On the future of law and justice

The first paragraph is just an introductory summary of my previous post on Peak Technology, skip to the second paragraph for my ideas about law and justice.

In our times, it is a commonly accepted belief that society evolves with the advent of technology. Technology is seen as progress. And when technology has some drawbacks and causes problems, then some more advanced technology is often seen as the solution. In general, it is assumed that much of the progress of societies is driven either directly or indirectly by technology. In many cases, this connection is obvious and in my opinion, the advance of medicine is one of the most obvious examples. Common belief, however, extends the notion of "technology as the cause of progress" even to areas of social progress which are not inherently driven by technology. As an example, consider the topic of free speech or the equal-rights movement for people of different sexual orientation. Proponents of technology claim that free speech is promoted a lot by information and communication technologies like the printing press, movable type, or --nowadays-- the Internet. They go on to say that those possibilities of communication encourage diversity in society, which in turn supports all kinds of equal-rights movements, be it for ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or some other dividing line. There is also the argument that the scarcity of resources in less technologically advanced societies leads to conflicts, while the abundance in modern society leaves something for everybody and thus encourages sharing. (But as of 2013, the social divide in some of the richest and most technologically advanced countries, such as the USA, is greater than in some technologically and economically less advanced countries, such as Norway and Finland. (Google “Gini coefficient” for info on that.) This is just one of many counter-examples that could be given to the hypothesis that "technology is the main driver of progress".)

In this article, however, I want to introduce one social improvement of society which offers huge gains for people and institutions while it is entirely independent of technology. I am proposing to improve the system of law and justice, whose modern roots go back two thousands years to the Roman empire whose laws are still studied any contemporary aspirant of the legal profession. I am referring to this historic legacy just because the improvement proposed is so independent of technology that it could as well have been introduced in classical Roman times. The idea is very simple: turn justice from a competitive into a cooperative profession. Replace questions of "who is right?" and "who's right (or obligation) is it?" with the quest for just and balanced compromises. Just imagine that instead of getting a lawyer to "fight for your right", you will get a lawyer to counsel you about the laws and customs of a specific domain and to help you take beneficial and sustainable decisions. Sustainable, here means that it will not infringe on other's rights in a way that will incite opposition to your actions. Further imagine that if two parties have a disagreement of high stakes they will not each assemble a team of highly paid and about to overwork lawyers to fight it out in front of a judge, but they will instead appeal to a highly reputed mediator which will align their interests and the tradition of the law and past similar cases to form a compromise which serves both their interests to the best possible and also sets an example of how similar disputes can be solved in the future.

One of the founding principles of the legal profession is that formalized law provides safety and freedom of action because parties with conflicting interests are able to prevent conflicts or to know the outcome if conflict happens. Another important principle is the balance of interests. Another one is that decisions should only be based on relevant facts of the matter and not incidental elements such as nobility, affluence, ethnicity, or other properties of the actors or the circumstances. (The latter is the famous "blindness of justice" to irrelevant matters.) All of those principles are preserved with the proposed improvement while many other aspects are changed.

I see a lot of advantages in such a reformed legal system:

• laws would be much simpler, since their purpose would not be to give a fixed solution for every possible case and instead leave some wiggle-room for the disputing parties and their legal counselors.
• legal conflicts would occur less often because counselors will advocate the way of consideration instead of the confrontational road.
• legal conflicts could be resolved much more timely and with much reduced cost
• all members of the legal profession would swear an oath of justice similar to the oath of Hippocrates in medicine. they will commit themselves to the principles of law and to working towards the goals of both parties in a conflict as well as the evolution of law which benefits society at large.
• parties which can afford more or better lawyers will not be advantaged any more.

So lawyers become consultants and mediators instead of being advocates and lobbyists. Wouldn’t that be much more in line with the original values and virtues of justice and more beneficial to our society and all its members?

Peak Technology

Biking around Paris today I saw a poster similar to this one:

One of the phrases on the poster I saw was saying something like "we don't want better and more modern housing here, because we cannot afford that".
So I thought it's interesting that people are actually refusing something better than they already have.

And then I thought about lots of modern inventions which people don't really need. Like displays with a resolution that's almost better than our eyes can notice. Or cars that can go faster than is permitted to go on public roads. I could go on and on and this makes we wonder whether the role of technology in society is changing now. Not long ago (and in a large part of the world still now), technology would benefit the rich more than the poor, but it would still benefit the poor so much that a modern poor person would have a better life than a king two hundred years ago. One of my favorite example is the modern sewage system introduced in our part of the world mainly in the 19th century. It makes life more comfortable and much safer for the rich and the poor alike. Public transit, including air transit is similar. Modern air (or high-speed rail) is a good example how rich and poor pay very different prices for basically the same service (getting somewhere) simply by selling tickets with different conditions like flexibility of travel time/date, space on board, and various premium services. So this technology benefits both rich and poor people and even makes rich people pay more for it. Another example are Android phones which cost between 100 and 400 € while offering basically the same functionality (email, maps, chat, phone, web, ...). This way rich customers automatically contribute more to the development of the software and basic infrastructure than the poor.

Now, after seeing this writing on the Parisian wall... and after considering that my own highest high-tech are my bicycles and some not-so-new computer equipment. I really wonder if technology will really get us any much further as a society. Of course, the internet itself is probably the biggest thing in the tradition of technology which benefits rich and poor alike. And I think that the internet still has a lot of potential, especially in education. And, of course, self-driving cars will be a big relief. But still I think we might be nearing a peak where technology doesn't bring the most progress which universally helps all groups in society. We might soon get to a point where the bottleneck is somewhere else. Or maybe the bigger potential is already somewhere else and we just can't see it because we're all looking in the direction of technology waiting for it to rescue us.

I was looking what this other field of progress could be and while reading about "social advance in society" I found the "Social Progress Imperative" which has published the "Social Progress Index" and I was happy to find this data... but only until I noticed how shallow it is. For instance "respect for women" is measured with a simple poll. Therefore, it is rather "perceived respect for women". Also, Germany is really bad on "percentage of people going into tertiary education", which is likely because Germany's great professional education system hasn't been counted as tertiary education. I understand that the SPI only uses data which had already been collected by various other organisations (as listed in their Appendix), but the result is simply a rating which does not tell as much as it seems. So to sum up, I think that in the future social progress which happens independent of technology progress might be very important. And while technology progress can partly be measured in numbers like connection speeds, pixel rates, etc, there is less agreement and even less comparable data in the field of social progress.

TV-incited violence vs. Gross National Happiness (must-read for anybody with a social conscience!)

Four years ago, Bhutan, the fabled Himalayan Shangri-la, became the last nation on earth to introduce television. Suddenly a culture, barely changed in centuries, was bombarded by 46 cable channels. And all too soon came Bhutan's first crime wave - murder, fraud, drug offences. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy report from a country crash-landing in the 21st century

Here are some excerpts from a 2003 Guardian article about the effects of TV in the country of Bhutan. It is impossible to imagine how a modern Western country would be without TV. Bhutan, however, was without TV until 1999 – it's introduction to the country provides an unprecedented and unique opportunity for study.
The article "Fast forward into trouble" is much longer and here are only some of the most interesting pieces.

April 2002 was a turbulent month for the people of Bhutan. One of the remotest nations in the world, perched high in the snowlines of the Himalayas, suffered a crime wave. The 700,000 inhabitants of a kingdom that calls itself the Land of the Thunder Dragon had never experienced serious law-breaking before. Yet now there were reports from many towns and villages of fraud, violence and even murder.
The Bhutanese had always been proud of their incorruptible officials - until Parop Tshering, the 42-year-old chief accountant of the State Trading Corporation, was charged on April 5 with embezzling 4.5m ngultrums (£70,000). Every aspect of Bhutanese life is steeped in Himalayan Buddhism, and yet on April 13 the Royal Bhutan police began searching the provincial town of Mongar for thieves who had vandalised and robbed three of the country's most ancient stupas. Three days later in Thimphu, Bhutan's sedate capital, where overindulgence in rice wine had been the only social vice, Dorje, a 37-year-old truck driver, bludgeoned his wife to death after she discovered he was addicted to heroin. In Bhutan, family welfare has always come first; then, on April 28, Sonam, a 42-year-old farmer, drove his terrified in-laws off a cliff in a drunken rage, killing his niece and injuring his sister.

Before 1999, Bhutan's society and politics was much different from every other country in the world:

"We wanted a goal different from the material concept of maximizing gross national product pursued by western governments," [Bhutan's foreign minister] says with a beatific smile. "His Majesty decided that, as a spiritual society, happiness was the most important thing for us - something that had never been discussed before as a policy goal or pronounced as the responsibility of the state." And so, in 1998, the Dragon King defined his nation's guiding principle as Gross National Happiness.

The marijuana that flourishes like a weed in every Bhutanese hedgerow was only ever used to feed pigs before the advent of TV, but police have arrested hundreds for smoking it in recent years. Six employees of the Bank of Bhutan have been sentenced for siphoning off 2.4m ngultrums (£40,000). Six weeks before we arrived, 18 people were jailed after a gang of drunken boys broke into houses to steal foreign currency and a 21-inch television set. During the holy Bishwa Karma Puja celebrations, a man was stabbed in the stomach in a fight over alcohol. A middle-class Thimphu boy is serving a sentence after putting on a bandanna and shooting up the ceiling of a local bar with his dad's new gun. Police can barely control the fights at the new hip-hop night on Saturdays.

While the government delays, an independent group of Bhutanese academics has carried out its own impact study and found that cable television has caused "dramatic changes" to society, being responsible for increasing crime, corruption, an uncontrolled desire for western products, and changing attitudes to love and relationships. Dorji Penjore, one of the researchers involved in the study, says: "Even my children are changing. They are fighting in the playground, imitating techniques they see on World Wrestling Federation. Some have already been injured, as they do not understand that what they see is not real. When I was growing up, WWF meant World Wide Fund for Nature."

It is so early in the morning that the birds are still asleep. But Sangay Ngedup, minister for health and education, has been on the path for hours. His gho is bunched beneath his backpack, and a badge with the king's smiling face is pinned on to his baseball hat. In the past 15 days, he has climbed and scrambled over some of the world's most extreme terrain, from sea level to a rarefied 13,500ft in the Bhutanese Himalayas. Is there anywhere else in the world where a cabinet minister would trek 560km to warn people against becoming a nation of couch potatoes? "We used to think nothing of walking three days to see our in-laws," he says. "Now we can't even be bothered to walk to the end of Norzin Lam high street."

For the first time, he says, children are confiding in their teachers of feeling manic, envious and stressed. Boys have been caught mugging for cash. A girl was discovered prostituting herself for pocket money in a hotel in the southern town of Phuents-holing. "We have had to send teachers to Canada to be trained as professional counsellors," says Sangay Ngedup. This march is not just against a sedentary lifestyle; it is a protest against the values of the cable channels. One child's placard proclaims, "Use dope, no hope." "Breast is best," a girl shouts. "Enjoy the gift of sex with condoms," reads a toddler's T-shirt.

Bhutan's isolation has made the impact of television all the clearer, even if the government chooses to ignore it. Consider the results of the unofficial impact study. One third of girls now want to look more American (whiter skin, blond hair). A similar proportion have new approaches to relationships (boyfriends not husbands, sex not marriage). More than 35% of parents prefer to watch TV than talk to their children. Almost 50% of the children watch for up to 12 hours a day. Is this how we came to live in our Big Brother society, mesmerized by the fate of minor celebrities fighting in the jungle?
Everyone is as yet too polite to say it, but, like all of us, the Dragon King underestimated the power of TV, perceiving it as a benign and controllable force, allowing it free rein, believing that his kingdom's culture was strong enough to resist its messages. But television is a portal, and in Bhutan it is systematically replacing one culture with another, skewing the notion of Gross National Happiness, persuading a nation of novice Buddhist consumers to become preoccupied with themselves, rather than searching for their self.

In our Western culture it is only a recent trend introduced by a small elite to see happiness, not material wealth, as society's goal. Here are some of my earlier posts on happiness:

• happiness and new year's resolution (quoting psychologist Martin Seligman)
• on the fate of humanity (quoting economist Richard Layard)