Law and Order

This is not about the TV show.

My dream college was St. John's College with campuses in two states. It's a very rigorous humanities or liberal arts degree with a great books curriculum that still uses colloquiums -- rigorous discussions -- as an important part of the curriculum.

When it's done right, liberal arts is supposed to be the liberating arts. It's supposed to be empowering and teach you how society works and how to be an effective citizen.

I used to say that as a homeschooling mom, I was giving my two socially challenged children a humanities education and defining it as an education in how to effectively live with the inconvenient, inescapable fact of your own humanity -- and that of other people.

I never got to go St. John's. But I did spend many years in online forums like Hacker News, Metafilter and Cyburbia that were like colloquiums without academic credit. And I generally tried to position myself as humble and a nobody and tried to make sure people would tell me what they really thought of my ideas.

I didn't really want my ideas to be deferred to based on social status. I wanted people to tell me "That's stupid and here's WHY." so that once in a while I could get schooled on stuff that actually mattered.

I chose to be open about my gender knowing that automatically makes me a second-class citizen.

I was open about being homeless for years knowing that's socially stigmatizing.

I didn't really expect people to be so abusive to me. I don't hurt people for sadistic funsies because I think I can get away with it. I don't understand people who do. 

Being a woman or poor aren't moral defects. They aren't crimes and they aren't actually reasonable proxies for "probably up to no good" though homeless people are routinely treated like they must be bad people.

I and my sons were thrown out of a Starbucks when we got blamed for trashing the bathroom based entirely on being homeless. No, we hadn't trashed the bathroom and we became very aware that wealthy people do stuff like that and expect staff to just clean up after them like servants. And then staff "kick the dog" and blame someone even lower status rather than confront a monied client.

I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and I developed a dripping sarcasm voice in part out of concern that classmates who weren't taking physics and chemistry and higher order math were taking my jokes as statements of fact and I didn't want anyone getting hurt because they thought X really worked that way when my point was probably "This is stupid and eye roll worthy."

So I knew from firsthand experience that people respecting everything you say for a legitimate reason like she's smart and better educated than us! can be very problematic, even if no one is trying to kowtow to anyone and no one is trying to kiss butts and social climb. Even if they just honestly lack the background information and don't realize you were joking.

It gets worse when money and power get involved and people don't want to admit they know your secretary is sleeping with you, that wasn't really your wife at that conference etc. because you could fire them and make it difficult for them to ever get a job again.

I'm curious how social things work. I'm curious about organic development of things like nations and legal systems. How and why do things like that develop at all and what makes one system go one way and another system go another?

And I'm keenly aware that existing mental models and existing social status are essentially dirty data that's tough to separate from meaningful conclusions.

I'm interested in questions like What is a reasonable basis for age of majority? and I believe one element of that is you need to have adequate brain development to have executive function: Executive Function and Age of Majority.

Biologically, most people develop executive function at age twelve and it takes a year or two to practice using that effectively. Bar mitzvah marks the Jewish religious age of majority where you can be reasonably expected to be held morally responsible for your actions and it occurs at age thirteen.

So older cultures recognized that prior to thirteen, it just didn't work to expect a kid to really understand certain things.

I'm a former homemaker and homeschooling mom and one of the best things I did as a parent was educate myself and my children about reasonable developmental expectations and how things worked in terms of biology and personal effectiveness.

I was a wizard on Dr. Mario and could play it to level thirty. That means at least ten straight wins at high speed because after level twenty, it kicks you back down to twenty if you lose.

We would handicap me when I played against my kids and have me start at a harder level so they had some hope of winning. And one son commented on the fact that he couldn't see something I saw.

I could do sideways matches that always weirded him out because he couldn't see that potential. He only saw the vertical matches. 

I told him "You're a child. I have brain functions you lack. You will probably be able to see it when you are older."

I also talked to him about things like the practice of "sleep on it." If you are frustrated and it's just not working, stop wrestling with it. Walk away, take a break, come back to it fresh.

So once when one of his games was making him crazy and he just couldn't beat it, he put it away for a few months and came back to it when he was a little older and probably had more brain development. And he finally beat it, first try, after historically dying over and over.

A functional society grows out of pragmatic understanding of things like biological brain development. And all societies develop organically and none are without "defects in their DNA" so to speak.

Absolutely no nation or anything created by humans is without antecedents that "Well, that's just how some guy in the past did it and it worked for him and persisted, but we don't really have a good theory for why that works and what the best mental model is."

There's a saying that scientific progress proceeds one funeral at a time. People get successful for their ideas, they gatekeep out new competitors and protect their turf. 

We learn meaningful limits by a process of failure. 

Older societies that were smaller almost certainly landed on thirteen or fourteen as a common age of majority because of things going badly if they tried X with twelve year olds.

Society has grown more complex and it mostly doesn't work anymore to call a thirteen year old a legal adult. But we do have emancipation laws for declaring a minor a legal adult, so there's already existing legal precedent or legal recognition that biologically or mentally an adult capable of adult decisions and adult responsibility is distinct from our social and legal practice of making you an adult at age eighteen and in some social situations, the courts have the authority to make an exception.

And law and order is fundamentally about managing social things like that. It's about wrangling relationships between people and trying to find a reasonable basis for how to draw the line in conflicts between two individuals or between one individual and a group or the larger society.

If two people are perfectly loving and ethical and good to each other and they are the only two people in this valley and the outside world has nothing to do with them, cool. No problem. You don't need marriage.

Marriage exists as a legal institution because two people aren't necessarily good to each other, but it also exists because:

1. Sexual unions commonly result in children, so their relationship to each other is highly likely to have substantial impact on other people, if only their offspring.

I have long wondered if the expression about "When two become one." is really about two sets of separate DNA mixing to produce a child and now you can't really separate a man and a woman socially and practically without significantly impacting that child in probably negative ways. 

I have long speculated that marriage organically has origins in the reality that when a child results from your union, it's now problematic for a LOT of people if you two want to call it off in a snit because human children have long development cycles and don't become functional members of society if they are neglected or abused.

2. Inheritance and other things means if you aren't legally wed and protected by society, relatives and other people can interfere with the outcome no matter how good your partner tried to treat you.

This is a fundamental basis of gay rights advocates wanting the right to marry in a same sex relationship. 

Without the right to marry, you and your partner can say "I love you, I don't care what other people say." and put their funds in a shared bank account and buy a house in the name of whomever qualifies for a mortgage -- probably unable to put both names on it and actually qualify for a mortgage -- and when he dies, the relatives inherit the house and throw you out of a house you've lived in for decades if you haven't jumped through a LOT of hoops to try to make sure that can't happen.

And lots of gay people have had that done to them because the icky relatives in Million Dollar Baby are all too common. 

Years ago, I read an article about a heterosexual couple who were living together and expecting a baby and they both had careers and had kind of new age, hippie attitudes and didn't feel marriage made sense.

The boyfriend had begun saying "My wife is pregnant." at parties so people would congratulate him instead of going "Dude, sorry. That sucks!" and they were finding that it was so time consuming and so much of a hassle to arrange things like medical coverage and inheritance rights that would be automatic if they were married that they were beginning to wonder if they should just get married to simplify the whole thing.

A college professor of mine whom I suspect was probably gay once said something like "Marriage comes with 159 distinct rights." I could be misremembering the number he used, but it was SHOCKINGLY high.

He was commenting on why gay people were seeking the right to marry. And I halfway think society balks at that probably because the concept of marriage likely grew organically out of the birth of children and same sex couples can't OOPSIE get knocked up.

I suspect historically, adolescents slept around quietly until some chick got pregnant and then the two were marched to the court house or church at gun point. Because just rolling the genetic dice is vastly more effective at improving odds of a baby happening than any miracles of modern medical fertility intervention and may be a proxy for some baseline compatibility.

I have a genetic disorder with fertility challenges. My sister spent years researching fertility issues and tried to get pregnant with two husbands and etc. I don't think either of her marriages was really a good idea.

I think mine was better than average and my first pregnancy was "I'm what?" and my second one resulted after skipping birth control two or three times.

I was surrounded by people saying they had tried for their second baby for eight months or two years and I was put in the uncomfortable position of calling my older sister and telling her I'm pregnant again when she still was struggling to get pregnant.

I think in a heterosexual couple, biological compatibility for purposes of making a baby may be an important basis of or proxy for general compatibility.

Our relationship worked in part because I have serious respiratory issues and my husband was the one who didn't want people smoking in our house. I couldn't have stayed if he was a smoker.

I've thought about that a LOT over the years because of meeting people via Internet who found me attractive and were smokers. I've thought a LOT about "What exactly IS this vague concept of compatibility?" 

And as someone who spends a LOT of time online and has serious health issues dictating serious constraints on my life, I've frequently had the opportunity to be chatted up online by people I likely would have never spent time with in person because they have physical habits that I cannot be around.

Historically, if you just didn't get chatted up by biologically incompatible people because you don't eat the same foods or whatever, how would you have ever known? 

And in a world that encourages people to save it for marriage or not sleep around, how much good data do most people have on how to determine compatibility and what that even means?

I don't know how anyone would test that hypothesis, but I have long wondered if ability to readily conceive a child together is a proxy for "Probably happy to share meals together and a thousand other things essential to living together peacefully and not being constantly at each other's throats and on each other's very last nerve."

This blog is kind of a hobby of sorting out my interest in the organic basis of growing civilization from the ground up as a legal construct rooted in moral best practices.

With that defined as figuring out how to do right by individuals and the group as a whole when there is inevitably conflict of interest anytime two or more people do anything at all together.

A woman alone doesn't produce a child and doesn't need marital laws. A man alone doesn't either.

Most likely, the origin story of marriage is babies happen. But marriage is legally distinct from simply being a parent and society is perfectly happy to help heterosexual couples adopt or get significant medical intervention to get a child. Failing to reproduce doesn't per se nullify a contract of marriage.

So I am for same sex marriage and protecting the rights of the LGBTQ community. I see no reason to deny them rights based on lack of naturally occuring fertility within those relationships.

This piece isn't really intended to be about marriage or LGBTQ rights. It's about what I'm doing with this blog and that's merely an illustrative example of what I'm trying to do here.