I don’t think I ever properly explained this title to my last blog entry.
It is like this. The economy is a complicated interaction of many many people making transactions. Socialistic economic planning committees try to control this process and bring about desirable results. Apart from the question as to whether the results are really desirable, the results are usually quite different from what was intended. The economy is too big and too complicated to be controlled by directives from a national planning committee.
And something like this is also true of law. The rule of law is not something that is provided by a certain governmental structure (i.e. a republic v. a democracy). The rule of law is a societal custom. It is preserved by a population that follows it and therefore passes it on to the next generation. Legislatures try to improve on this situation by producing many new laws every year. It simply drowns the society in coercive irrationality and almost never achieves the intended results.
Another analogy would be language. We speak and preserve and transmit our language to the next generation without a central planning committee wielding the authority to tell us how to use words and which ones we should use. Legislatures are like the geniuses who decided we should all speak Esperanto.
Legislatures are like the geniuses who decided we should all speak Esperanto.
I understand the point you’re trying to make. However, Esperanto is not the best example of it for two reasons.
First, Esperanto isn’t centrally planned. It started out as one person’s project when first published 122 years ago, but soon after, its inventor released it to the public. From then on, it was free to evolve and grow at the whims of the community, just like any other language. As you might guess, in the beginning, there were holes that needed filling and wrinkles that needed smoothing, but the community took care of that by using it every day in every imaginable situation, just as happens in any other language. It should come as no surprise, then, that 122 years later, Esperanto has matured into a real, living natural language.
Second, there is not, nor has there been, any concerted effort to replace anyone’s native language with Esperanto. Esperanto is meant to be a voluntary easy-to-learn second language to allow people of different native languages to communicate effectively at low cost, not a mandatory unique language to replace all others. The idea is to break down language barriers, not by getting rid of every other language, but by providing a low-cost tool to bridge those barriers when one’s native language or regional language no longer suffices.
I’m actually a bit curious to which “geniuses” you refer.
Yikes. Thanks for the correction. I was trying to basically say that the idea that law should be rationally planned and designed is similar to the conceit (in my opinion) of saying that language should be rationally or scientifically planned or designed.
It may be a doomed analogy, since my version of Esperanto’s history and theory is fictional. I was misremembering some small bit of vague trivia from High school. Maybe I could have said giving legislatures power is like requiring everyone to learn Esperanto (with yearly mandatory revisions). Maybe.
No problem :-). Esperanto has a relatively small 2,000,000 speakers (and growing), and they tend to keep a low profile, so misconceptions abound and are hard to avoid. I try to do my small part by correcting them where I find them (gently, I hope; you’ll let me know if I was too blunt).
Now that I think about it, though, Esperanto may actually a good example of the point you’re trying to illustrate, albeit for the very opposite reason you first gave. It was indeed centrally planned at first, but its inventor realized very early on that if his language was to gain any traction, he had to let it go, which he did, and the rest is history. An earlier constructed language you may have heard of, Volapük, suffered a different fate. Its inventor just wouldn’t let go, and while it had some success at first, as soon as Esperanto came along, people jumped ship en masse. Volapük died on the operating table.
Yes, it sounds like the experience is similar to some history of open source.