Politicians are in the business of making laws. At election time, we choose the candidate who we think will make the fairest, cleverest, best laws. We all want our politicians to serve our personal interests. Anyone who is civic-minded enough to bother voting probably even has some notion of the greater good. But if our interests, personal or public, are handed over to lawmakers, then all we get are changes in the law.
We all know that the social fabric depends on a great many other things than just the law. After all, we don't murder and steal, even when the police aren't in sight. But when it comes to the collective expression of what is good, right, efficient, or intelligent, the only thing we all share is law. The only working system we have to come to an agreement as a city, state, or country is our government; our democracy is the only guarantor that we will have a say.
Being so limited in a mutually agreed-upon toolbox for civic decisionmaking, we see few options for doing things differently. As the psychologist Abraham Maslow said, "It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."
People do seek alternatives to hammers and nails. Libertarians say that there should be fewer laws and people will figure it out for themselves. Religious fundamentalists find complex reasons to say that their moral teachings are everybody's law. The collectivist Left protests, agitates, and unionizes. And none of us agree on a damned thing, so we end up where we started, at the ballot box, electing people whose only authority and expertise is making and modifying laws.
We depend on criminal and civil penalties when in other times and places, custom would have sufficed. We all feel some loss. We all sense that there was a more cohesive, instinctual way of being before life got so complicated. We pine for handshakes and eye contact. We yearn for town hall meetings. We wish that people just knew better. But they don't. We don't.
Still, our system of government mostly works, even if nobody comes away happy. Contracts are honored. Streets are swept. Children go to school, workers work, and life goes on. Even as a populous, highly heterogeneous, and individualistic society, the things we must do together somehow get done. We make the most out of a crude instrument, but maybe things could be better.
We clash mightily we turn our hammers to sticky moral decisions. What sort of laws are best to reduce teen pregnancy, or drug abuse? What about abortion, immigration, or gun violence? How about school drop-outs, obese smokers, or the common slacker? What kind of law can we really agree on? Prohibition taught us the limits of outright bans of vice, but we come back for more every time. Some people want to ban abortion. Others want to tax sugar like cigarettes. Some want to drug test welfare recipients, while others want to ban all guns. We all have pet social issues, and some of those issues are highly divisive; some are even matters of life and death. But does there need to be a law for everything? Is there some other mechanism by which people can decide to change things?
How can we expand our toolbox beyond the hammer of the law? One place to look is in the success stories that have emerged out of lawless, dysfunctional places. Decades ago, public health and foreign aid programs began to give up on things like mandatory immunization programs and moralizing about vice. They started to sit down with people and craft the messages that change personal decisionmaking.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV has ravaged communities for decades, society itself changed attitudes towards condoms and voluntary testing, demanding more from their leaders. In India, where corruption has long crippled basic public services, civil society organizations began to demand more from their institutions, regardless of what the parliamentarians in New Delhi did.
The Middle-East has seen a massive turnover in how power is allocated, and what sorts of say people have in their own lives and personal expression. Today, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Moscow to protest an unfair ruling arrangement. They don't want laws. They want fairness, security, and opportunity.
Here in America and across the West, something big is changing too. People are waking up and demanding not only better government, but better societies. The excesses of capitalism will likely be remediated as much by public shame as they will be by oversight and regulation. It's only just beginning here.
Social media, interest groups, and individuals are making real progress on our greatest collective challenges, from poverty and crime, to simple gluttony. Through spontaneous organization, we are regaining the social powers that were lost somewhere in modernism. We don't always need to wait for our lawmakers to agree. Sometimes, when people are organized and determined, we just do it ourselves.
