Every society lives inside rules inherited from the past. Constitutions, laws, contracts, customs, institutions and treaties are messages from one generation to another. They contain accumulated knowledge about how people have learned to live together.
This inheritance is one of civilization’s great achievements. Without it, every generation would have to start again. But inheritance has a problem.
The world changes. The rules remain.
A law that made sense when it was written may become inadequate when the technology, economy, environment or social conditions around it have changed. The problem is not necessarily that the original rule was wrong. It may have been exactly right for its time. The problem is that the world it was made for has disappeared.
The weaver and the machine
Imagine a woman 250 years ago carrying hand-woven cloth to the market. She knows her craft. She knows what the cloth is worth. She has spent months making it.
Then a new merchant arrives with machine-made fabric. It is cheaper, more regular and produced on a scale she cannot match. She has not suddenly become a worse weaver.
The technological environment has changed. And behind that technological change are rules: rules governing investment, property, corporations, banking, trade, factories and pollution.
The rules have helped create a new world. The woman has to live in that new world even though she never decided the rules that created it. This is one of the great problems of inherited institutions.
Rules contain assumptions
Every rule contains assumptions about the world.
- Property law assumes something about what can be owned.
- Corporate law assumes something about what a corporation is for.
- Labour law assumes something about the relationship between employer and employee.
- Environmental law assumes something about the relationship between economic activity and nature.
- Constitutions assume something about how political power should be organized.
These assumptions may remain invisible because we are accustomed to them. But technology can make them visible very quickly:
- The printing press changed the economics of information.
- Industrialization changed the economics of production.
- The automobile changed the structure of cities.
- The internet changed communication.
- Artificial intelligence is now changing the economics of knowledge and cognitive work.
The faster the world changes, the more frequently our rules have to be reconsidered.
Burke’s paradox
This does not mean that we should simply throw away inherited institutions.
Edmund Burke’s great insight was precisely that institutions contain knowledge that no individual possesses. They are products of accumulated experience, tradition and adaptation. He argued that political arrangements cannot be understood independently of the circumstances in which they operate.
This is an important warning against the idea that every generation can rationally design society from scratch. But Burke’s position contains an interesting implication. If circumstances change, institutions may have to change with them.
Burke did not simply defend immobility. He argued for preservation together with the ability to improve. In his view, reform should normally work with inherited institutions rather than destroy them wholesale.
This gives us a useful distinction:
- Conservatism can mean preserving a form.
- Or it can mean preserving what the form was meant to achieve.
Those are not always the same thing. If the world changes, preserving the original form may eventually destroy the original purpose.
When preserving becomes radical
Consider a simple example. Suppose a city created a rule to protect people from dangerous traffic. At the time, traffic consisted mainly of horses and pedestrians.
Two hundred years later, the city has cars, bicycles, electric scooters and autonomous vehicles. The original intention — protecting people — has not changed. But the rules must change.
Keeping the old rules unchanged would not be conservative in the deeper sense. It would simply be allowing historical circumstances to dictate present outcomes.
The same problem exists at much larger scales.
Climate change, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, global finance and digital communication have changed the conditions under which many older institutions operate. The challenge is therefore not to choose between tradition and change.
The challenge is to make tradition capable of change.
The speed problem
For most of human history, social change was relatively slow. A constitution could remain relevant for generations. A technology might dominate for centuries. Customs could evolve gradually.
Today, technological and economic systems can change within years or even months. This creates an increasing mismatch between the speed of change and the speed of institutional revision.
- Markets can change extremely quickly.
- Companies can reorganize quickly.
- Technology can change even faster.
- But constitutions, laws and international treaties can take decades to change.
The faster the world moves, the more dangerous this asymmetry becomes. A rule can become obsolete without anyone having deliberately made it obsolete. It simply survives its circumstances.
The question
We therefore need to rethink what it means for a rule to be stable. Perhaps stability should not mean:
“This rule does not change.”
Perhaps it should mean:
“The process for changing this rule is stable.”
That is a very different idea.
A constitution could remain legitimate not because its wording is frozen forever, but because citizens have a reliable way of reconsidering it.
A treaty could remain useful not because every clause survives unchanged, but because there is a legitimate mechanism for updating it when circumstances change.
A democratic society could preserve continuity without confusing continuity with immobility.
The goal is not to erase the past. It is to allow the past to remain connected to the present.
Rules are messages from the past.
Democracy is our opportunity to answer them.
The next question is therefore practical: If rules need to evolve, who should be allowed to revise them — and how?
That is where the Wiki principle begins. A theme for the next blog post.