Rules

A Short History of What We Live By

Lorraine Daston

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691239187
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: European History

A panoramic history of rules in the Western world Rules order almost every aspect of our lives. They set our work hours, dictate how we drive and set the table, tell us whether to offer an extended hand or cheek in greeting, and organize the rites of life, from birth through death. We may chafe under the rules we have, and yearn for ones we don't, yet no culture could do without them. In Rules, historian Lorraine Daston traces their development in the Western tradition and shows how rules have evolved from ancient to modern times. Drawing on a rich trove of examples, including legal treatises, cookbooks, military manuals, traffic regulations, and game handbooks, Daston demonstrates that while the content of rules is dazzlingly diverse, the forms that they take are surprisingly few and long-lived.Daston uncovers three enduring kinds of rules: the algorithms that calculate and measure, the laws that govern, and the models that teach. She vividly illustrates how rules can change—how supple rules stiffen, or vice versa, and how once bothersome regulations become everyday norms. Rules have been devised for almost every imaginable activity and range from meticulous regulations to the laws of nature. Daston probes beneath this variety to investigate when rules work and when they don't, and why some philosophical problems about rules are as ancient as philosophy itself while others are as modern as calculating machines. Rules offers a wide-angle view on the history of the constraints that guide us—whether we know it or not.

1

Introduction

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF RULES

Clues to a Hidden History

This is a short book about a vast topic. We are, all of us, everywhere, always, enmeshed in a web of rules that supports and constrains. Rules fix the beginning and end of the working day and the school year, direct the ebb and flow of traffic on the roads, dictate who can be married to whom and how, situate the fork to the right or the left of the plate, score the runs and walks of baseball games, tame debate in meetings and parliaments, establish what can and cannot be taken on a plane as hand luggage, specify who can vote and when, parse the grammar of a sentence, channel customers into the proper lines at the grocery store, tell pet owners whether their animals are welcome or not, lay down the meter and rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet, and order the rites of birth and death. And these are just examples of explicit rules, the sort to be found written down on signs and in manuals, handbooks, sacred texts, and legal statutes. Add implicit rules, and the web becomes so densely woven that barely any human activity slips through the mesh: there are the unwritten rules about whether to greet with outstretched hand or two pecks on the cheek à la française (or one, à la belge), how many miles per hour over the posted speed limit will be tolerated without incurring a traffic ticket, how much to tip at what kind of restaurant, when to raise (and lower) one’s voice in conversation, who should open doors for whom, how often and how loudly an opera may be interrupted with cheers and boos, when to arrive at and when to leave a dinner party, and how long an epic should be. Cultures notoriously differ as to the content of their rules, but there is no culture without rules, lots of them. A book about all of these rules would be little short of a history of humanity.

Rules are so ubiquitous, indispensable, and authoritative that they are taken for granted. How could there ever have been a society without rules, a time before rules? Yet the universality of rules does not imply their uniformity, either across cultures or within historical traditions. Rules exhibit vertiginous variety not only in their content but also in their forms. The former has been grist for the mill of travelers and ethnographers ever since Herodotus’s (c. 484–c. 425 BCE) tales of how, from an ancient Greek perspective, in Egypt everything is reversed (though no less regular): the men stay home and weave, while the women go to the market; women urinate standing up, men sitting down; even the Nile runs backwards, from south to north.¹ The latter unfurls in the long list of species that belong to the genus of rules: laws, maxims, principles, guidelines, instructions, recipes, regulations, aphorisms, norms, and algorithms, to name just a few. The variety of these species of rules is a clue to a hidden history of what a rule is and does.

Since Greco-Roman antiquity, three principal semantic clusters have mapped out the meanings of rules (Chapter 2): tools of measurement and calculation; models or paradigms; and laws. The subsequent history of rules is one of proliferation and concatenation, yielding ever more species of rules and ever more exemplars of each species. The result is a cat’s cradle of complexity almost as complex as culture itself. The three Ur-meanings of rules nonetheless spin out scarlet threads that wind their way through the historical labyrinth over millennia. By adopting a longue durée perspective and canvasing rules from many diverse sources, from monastic orders to cookbooks, from military manuals to legal treatises, from calculation algorithms to practical how-to instructions, this book traces the long career of this ancient trio of meanings in the learned and vernacular traditions that share Greco-Roman roots and that have evolved together over more than two millennia. Chapters 2 and 3 reconstruct how rules functioned as supple models from antiquity through the eighteenth century; Chapters 4 and 5 describe how algorithms of calculation worked in practice from ancient times until the rise of algorithms and mechanical calculation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapters 6 and 7 contrast rules at their most specific, as nitty-gritty regulations, with rules at their most general, as Olympian natural laws and laws of nature, from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Chapter 8 examines how moral, legal, and political rules bend and break in the face of recalcitrant exceptions, from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries.

Three oppositions structure this long history of rules. Rules can be either thick or thin in their formulation, flexible or rigid in their application, and general or specific in their domains. These oppositions can overlap, and some are more relevant than others, depending on which of the three kinds of rule is in question. Rules understood as models tend to be thick in formulation and flexible in application (Chapters 2 and 3). A thick rule is upholstered with examples, caveats, observations, and exceptions. It is a rule that anticipates wide variations in circumstances and therefore requires nimble adaptation. Thick rules incorporate at least hints of this variability in their very formulation. In contrast, rules understood as algorithms tend to be thinly formulated and rigidly applied, though they too can sometimes thicken (Chapters 4 and 5). An algorithm need not be brief, but it is seldom designed to deal with unusual or simply diverse cases. Because thin rules implicitly assume a predictable, stable world in which all possibilities can be foreseen, they do not invite the exercise of discretion. This is unproblematic when the thin rules are confined to solving textbook problems—for example, in simple arithmetic. But the annals of computer algorithms are by now full of cautionary tales about programs for everything from facial recognition to paying your taxes that were tailored too thinly and enforced too rigidly to fit a more variegated reality.

Both thick and thin rules can be either minutely specific—a model for making this kind of table out of this kind of wood, or an algorithm for computing the area of this irregular polygon only—or sweepingly general. Rules understood as laws can also run the gamut from specific regulations governing parking on this street on Sundays to the generality of the Decalogue or the second law of thermodynamics (Chapters 6 and 7). Both specific and general laws can be applied either rigidly or flexibly. Rules that teem with specifics, like the sumptuary regulations discussed in Chapter 6, may need some give in application, if only because the specifics change so quickly. And even the most general laws of all, understood as divine commands that are eternally and universally binding, may also on occasion be bent (Chapter 8).

These oppositions should be understood as marking the extremes of a spectrum of possibilities rather than as all-or-nothing complements. The chapters that follow illustrate how rules, whether conceived as models, algorithms, or laws, differ by degrees in thinness and thickness, rigidity and flexibility, specificity and generality. Although not all combinations are equally possible, a long history like this one can stretch the present-day imagination with examples of rule regimes that have become rare, such as algorithms formulated thickly and applied flexibly (Chapter 4).

Rules are a betwixt-and-between category. In ancient and medieval schemes of knowledge, they occupied the middle territory between lofty sciences like natural philosophy, which aimed at certain knowledge of universal causes, and the most lowly, mindless, repetitive gestures of unskilled workmen. The province of rules was the arts, those branches of practical knowledge and know-how that blended reason and experience, guidelines that could be taught and savvy that could only be acquired through practice (Chapter 3). In early modern polities, rules were situated between local regulations overflowing with local specifics and universal natural laws valid for everyone, everywhere, always. Analogously, rules in early modern science were regularities too specific to qualify as grand laws of nature but too general to count as isolated observations: for example, the rule that water expands rather than contracts when it freezes versus the law of universal gravitation, as valid for the remotest planets as for the apple that falls from this tree (Chapters 6 and 7). Rules define both social and natural orders of a middling sort, always mediating between extremes of certainty and chance, generality and specificity, perfect order and utter chaos.

All of these contrasts boil down to one big contrast: a world of high variability, instability, and unpredictability versus one in which the future can be reliably extrapolated from the past, standardization insures uniformity, and averages can be trusted. Although the episodes recounted in this book trace a rough historical arc from the former world to the latter, there is no inexorable dynamic of modernity at work here. An island of stability and predictability in a tumultuous world, no matter what the epoch or locale, is the arduous and always fragile achievement of political will, technological infrastructure, and internalized norms. At any moment it can be suddenly overwhelmed by war, pandemic, natural disaster, or revolution. In such emergencies, thin rules suddenly thicken, rigid rules become rubbery, general rules wax specific. It is telling that such explosions of uncertainty are called “states of exception” (Chapter 8)—states in which rules temporarily lose their hold. If rules are changed too often and too quickly to keep up with dynamic circumstances, the very idea of a rule can start to wobble (Epilogue).

Rules as Both Paradigms and Algorithms

Rules provide a rich vein to be mined for philosophical problems and projects. The most ancient and enduring problem inspired by rules is how universals can be made to fit a potential infinity of particulars that cannot be foreseen by the rule-maker. This problem is as old as philosophy itself and still very much with us. All the chapters in this book describe how this problem was addressed in different settings and in different periods, whether in the law court, the artisan’s workshop, or the confessional. I turn to this problem in the next section. But first I must answer a question key to understanding a second, more modern philosophical problem about rules that readers will have no doubt posed themselves by this point. Algorithms and laws are still central to our understanding of rules, but whatever happened to the third member of the ancient trio, models or paradigms?

Right through the end of the eighteenth century, this now-extinct meaning of rules was robust in both precept and practice. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, rules-as-algorithms increasingly edged out rules-as-paradigms. This shift spawned a second modern philosophical problem about thin rules: can rules be followed unequivocally, without interpretation or contextualization, and if so, how is this possible? As we shall see in Chapter 5, this is a problem that can hardly even be formulated until the prototypical rule shifted from being a model or paradigm to being an algorithm, especially an algorithm executed by a machine. This shift is remarkably recent, and its consequences are still reverberating in philosophy, administration, military strategy, and the ever-expanding domains of daily life conducted online.

Although algorithms are as old as the operations of arithmetic and the associations of rules with quantitative exactitude stretch back to Greco-Roman antiquity and beyond, algorithms were rarely the primary sense of rule in the intellectual traditions stemming from ancient Mediterranean cultures, even in mathematics. When dictionaries of European vernaculars began to be published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, algorithm featured as the third or fourth definition under the lemma “Rules”—if it appeared at all. The most comprehensive mathematical encyclopedia of the nineteenth century, a seven-volume German behemoth, did not even contain an entry for “Algorithm.”² Yet only a few decades after its publication, algorithms had become central to understanding the essence of mathematical proof, and by the mid-twentieth century they were powering the computer revolution and conjuring dreams of everything from artificial intelligence to artificial life. We are now all subjects of the empire of algorithms.

This empire was barely a dot on the conceptual map until the early nineteenth century. Algorithms play an important role in many mathematical traditions all over the world, some quite ancient, and material aids to calculation such as pebbles, counting rods, and knotted strings are also widespread (Chapter 4). But the idea that many forms of human labor, including mental labor, might be reduced to algorithms, much less algorithms mechanically executed, seems to have taken hold only in the nineteenth century (Chapter 5). Before remarkable experiments applie...