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What are the sources of social order?
It is funny: I have found that people have very strong opinions about where they think social order ought to come from. Some say religion, or the state, or some such thing. In fact, there is very little systematic study about—as opposed to the "ought" question—the "is" question: where order actually comes from in a modern society. This failure to think through what generates social rules is a big gap in the social sciences. It is one which has been filled with a bunch of opinions and instinctive reactions, but I think there is now some effort to correct that and to look a little more systematically at the origins of order.
In my view, there are really four major sources of norms. Two of them are ones that people understand right away. First, the government can simply pass a law. It is hierarchical and formal, like abolishing racial segregation or some such thing. The second is religious. In most organized religions, that is also done hierarchically. When Moses came down from on high with the Ten Commandments, he presented rules that applied to the community.
The two other sources that I think are quite important are what I would call forms of "spontaneous order." One form of spontaneous order reflects the ability of decentralized individuals to negotiate social rules for themselves. In my book I give a rather trivial example that is nonetheless revealing. In the southern suburbs of Washington, D.C., you will find a practice called "slugging," for sharing rides in the commuter lanes to get to work in downtown Washington. People wait in line and get into the car of a perfect stranger in order to meet the three-passenger quota to qualify to ride in the commuter lanes. This system did not come about because some agency decreed it in a hierarchical way; rather, it emerged out of the efforts of rational individuals who were trying to figure out a way to get to work a little faster. In fact, a lot of moral rules are evolved in this kind of decentralized fashion.
The other form of spontaneous order is generated not by a process of rational cooperation, as in the ride-sharing example, but rather by an a rational process. For example, many folk religions around the world do not derive their authority from a hierarchical source like Moses on Mount Sinai; rather, they have evolved spontaneously as a way of organizing experience in the communities they represent. I would say further that these spontaneous sources of order tend to be relatively neglected in the academic literature because we are always looking to hierarchy as the primary source of order. If you are on the Left, you tend to look at the State, and if you are on Right, you tend to look to organized religion. In my view, the spontaneous sources of order are supported by deep human cognitive and social instincts.
Are these moral norms fixed or transcendent, as in natural law theory, or are they a product of social consensus?
I think they are both. I think that human nature establishes certain kinds of human ends and, more important, makes impossible certain kinds of socially constructed outcomes. For example, socialism assumed a much greater degree of altruism on the part of individuals than they possess by nature. It assumed that individual Cubans or Vietnamese, for example, would be just as beneficent toward the Cuban or the Vietnamese people collectively as they would be toward their own family or their own immediate friends. Socialism had a wrong view of human nature.
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