Yesterday, I described the thinking behind this Steve Yegge post as “creepy and dangerous”. Today, I want to focus on the “dangerous” part, after a quick detour to summarize “creepy”. In short, Steve advocates allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good in the realm of lawmaking; if people had followed this advice in the past, the world would likely be a worse place, and if people follow in in the future, it will likely become a worse place.
Creepy
As discussed yesterday, Steve’s analogy of law to code inverts the proper relationships between man, society, and law. Men created society to advance their interests, and society evolved law as a means of self-regulation. Code, on the other hand, is created by men to govern the evolution of processes designed to serve them. To treat law as code is to imply that the purpose of law is to order men’s activities in the pursuit of some higher purpose. This is a profoundly illiberal viewpoint. Furthermore, as I’ve said, I find it creepy. “I am not a number, I am a free man”, and all that.
Dangerous
Steve draws some troubling conclusions from his analogy. He argues that because it’s very, very difficult to make changes to large software systems (e.g. adding a feature to Amazon’s codebase) it’s also very, very difficult to make changes to large legal systems (e.g. the laws governing drugs in the United States). Furthermore, he assumes that poorly thought-out legal changes are destructive in the same way that poorly-thought out code changes are.
For the reasons discussed yesterday, this just ain’t so. Due to the nature of society, and its many non-legalistic methods of self-regulation, most changes to the law can do only a limited amount of harm; they can’t destroy society the way that one bad bit can destroy a process. (There are, of course, exceptions, but drug policy isn’t one of them.) It’s also much easier to change the law than to change code; just look at the number of laws, regulations, and administrative what-have-you that our federal, state, and local governments produce every year.
Steve’s analogy would recast many historically important changes to legal regimes as, essentially, ground-up rewrites of codebases – and we all know how well those tend to go. Considering the historical developments this analysis would have rendered inadvisable, I feel it’s fair to label Steve’s line of argument as “dangerous”.
History
Consider the following changes in legal regimes (I’m concentrating on those related to – not necessarily part of – American history) and ask yourself if they were really thought out at all, and whether they were more or less difficult to implement than the legalization of marijuana (Steve’s example) would be:
- Liberation of Eastern Europe
- Ending the draft (moving to an all-volunteer military)
- Civil rights movement (esp. the Civil Rights Act of 1964)
- Liberation of Western Europe
- Women’s suffrage
- Abolition of slavery
- American Revolution
Do you really think, assuming that U.S. policy towards marijuana is misguided, that changing it just can’t be done until a blue-ribbon Presidential commission sits down and works out comprehensive, 50-state, unform marijuana reform policy? (If you want a practical suggestion on what might be done without such a commission – since Steve raises a lot of practical questions which he feels must be answered – just move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule V. The results will be imperfect, but so is everything else.)
Caution
It’s important not to get carried away with this. There are a nearly endless number of really stupid ideas out there, which ought not to be tried. The notion of “leave well enough alone” has its place as well. There are lots of reasons not to change things. “It’s hard” just isn’t one of them.
