Alex Singleton respects Peter Cuthbertson enough to bother trying to set him straight.
But Cuthbertson has two problems, the first of which being that he seems to think that all authority comes from the state (therefore we need must laws on which hand to hold our forks in when eating fruit salad, and whether to set boiled eggs on the Big or the Little End).
But the second problem is if anything worse. Recently I was in the coffee bar area of the swanky suite of offices where I make a living (at the tax-payer’s expense) whilst two fortysomethings were sorting out teas and coffees for a business meeting taking place on the same floor, but with a different (private sector) company. The woman, was better dressed in her brown-checkered suit than most British female politicians (which is to say that she didn’t look like a dressed-up showjumping horse on steroids or an English sheepdog with dyed hair wearing Nancy Reagan’s padded shoulder suits) without being a glamorous trendy. She was chatting to the man, who was dressed rather like my bank manager did ten years ago. As I was scrambling for teabags, milk etc, the man described how his daughter had invited her boyfriend to meet the parents. The woman then asked if it looked like a serious relationship and did the man approve.
After saying that it could be a promising relationship the man hesitated before adding “He’s quite a promising chap: he’s got a good well-paid job, drives a nice car, has a home in a nice neighbourhood, he looks presentable enough…” The father’s voice trailed off.
The woman interjected: “…but…”
And the man blurted out: “He’s a member of the Tory Party!”
And the woman said: “Oh dear!” with sympathy. The conversation ended: the poor man’s daughter was sleeping with a weirdo.
This story ends on a happy note. Last week I saw the man and he seemed to be in good spirits: it looks like daughter wised up…
I hold no brief for the Tory party and Peter Cuthbertson is ‘big enough and ugly enough’ to look after himself. However, I did check with your original post in which you pointed out that law probably started spontaneously. True enough but it is the ENFORCEMENT of law that requires a state apparatus – distressing as that may be to ‘anarcho-libertarians’. Otherwise the ‘law’ simply becomes whatever the local gangster decides it is.
David Duff
So table manners were not originally legislated by the state, but depend on the fear of a government owned or government-licensed police raid for their enforcement?
Not so.
Wearing black or white tie?
Clocks going clockwise?
Removing one’s hat when standing at the pissoire as a lady walks by, or not?
Gambling debts in the UK (not enforceable in English courts)?
The recipe for black pudding?
The state can and often does interfere in these matters, but the suggestion that we obey rules only because the state created them, or that the state enforces them is to deny the existence of the private domain in a civil society. Which would be somewhat odd for a conservative.
My impression is that the truth was a delicate balance between the two above (David and Antoine).
Namely that disputants with a case to settle would often go to a local gangster (sorry, baron, lord….) and ask for mediation. But if the baron was ridiculously biased or unhelpful, people would stop doing that, and should a rival authoritative thug be available, go to him instead.
So enforcement does rather require force, but it was quite often freely chosen from among alternatives. And on the other side, a thug desiring respectability and affection (they do, you know) could acquire it by building up a reputation as a fair-minded king who tries to reach acceptable and apparently just decisions when mediating between rival petitioners.
On the other hand, in some, perhaps most parts of the world, as David suggests, law enforcement really was just imposed by the strongest local lord for millennia – and I reckon the difference still shows between the two kinds of societies.
Societies where there were sometimes choices of enforcers and so a tradition of consensual fairness grew up (Antoine’s view overpowering David’s) and societies where as long as anyone can remember, what the king says happens, or else (David’s view overpowering Antoine’s).
I’m not disputing the early emergence of state or quasi-state law enforcement. What I am claiming is that some types of ‘law’ do not emanate from the state and are not enforced by the state. Table manners, the laws of cricket, which rooms (if any) in the Reform Club women were permitted, which direction clocks go round, whether Tuesday follows Monday and so on.
The question of what would happen to public order if the state didn’t exist is a good one for conservatives to pose of libertarians. But to start from a basis that ALL laws require the state is the sort of legal positivist thinking that no conservative should even contemplate.
It is one thing to believe that man is flawed and therefore cannot be expected to do good out of human nature. It is quite another to believe that therefore human agencies can or ought to overcome this by state intervention.
The ‘War on Drugs’ for example can be criticised from the eminently conservative viewpoint that the War on Drugs apologist:
i) assumes that people can be persuaded to stop seeking short-term pleasure,
ii) implies that the state is in anyway capable of attempting such a task,
iii) believes that it is a proper function of state power to engage in a futile project of this sort,
iv) deludes itself that government agencies are staffed by incorruptable saints who will never abuse their powers or allow themselves to be bought or ever make a mistake,
v) or worst of all knows all of the above and is simply interested in exercising arbitrary power in the name of the public good, without believing in it.
Similar criticisms can be made of every other welfare programme.
In this matter I’m sure that I would have the complete agreement of Sean Gabb.