Custom, Coercion and Societal Harmony
Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from a presentation for the Academy of Philosophy and Letters delivered on June 3, 2022.
Have you ever attended a symphony? If you arrive early, before the performance begins, you might hear the players warming up. It’s not ugly, but it’s chaotic. Some instruments are slightly out of tune, and the players go about making apparently random sounds, without regard for what the other players or the audience is doing. Chatter and noise fill the venue. Then there is a moment when the conductor steps onto the stage, gives a bow, raises the baton, and begins to direct the players. A harmonious blend of sound replaces cacophony. At that moment, something exhilarating happens; there is a transition from the warmup to the performance. The new element is order.
In art, order is a component of beauty; in society, order is the basis of peace, prosperity, liberty, justice and any other good we seek in community. Civil disorder is deadly and destructive. An estimated 220 people died in 329 urban riots between 1964 and 1968. An estimated 25 people died amidst the protests and looting that occurred in 2020. We experience social order in so many settings–classrooms, meetings, church services–and it is so essential to so much that we do in life that we are liable to forget its importance until images and experiences of disorder jolt us toward a greater appreciation for it. We have seen many such images and had many such experiences over the past few years–civil disorders following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the violence in Kenosha following the shooting of Jacob Blake, the January 6th assault on the capitol, and the multiple instances of mass gun violence just in the last few weeks come to mind.
There are other indicators of a decline in order in our social relations: the rise of nonmarital births among white, black, and Hispanic women; the decline of marriage and other associational affiliations; the emergence of a normless, ostensibly sex-positive culture Christine Emba interrogates in her new book Rethinking Sex. There is the ongoing opioid epidemic and the rise in homelessness in California and major cities in other states. There are frequent episodes of violent crime in predominantly black inner cities of municipalities like St. Louis, Baltimore, Birmingham, and Detroit. All these phenomena and others suggest the need for renewed focus on the good of order.
Scholars often point to freedom as the quintessential aspiration and value of Western political thought. A famous entry in this genre is Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, where he describes the conditions and institutions necessary to establish individual liberty, narrowly defined as the ability to plan and live one’s own life free from the arbitrary coercion of others.1 Yet, Hayek acknowledges liberty is not the only social good. In fact, order makes possible a society with a high degree of individual liberty.2 Order is also a good; not the only good, but a good in its own right. My aim here is to discuss the value of order and the conditions that sustain it, and to offer a few preliminary thoughts on the challenge of restoring and preserving order in our time.
Here’s my argument: there are basically two ways for a people to maintain social order: law backed by coercion, and convention or custom backed by social sanctions.3 To be sure, the two are intertwined, and every society employs a mixture. But establishing and maintaining an enduring order depends on a fairly low coercion-to-convention ratio. In other words, you need most processes of social control and order-maintenance to be based on voluntary compliance enforced through social sanctions. In the United States, since the 1960s, we’ve built a system of social control that has the ratio backwards. We’re lax on the convention side and overly reliant on the legal side. The social order is losing legitimacy because it’s overly reliant on coercion. While working to restore the legitimacy of law enforcement and criminal justice institutions, we need to strengthen and build social institutions that provide discipline and promote order. Yet, while proponents of defunding or abolishing the police are misguided in important respects, elements of their logic point us to the need to deal with root causes of social disorder rather than merely with symptoms. The real root causes, though, are deeper than the structural and economic issues many proponents of ‘defund’ logic have in mind: they are spiritual. We must ultimately attend to those root causes if we wish to restore an enduring, decent, and just order.
The constitution of order comes with costs to the individual and potentially to society, but it is essential to human flourishing. As conservative thinker Russell Kirk and others have taught, order, justice, and freedom are the goods political institutions aim to secure.4 There is a sense in which order takes priority because without order, justice and freedom are insecure. Order is a paradigmatic concern for conservative thinkers, but liberal and social contract theorists too acknowledge that the maintenance of order benefits all the members of a society and requires limits on individual liberty.5 While Hayek, the theorist of freedom, focuses on the benefits of freedom for civilization, not necessarily each individual, theorists of order like Kirk and Simone Weil begin with the needs of the individual person, of the soul.6 Weil famously described order, a clear sense of what one is to do in life, as “the first of the soul’s needs.”7
What is “order”? At the least, a minimalist conception of ‘mere order’ would evoke notions of predictability, stability, and calm.8 A situation of social order is one in which human interaction in the economic, political, and social spheres proceeds peaceably in accordance with broadly shared expectations.9 We can think about order as a public good. Securing order requires solving problems of both coordination, which requires establishing shared expectations, and cooperation, which requires solving prisoners’ dilemmas that incentivize defection.10 We need to know which side of the road to drive on, and we need to be able to rely on other drivers to actually drive on that side–and to reliably do so ourselves. We need both the means and the motives to cooperate and, by and large, to act in accordance with the expectations others have about our behavior.
Though order is essential for human life, there exists a human impulse and a rational incentive at times to buck against order, to engage in disorderly behavior. While we frequently experience order, we also frequently observe, and perhaps commit, infringements of order. We encounter the “free-rider problem” of providing a public good: the fact that those who do not help to produce it may still enjoy it. And so, securing order requires institutions and systems of rules that channel and constrain individual behavior. These institutions generate behavioral expectations and also provide incentives raising the benefits of orderly behavior, along with the costs of disorderly behavior, such that orderly behavior is sufficiently attractive to most actors.
Law is an important institution of order, and coercion a necessary tool for raising the cost of disorderly behavior. The effectiveness of law itself, though, depends upon a prior acceptance of the law and those who enforce it as legitimate. The successful establishment of a government and of law occurs with reference to, and operates as one component of what Kirk called the “civil social order.”11 Beliefs and ideas are central to maintaining the legitimacy and therefore the continued functioning of a governing authority.12 Legitimate authority rests largely on voluntary obedience. If a centralized authority cannot command the allegiance of the members of society, it will resort primarily to coercion, which reflects weakness, not strength.13
Other mechanisms within the civil social order also work to secure order. Conventions, customs, and institutions, from language to rules of the road to rules of dating and marriage, serve coordinating and sanctioning functions, allowing us to generate reliable expectations even from numerous people we do not know personally, but with whom we share a society. Some of these are the sorts of institutions that political scientist Elinor Ostrom explored in Governing the Commons for regulating use of common-pool resources in a sustainable fashion.14 Church discipline, which in earlier periods of American history played an important role in order-maintenance, is another example.
Now to justify my claim that our regime of social order maintenance is imbalanced. Failing to discourage disorder through social sanctions, we have established a regime that overly relies on punitive legal sanctions, eroding its legitimacy. Research in law and economics and related fields has linked the notable rise of nonmarital births since the 1960s directly to both murder and property crime rates.15 The prevalence of nonmarital births is highest among black Americans, which likely goes some way to explaining the higher level of arrests, convictions, and incarceration rates among black Americans, particularly black men. This is an example of a failure of social institutions to effectively discourage behavior with deleterious effects for children, a failure that contributes to further disorder in the form of what Matt DeLisi and John Paul Wright call “behavioral poverty.” The issue of the family is the clearest example, but there are other ways we have failed to establish order through social conventions or through less punitive forms, leading to an overreliance on the criminal justice system. Former Dallas police chief and current police superintendent for Chicago made this point in a July 2016 speech, that Americans have sloughed the burden of dealing with social problems such as mental health and social dysfunction onto the police.
Over the same time period, since the mid-1960s, we have seen the rise of “overcriminalization” and what many call the American “carceral state.” Partly as a response to the civil disorders and destruction of the 1960s, criminal justice policy grew increasingly punitive up to the mid-2000s before state legislatures began to pass reforms.16 Our rate of incarceration, the highest in the world, has roughly quadrupled since 1972.
Once again, the effect is differential by race and economic status: black and Hispanic Americans together make up the great majority of those incarcerated and justice-involved across the country.17 In effect, our failure to promote and establish effective forms of conventional social control, combined with our punitive criminal justice policy, has meant, to borrow a point from Glenn Loury about the decision to crack down on sellers, rather than buyers in the drug war: we middle class Americans “balance our cultural budget on the backs of the weakest and darkest of our fellow citizens.”18 The deterioration of social order is not limited to the inner city; it is a broader failure that nevertheless affects the most marginalized among us most intensely.
What is to be done? Those advocating to ‘defund the police’ and promoting the discourse of ‘abolition’ do not adequately appreciate the role of law and policing in securing mere order, particularly in the poorest and most disadvantaged communities. Yet, while the ‘defund’ argument is misguided, a simplistic ‘law and order’ response is also inadequate.19 There is indeed a need to restore legitimacy to police and criminal justice institutions. There is a need to pursue crime-reduction solutions that engage civil society and members of the community with authority. The ‘defund’ argument also suggests a focus on the ‘root causes’ of crime, disorder, and the rise of the carceral state. There may very well be a need for increased social services such as job training, mental healthcare, and improvements in education. The real root causes of disorder, though, lie elsewhere than the ‘defund’ proponents and the idea of systemic racism alone point us.
In making an argument for the Bible as an important component of primary education, Benjamin Rush in fact employed root cause logic to this effect:
In contemplating… the political institutions of the United States I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes, and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of christianity, by means of the bible.20
Many theorists of order teach us that order in the commonwealth is intimately related to order in the soul.21 Persons, members of the commonwealth, must acknowledge and adopt a moral order.22 Like Rush, a number of prominent contributors to the American tradition of ordered liberty have held that the Christian religion was the basis of personal and social moral order in this country. The recent work of Charles Murray, Robert Putnam, and Tim Carney also shows the importance of religious participation for the development of social capital and of orderly habits at the personal level. Professionals and activists working to address the causes and consequences of violence and disorder in the most challenging environments, such as Robert Woodson and Sylvia Bennett Stone, know well the continued relevance of Rush’s simple but controversial claim.23 We need to reclaim and newly cherish the deep moral and spiritual roots of our order.
Returning to the symphony image once more, we can glean two lessons as we prospects for a restoration of order in our society. One is the importance of competent and benevolent authority, embodied in the person of the conductor, freely respected and obeyed. Another is the importance of shared projects, common undertakings, for the establishment and maintenance of order. The symphony endows each player with a role, a sense of what to do and how to interact. The music, whether or not the conductor is the composer, provides a script, a form for the players’ harmonization. In the same way, our associations, shared projects, and common undertakings as family members, church members, and citizens provide the means of renewing the order we have inherited, ever aiming for the higher kind of order respecting the dignity of the human person and the authority of our Creator.24
