Civilization and Its Bounds

Civilization is not an easy subject to ponder. Clearly there is an historically broken but intellectually continuous thread from Sumer to Greece to Rome and then to Byzantium. After that the canon passed to the Arabs who held it through the darkness along with the Byzantine monasteries. From the ruins and towers of Byzantium then rose the bourgeois phoenix, market driven, not quite civilized, like Christian Byzantium, but closer to the barbarian than they, which entrepreneur by entrepreneur, disruption by disruption, yet owns the planet.
If it be possible to characterize civilization as moral and intellectual agents conserving pattern and meaning from chaos then market economies are not quite civilized however effective they are at wealth building under specific social environments. The market conserves the pattern. Participants conserve the market. They do not curate the canon so much as engage in database exercises as technicians. This is not ancient civilization. It is civilization evolved and once removed. It is not the same thing.
Make no mistake. Market driven economies build wealth and concentrate wealth in order to build more wealth. That is all they do and they are without equal in doing it. Meaning, in a market economy, is a game and the score is kept in money. An arbitrageur, an entrepreneur, and a banker are moral agents in a closed system of behavior involving these major elements: due diligence, contract performance, and market discipline along with codified considerations of merchant law such as warranties of merchantability. The logical end of the process of wealth creation is the holder of the larger score, the capitalist, employing his cash as a market moral agent to increase the capability of the market economy to create wealth.
This is a closed system. It goes nowhere but to the bank with bags of money and it needs rational constraints to make it humane.
Realize, market morality and the civilized moral system are probably incommensurate. It is essential that market morality be contained in that larger moral structure as something separate, not inferior but different. We clearly need a model of society and business complementing whatever economic model arises from Big Data and AI and we do not have one and are not particularly discovering one. We are behaving into a theoretical vacuum which can result in nihilism and social decay. That is the dilemma we face.