Laws we expect to be broken (Quinn)
July 26th, 2007 | Published in Philosophy, Morality, Quotes, Politics | 1 Comment
“Having saddled yourselves with laws that you assume will be broken, you’ve never found anything to do that makes better sense than punishing people for doing exactly what you expected them to do in the first place. For ten thousand years you’ve been making and multiplying laws that you fully expect to be broken, until now I suppose you must have literally millions of them, many of them broken millions of times a day.”
–Ishmael in Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael (1997), p. 109
July 31st, 2007 at 9:19 am (#)
I just finished reading Quinn’s newest book.
What strikes me is the difficulty of getting across ideas to the general public, especially when one is exploding popular cultural myths.
Quinn is a Systems Thinker.
Perhaps fewer than 1% of the population is familiar with the concept of systems thinking and the methods of analysis and reasoning employed in the art and science of systems thinking.
The Socratic Method is one of the more powerful and effective tools for inquiry, but a lot of people find it annoying, because of the endless questions, many of which have no immediate answers.
Related to Quinn’s analysis of the Genesis Story, there is a further insight into the meaning of Adam’s Fall. In Taoism, there is a saying, “Think about Right and Wrong, and one immediately falls into Error.” The issue isn’t so much about creating an axis ranging from saintly good on one hand to demonic evil on the other, but what one does when confronted with an act lying somewhere along that axis.
It is customary in our culture to divide that axis into two zones, called Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, Lawful and Unlawful. On the one side, there is reward; on the other side, punishment. We establish rules that define the dividing line beyond which some sanction or punishment is to be meted out.
The problem isn’t so much defining the axis of Good and Evil as in defining the response function upon it. Ever since the dawn of civilization, humans have constructed rules and laws superimposed upon that axis. These rules and laws typically are expressed in dictums of the form, “IF … THEN … OR ELSE …”
It turns out (from a mathematically grounded systems analysis) that such a regulatory architecture is a tragic and lamentable mistake. Augustine called it “Original Sin,” but a better name for it would be “Human’s Original Logic Error,” because it’s an error in mathematical reasoning.
The assumption upon which all rules are based is that rule-governed systems are orderly and stable.
But well over a century ago, mathematicians discovered that rule-driven systems are inherently chaotic.
There is a solution. One must evolve from rule-based methods to function-based methods.
Alas, most people in our culture lack the mathematical depth to appreciate the concept of function-based methods of system regulation.
For more detail, see Disjunction Dysfunction and the Error Function at:
http://underground.musenet.org:8080/utnebury/error.html