Balkinization: Civilization 101

Civilization 101

Andrew Koppelman

Amid the present nationwide rioting, some fundamentals of civilization have been overlooked, and a restatement may be helpful.

In a well-functioning society, citizens are able to live their lives in safety and security. They do not need to worry about criminal violence. Nor do they worry about police abuse. Nor do they need to worry, more generally, about unpredictable assaults from the state.

In the past few days, we have seen multiple failures along these dimensions. We have also seen a lot of foolish chatter, on both left and right, that focuses on some of these failures while neglecting others.

The origins of political order are not pretty. It often emerges when roving bandits are replaced by stationary bandits, who exert a monopoly of force over a given geographical area and so have an incentive to protect persons and property for the sake of more tax revenue in the future. The ensuing authoritarianism can be brutal, but if you keep your head down and don’t irritate the king, you can live your life in safety. I’ve spoken to Iraquis who tell me that life under Saddam Hussein, an evil man who kept the peace, was better for them than the incompetent and chaotic first years after George W. Bush conquered the country. (Had the war planners thought more coherently about how to reestablish order, the war might be remembered as a clear success.)

In any regime, crime is a problem. The fundamental defect in Bush’s governance of Iraq was that he could not protect citizens from private violence. We are seeing that today. The looters and arsonists are not idealists manifesting indignation at social injustice. For the most part, they are either opportunistic petty criminals or provocateurs of the right or left. If you sympathize with them or trivialize the harm they have inflicted on innocent people, you’re a fool.

As the Saddam example shows, the basics of civilization can be delivered even by bad, brutal police. It is, however, possible to do a lot better. In time, public officials, who started out a few millennia ago as mere apparatchiks of the king, can develop an ethic of their own. That is how the rule of law develops.

Our present predicament concerns how to reestablish (or, depending on what you think of the status quo ante, establish) the rule of law. In order to do that we need to be clear about what we are trying to accomplish.

The most basic elements of the rule of law are regularity (consistent deployment of state power) and publicity (the regularities are known to the subject population). Paul Gowder observes that these matter because they provide protection against hubris (the unaccountable use of power) and terror (the unpredictable use of power). Regularity and publicity are means to the end of preventing hubris and terror. The rule of law exists when those evils have been effectively prevented.

Policing, in its proto-civilizational stage, is the deployment of the king’s army on behalf of himself and his tribe. (Many early regimes consist of the dominance of one hereditary tribal unit over others.) In such a regime, the shape of policing is marked by tribal patterns. In Saddam’s Iraq, reasonable safety was available if you were an Iraqi Christian who didn’t challenge the regime. Not if you were a Kurd. With respect to subject populations, terror is a normal technique of governance.

In the United States, of course, governance by terror, prominently of African-American populations, has a long history, dating back to slavery. That ethic evidently continues in some police departments. It killed George Floyd. It has been conspicuously on display in the past several days. Police have attacked peaceful protestors and the press. If you sympathize with them or trivialize the harm they have inflicted on innocent people, you’re a fool.

The fundamental foundation of the ethic of good policing is the distinction between civilians and criminals. The job of the police is to protect the former from the latter. Police assaults on law-abiding civilians, in multiple cities across the United States, reveals a deep rot in the culture of those police forces.

So the forces of civilization have to struggle on two fronts: with the criminals and with the police. Reforming the police will be a long slog. The internal ethic of organizations can be changed, but it takes strong and effective leadership, sustained over a long period. The hopeful news is that the predominance of the thuggish police ethic is geographically clustered: many police forces have performed well. In Evanston, Illinois, where I live, a few police peacefully stood and watched about 5,000 protestors.

The rioters and looters are another matter. They must be dealt with quickly. Even police forces with nasty, repressive norms can do that job. (Though, as if their performance were not already bad enough, a line of Chicago police yesterday stood for three hours and watched looters without intervening.) Once more, bad governance is better than anarchy. Bush’s biggest mistake in Iraq was to effectively adopt an ethic of “fuck the police”: dismantling all the existing institutions of governance, the civil service and the military, because they have historically served a bad regime, and trying to start over from scratch. That didn’t go well. We have the police forces we have.

Even though it has been made conspicuously clear that George Floyd’s killing is not an isolated problem, and the protests are amply justified, I would not hold any more of them until the looting stops. They distract the police from the thugs. Officers who are monitoring demonstrations are not protecting neighborhoods. One should conduct one’s politics in a way that does not endanger innocents. As Barack Obama observes, protest will accomplish nothing without the hard work of local political organizing. That should now be our focus.

It is also pertinent that continuing waves of violence empower the most thuggish elements of the police, and politically help the Thug-in-Chief. If voters think that they have to choose between violent criminals and violent police, they will vote to have violent police. We are struggling on two fronts. We need to understand both.

Posted 5:08 PM by Andrew Koppelman [link]