American culture was essentially Judeo-Christian. In 1892, the Supreme Court declared (in Holy Trinity v. United States) that the historical record of America overwhelmingly demonstrated that the United States “… is a Christian nation.” And so, it continued.
On February 15, 1954, Time magazine reported that the annual prayer breakfast that year had President Eisenhower, the Vice President, the Chief Justice of the United States, Cabinet members, Congressmen, diplomats, and prominent businessmen in attendance. In his speech, Chief Justice Earl Warren spoke of America being a Christian nation. I think it is worth quoting a few of his words:
“…I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Saviour have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses . . . Whether we look to the first Charter of Virginia . . . or to the Charter of New England . . . or to the Charter of Massachusetts Bay . . . or to the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut . . . the same objective is present: a Christian land governed by Christian principles . . .”
Try to imagine contemporary dignitaries uttering those inspirational words.
However, the country began secularizing in about 1960 and it happened in a rapid cascade. South Africa had similarly been a country underpinned by the Biblical ethos of the deeply religious Christian Boers, the Afrikaans speaking white tribe of Africa who had been there since the 17th century. In 1994, South Africa dismantled white rule, and the country was taken over by the African National Congress, an unrepentant Marxist organization funded and guided by the Soviets since the 1950s.
What does all this have to do with maintenance? Well, you might roll your eyes a bit but maintenance is a Judeo-Christian religious value. That’s right. Let me explain. The neutral default condition of a natural person shaped chiefly by evolutionary biology, is that the present matters most. With no cultural guidance, a person would be primarily motivated by the compelling call of present needs for safety and pleasure. “What I want to do now, is far more important than possible future consequences which I can only faintly see on a hazy horizon.” Furthermore, “What I want to do now is so present and palpable that it will not be constrained by dim memories of a past that my actions now might betray.”
Children brought into the world and left to their own devices with a GIC thrown in for good measure are most likely to become very present-centric adolescents. That is what their biologies and inclinations will make them. Caretakers at the GIC will struggle to get these children to do homework because doing so means deferring present pleasures for the sake of a possibly good consequence the day after tomorrow. Absent Judeo-Christian values, we all become present-driven beings. Doing maintenance is a lot like homework, but harder.
Crime is mostly perpetrated by people with what the psychologists call poor impulse control. A simpler way of understanding this is that criminals are present-focused. Not every secular person commits murder, but most murders are committed by secular people.
Judeo-Christian Bible-based values focus intensively on past and future in order to make tomorrow and yesterday call as stridently as today. Children raised with those values are very familiar with personalities and events of two thousand years ago and more. In a perfectly natural way, they know that they have a future that includes, eventually, the responsibilities of marriage and families of their own. Expectations rooted in the past become organic to their personalities and promises of a future guide their steps today.
What is more, the superbly sacred four-letter name of God in Hebrew comprises the three Hebrew words for past, present, and future. Merely invoking the name of God as religious Jews do in worship three times daily, forces a constant awareness that present is little more than a thin slice of time that transforms future to past.
As populations and their governments become more secular, the past and the future lose their significance. Taking care of maintenance today for a better future, a future beyond their tenure in political office, is not a good deal for a person whose values are secular and present-oriented. Pulling down the statues of yesteryear is the flip side of the coin of imperiling tomorrow by ignoring maintenance.
Back when I was a boy riding the trains in South Africa, almost everyone at South African Railways, from senior executives to the lowest maintenance man all believed the Bible and worshiped on a regular basis. Things are different now. Are they ever!
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