While we have the chance to discuss important matters, let us do so. This column will return to the subject of law, and in particular what we might call “objective” law. The author frequently uses this term, but explaining it properly keeps getting put off—either Putin happens, or some other unpleasantness. Understanding these matters, in the author’s view, is far more important than understanding Putin, since it helps people dismiss any potential Putin as insignificant, which renders him completely powerless.
So, is there something between people that is as inevitable in its consequences as the laws of physics? There is—namely, the regularities of cultural evolution. However, two problems are associated with understanding this phenomenon. The first is the nature of this objectivity; the second concerns what the law is actually about.
Let me try to explain. In the physical world, regularities appear to us as “given.” They have, so to speak, always existed on their own. The question of their origin troubles only rare eccentrics; an ordinary person, to interact with nature, need not contemplate where its laws came from. It is enough simply to know how they manifest themselves.
Quite different if we are talking about “human laws.” People assume they invented all the ways they interact with each other. And indeed, there are all kinds of parliaments and governments (and before them, kings and other leaders), and the greater part of media and Facebook is occupied by discussions of varying degrees of scholarly rigor precisely about what we should do with “laws,” what else needs to be “adopted,” and how we need to “change the system” so that, finally, things might improve.
But when you think about it, it becomes clear that “laws,” as we are accustomed to understanding them (that is, orders from superiors), cannot logically precede human society. Hobbesian “war of all against all” cannot give way to an order in which property rights are respected. A situation is impossible in which people would agree, “Let’s stop robbing each other and put over ourselves a boss who will watch over this and order us what to do”—however such an agreement is understood, literally or metaphorically. After all, for people to decide to act in this way, they must already value the benefits of peaceful exchange more than the opportunities provided by robbery, which contradicts the conditions of the problem. That is, in Hobbes’s formulation (and that of modern institutionalists), knowledge is immanently present that peaceful cooperation is better (cheaper and more beneficial) than robbery—so it remains unclear where the “war of all against all” suddenly came from.
To explain where objective law came from and what it represents, we can do so if we abandon positivism and look at human society as a product of evolution, specifically cultural evolution. This means that we consider not the biological evolution of the human species, but the process of the formation, development, and dying out of certain practices and ideas that bring their carriers results important to them.
Roughly speaking, those communities survived and prospered that, due to various circumstances, espoused certain approaches toward their fellow species members—and it should be noted that they did not realize the consequences of these approaches, did not consciously “invent” them for a specific purpose. That is, among an infinite set of taboos, they happened to have certain things (for example, integration of strangers rather than their destruction) that allowed these people not only to survive but also to spread their ideas to other, less fortunate groups.
Now we can say that the direction in which this evolution moves as a whole can be described as the selection of those practices that enable peaceful, mutually beneficial interaction among an increasing number of unfamiliar people. After all, humans have not been able to live without society for a very, very long time; interaction with other people is not only a means of prosperity but of survival. You cannot make even an ordinary pencil on your own; thousands of people unfamiliar with each other across the world must labor so that you can draw your silly pictures on paper—independently, you would be capable of nothing more than a stick for digging in sand.
Fundamental to the very possibility of interaction is the unpredictability of the future and, above all, the behavior of other people. Any valuable activity takes time, and the more time it takes, the more valuable it is—for you. Regular and purposeful activity is possible only when you are confident that things will proceed in a certain way, that is, when the future behavior of other people is sufficiently predictable. One might say that a person “lives into the future” and even lives by the future, which is precisely what distinguishes them from animals. As long as we are alive, we have plans, and it is these plans that constitute our lives.
Thus, we can attempt to formulate the objective law that “governs” the process of cultural evolution as follows: “Those practices survive that contribute to reducing the uncertainty of the future.” And the first obvious consequence of this law is the prohibition of aggression, which is the main cause of uncertainty of the future within a group of people.
Now, returning to the question of the nature of objectivity of social laws, we can say that it is cultural evolution that makes them objective. This process is no more controlled by us than the regularities of the physical world surrounding us, although, of course, we are both participants in this process and its cause.
And a few words on our second question—what is the object of this law, and on whom or what do its consequences fall. Critics of objectivity usually say something like this: “Here is a certain individual who grabbed bare wires and fully experienced the power of electricity. Another, stepping off the roof of a nine-story building, could not convincingly resist the law of gravity. But a third one murdered and robbed and nothing happened to him; he became richer, lived long and happily, and died in his bed. Where is the objectivity here?”
The thing is that the law we are talking about, or more precisely, its consequence known to us as “thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal” (that is, do not initiate aggression), “operates” not directly on the individual but on society—that is, on the ways of interaction among many people. Murder and robbery increase the unpredictability of the future, and therefore introduce chaos into the self-organizing orders of society. It is precisely these that are destroyed: cooperation becomes difficult or even impossible, society grows poorer and may even collapse entirely and disappear. All of this, of course, not only reflects on the people comprising this society but is realized through their behavior. The more aggressive the environment, the simpler and shorter-term people’s plans become, the easier it is for them to join in aggression, spinning a flywheel that ultimately destroys society.
There are many examples of this; at least, you will not find a society in which aggression rages and which at the same time prospers. The 20th century was rich in such experiments—the USSR, China, and other communist countries, in which state aggression was a source of constant chaos. They experienced repression, hunger and poverty, lost enormous numbers of people, and degraded morally and ethically.
And this happened absolutely regularly; the influence of the law here occurs without your participation and without your knowledge, just like the laws of physics.