Rules, Method, and Construction

Today we are witnessing, almost without realizing it, a flight from rules. The rules that have guided our lives, sometimes oppressively, sometimes discreetly and protectively, seem to be called into question in more and more domains: in government, in the economy, in finance, in school, in social coexistence, and even in the way each of us relates to our own health.

For me, this flight has a particular meaning, because the beginnings of my research were tied precisely to strengthening existing rules and adding new ones. I entered computer science at a time when programming could become an engineering activity only through rules, methods, design disciplines, formal languages, grammars, models, and constraints. Without rules, a program remained a fragile text, dependent on the inspiration and memory of the person writing it. With rules, it became a product that could be built, verified, transmitted, and maintained.

The concept of method, introduced with such force by Descartes into European culture, was for me a kind of intellectual jackhammer with which I entered not only software methodologies, but other domains of thought as well. Method means rules. School means rules. Coexistence means rules. Medicine and the preservation of health mean rules. Even freedom, if it does not want to turn into arbitrariness, needs rules.

School between Discipline and the Abandonment of Rules

School is perhaps one of the places where this transformation can be seen most clearly. In my childhood, school operated according to precise rules, sometimes rigid ones, but rules that answered obvious social needs: literacy, the transmission of a common culture, the formation of educated generations capable of becoming citizens and taking part in the life of society. From this mechanism of rules we emerged, in a certain sense, rather similar, like trees in an orchard brought to the same height and the same shape. It was not, of course, the ideal image of education, but it was the image of an order.

Then came the year 1968, with its revolt against authority, hierarchies, and rigid forms of discipline. Many of the criticisms directed at the traditional school were justified. We are not all the same, and the pupil cannot be treated merely as an object to be shaped according to a single norm. The new pedagogy wanted to take into account each child’s personality, rhythm, sensitivity, and right not to be crushed by blind discipline.

But, as so often in history, the correction of one excess produced the opposite excess. The desire to free the child from the rigidity of the old school gradually weakened adult authority. Parents often became allies of their children against the school, rather than partners of the school in educating them. The teacher was left increasingly alone in front of the class, and the educational function of the adult faded. In place of an authority that was debatable, but real, there sometimes appeared the absence of authority.

This absence has more serious consequences than it may seem. Education is not born only from protection and encouragement, but also from the encounter with a limit. The child needs affection, but also needs an adult who can say “no,” who can establish a difference between generations and offer the resistance necessary for growth. Without this otherness, the educational conflict disappears, but the child’s suffering does not. It merely changes form.

In the past, the dissatisfaction of young people often expressed itself as opposition between generations: children rebelled against parents, pupils against teachers, young people against the adult world. Today, in many cases, dissatisfaction seems to come from elsewhere: not from the conflict between dream and reality, but from the absence of a dream. When the adult no longer proposes rules, models, or horizons, the young person does not always have someone against whom to rebel, nor something in whose name to grow.

The antisocial phenomena that appear today around the school cannot be explained only by the lack of rules, but the lack of rules favors them. Violent groups of adolescents, school dropout, semi-illiteracy, the indifference of some parents toward their children’s path, and the loss of respect for the teacher are symptoms of the same crisis. It is not only the crisis of an institution, but the crisis of an idea: that education requires accepted rules, present adults, and a responsibility shared by family, school, and society.

Weariness with Regulation

Of course, people grow weary when rules become too numerous, too rigid, too bureaucratic, or too far removed from real life. There comes a moment when one feels no longer that one is living in an ordered society, but in an administrative labyrinth. Then the opposite reaction appears: the desire to simplify, to deregulate, to break constraints, to let the market, the individual, or the spontaneous forces of society work on their own.

I do not think this reaction should be despised. It contains a part of the truth. A society suffocated by rules loses its breath. But the illusion of a world without rules is no less dangerous. A market without rules can become a jungle. A school without rules can become abandonment. Defense without rules can become adventure. Coexistence without rules can become aggression. And the state, when it withdraws completely from areas where only it can guarantee balance, may leave behind not freedom, but hell.

The Market, the State, and the Framework of Freedom

In America there is a current of thought that has long supported reducing the state and defending the freedom of the market. In its radical form, it comes closer to what is today called libertarianism than to classical European liberalism. Libertarianism emphasizes private property, freedom of contract, voluntary cooperation, and the market economy, regarding many forms of state intervention as unjustified forms of coercion.

But even the market needs a framework: property rights, contracts, courts, rules of competition, and institutions capable of defending them. Without this framework, the market is no longer organized freedom, but brute force. When rules disappear altogether, what remains is not pure freedom, but the freedom of the strongest, the quickest, the least scrupulous.

Organic Rules and Artificial Rules

There are, I believe, two kinds of rules. Some appear organically, from coexistence, good manners, education, and a shared morality. Others are artificial rules, written in governmental, administrative, or legal offices. Part of the disturbance of contemporary society comes from the fact that we have suffocated organic, moral rules and replaced them with thousands of pages of sterile laws. When morality disappears, an ever larger apparatus of control is needed to maintain order.

Perhaps, then, the question is not whether we need rules, but what kind of rules we must preserve, what rules we must change, and what rules we must eliminate. The rule of rules should, in my view, be common sense. Unfortunately, common sense is precisely the most difficult thing to define with precision. Common sense is a rule that is not written, but felt; it is the lubricant that prevents the machinery of law from blocking society. It cannot easily be turned into an article of law, an administrative norm, or an algorithm. Without it, any system of rules becomes either oppressive or ridiculous.

The Crisis of the Legitimacy of Rules

People do not always reject the idea of rules; they reject rules that seem hypocritical: strict for the ordinary citizen and optional for the elites. The flight from rules may therefore be associated with a profound crisis in the legitimacy of authority. The rule is no longer perceived as a form of common protection, but as an instrument imposed from above, sometimes arbitrarily, at other times selectively applied.

New Forms of the Flight from Rules

The contemporary temptation to reject the rules of scientific medical protocols in favor of conspiracy theories or miraculous treatments is also a form of flight from rules: a flight from the scientific method. It promises liberation from authority, but leaves the individual vulnerable in the face of illness.

Finally, the replacement of human rules by algorithmic rules is another danger of our time. “The algorithm” seems to be the supreme rule, but it often functions as a black box. When we allow technology to decide in place of the law, are we not replacing an intelligible rule, socially negotiable, with a blind mathematical rule, lacking precisely that common sense which I invoked earlier?

On the other hand, total freedom of expression on the internet, this so-called digital Wild West, unaccompanied by rules of responsibility, has not led to a purer democracy, but to polarization, aggressiveness, and tribalism. It is living proof that the absence of rules destroys dialogue; it does not liberate it.

Democracy between Order and Freedom

Democracy itself rests on this tension. It needs firm rules, but also the capacity to modify them. It needs institutions, but also trust. It needs freedom, but also limits. When rules disappear, democracy degrades into the will of the strongest. When rules multiply without measure, democracy degrades into bureaucracy. Between these two dangers lies the fragile zone in which civilized societies try to survive.

Perhaps this is why the theme pursues me. I lived professionally in a world in which construction required method, and method required rules. I then saw, in social and political life, how difficult it is to find the balance between necessary rules and useless rules. And today I have the impression that we are witnessing not merely a reform of rules, but a deeper temptation: the temptation to believe that they can be completely replaced by will, by the market, by technology, or by instinct.

I do not believe in a world without rules. I do believe, however, that rules must remain intelligible, justifiable, and proportionate. A good rule does not humiliate freedom; it makes it possible. A bad rule does not defend order; it compromises it. And a world that renounces rules altogether does not become freer, but more exposed to arbitrariness.