“…we woke up in the 60′s to all these really bad values..racism, gender discrimination, pollution… We tried to create a system where there were no bad values….but we eliminated the good ones.”
Every once in a while I catch an episode of Common Sense with Dan Carlin, a commentary and news analysis podcast. I remember an episode when Dan was talking about the ever growing number of laws and regulations that America creates. I think he used some analogy like peanut butter or some sticky glue-like substance; over time if you keep pouring it on, things get gummed up and activity slows to a crawl. Dan proposed the idea that for a new law to be passed, some old law that is no longer relevant or was mis-crafted needs to be stricken from the books. Sort of a way to keep things constant. Dan gets the credit for sparking my investigation of how law creates and inhibits our freedom…a topic that I begin to explore in this post.
Phillip Howard, founder of Common Good: a drive to overhaul the US legal system, makes an interesting case. Most of the comments below are excerpts or summaries of his ideas put forth in a 2010 TED Talk:
You were probably taught that law forms the foundation of freedom? I know I was. I still believe it. But Howard makes the point that somehow or another in the last couple decades the land of the free has become a legal minefield. It has changed our lives in imperceptible ways, but when we pull back we can see it plain as day.
I won’t go into great detail about specific case examples as you can probably remember lawsuits against McDonald’s for spilled hot coffee, the lawsuit for millions of dollars over a lost pair of pants at the dry cleaners, teachers being threatened with lawsuits for trying to control their classes. And it’s so much more than these popularized instances.
“Our culture has changed to a point where people no longer feel free to act in their best judgment. “
What do we do about it?
We can’t, nor do we want to, give up the right when people do something wrong to seek redress in the courts. We do need regulation. However we don’t have the vocabulary to deal with it.
We are trained to now treat every issue as a matter of individual rights. We take a powerful legal microscope, consider all possible extenuating circumstances, and compare what actually happened to the perfect bias of hind-site. We judge the dispute against the standard of a perfect society, where everyone agrees what’s fair, accidents don’t exist, risk will be no more….utopia.
Here is what Phillip Howard proposes:
1. Judge law mainly by its effects on society, not individual situations.
2. Trust in law is an essential condition of freedom. Distrust skews behavior towards failure.
For law to be the platform of freedom people have to trust it. Law carries with it the power of state.
It drives people from the smart part of the brain where instincts, experiences, and all the other factors of human creativity and good judgment are to the thin veiner of conscious logic.
If you make people self conscious about their judgments, people will make worse judgments. Self consciousness is the enemy of accomplishment.
Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something. – Edison
3. Law must set boundaries protecting an open field of freedom, not intercede in all disputes.
4. To rebuild boundaries of freedom, two changes are essential:
- Simplify the law. Law has to be simple enough for people to internalize into their daily lives. If people can’t internalize it they wont trust it. But.. life is complex…How do you make it simple?
- Restore authority to judges and officials to apply law. Rehumanize the law. To make law simple so one can feel free, the people in charge have to be free to use their judgment to apply the law according to resonable social norms.
As you are walking down the sidewalk during the day, you have to think that if there is a dispute there is someone in society that sees it as their job to affirmativly protect you if you are acting reasonably. That person does not exist today.
I can’t agree with him more. A free society needs red lights and green lights, otherwise we soon decend into gridlock. That is what has happened to America.
“What we need now is the authority to make common sense choices. Its the only way to get our freedom back, and its the only way to release the energy and passion to meet the challenges of our time.”
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