The Evolution of Everything: How Small Changes Transform Our World. Matt Ridley

of the Dutch after 1600, the Swedes after 1800, the Japanese after 1945, the Germans likewise, the Chinese after 1978. The long peace of the nineteenth century coincided with the growth of free trade. The paroxysm of violence that convulsed the world in the first half of the twentieth century coincided with protectionism.

      Countries where commerce thrives have far less violence than countries where it is suppressed. Does Syria suffer from a surfeit of commerce? Or Zimbabwe? Or Venezuela? Is Hong Kong largely peaceful because it eschews commerce? Or California? Or New Zealand? I once interviewed Pinker in front of an audience in London, and was very struck by the passion of his reply when an audience member insisted that profit was a form of violence and was on the increase. Pinker simply replied with a biographical story. His grandfather, born in Warsaw in 1900, emigrated to Montreal in 1926, worked for a shirt company (the family had made gloves in Poland), was laid off during the Great Depression, and then, with his grandmother, sewed neckties in his apartment, eventually earning enough to set up a small factory, which they ran until their deaths. And yes, it made a small profit (just enough to pay the rent and bring up Pinker’s mother and her brothers), and no, his grandfather never hurt a fly. Commerce, he said, cannot be equated with violence.

      ‘Participation in capitalist markets and bourgeois virtues has civilized the world,’ writes Deirdre McCloskey in her book The Bourgeois Virtues. ‘Richer and more urban people, contrary to what the magazines of opinion sometimes suggest, are less materialistic, less violent, less superficial than poor and rural people’ (emphasis in original).

      How is it then that conventional wisdom – especially among teachers and religious leaders – maintains that commerce is the cause of nastiness, not niceness? That the more we grow the economy and the more we take part in ‘capitalism’, the more selfish, individualistic and thoughtless we become? This view is so widespread it even leads such people to assume – against the evidence – that violence is on the increase. As Pope Francis put it in his 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, ‘unbridled’ capitalism has made the poor miserable even as it enriched the rich, and is responsible for the fact that ‘lack of respect for others and violence are on the rise’. Well, this is just one of those conventional wisdoms that is plain wrong. There has been a decline in violence, not an increase, and it has been fastest in the countries with the least bridled versions of capitalism – not that there is such a thing as unbridled capitalism anywhere in the world. The ten most violent countries in the world in 2014 – Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and North Korea – are all among the least capitalist. The ten most peaceful – Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, Japan, Belgium and Norway – are all firmly capitalist.

      My reason for describing Pinker’s account of the Elias theory in such detail is because it is a thoroughly evolutionary argument. Even when Pinker credits Leviathan – government policy – for reducing violence, he implies that the policy is as much an attempt to reflect changing sensibility as to change sensibility. Besides, even Leviathan’s role is unwitting: it did not set out to civilise, but to monopolise. It is an extension of Adam Smith’s theory, uses Smith’s historical reasoning, and posits that the moral sense, and the propensity to violence and sordid behaviour, evolve. They evolve not because somebody ordains that they should evolve, but spontaneously. The moral order emerges and continually changes. Of course, it can evolve towards greater violence, and has done so from time to time, but mostly it has evolved towards peace, as Pinker documents in exhaustive detail. In general, over the past five hundred years in Europe and much of the rest of the world, people became steadily less violent, more tolerant and more ethical, without even realising they were doing so. It was not until Elias spotted the trend in words, and later historians then confirmed it in statistics, that we even knew it was happening. It happened to us, not we to it.

      The evolution of law

      It is an extraordinary fact, unremembered by most, that in the Anglosphere people live by laws that did not originate with governments at all. British and American law derives ultimately from the common law, which is a code of ethics that was written by nobody and everybody. That is to say, unlike the Ten Commandments or most statute law, the common law emerges and evolves through precedent and adversarial argument. It ‘evolves incrementally, rather than leaps convulsively or stagnates idly’, in the words of legal scholar Allan Hutchinson. It is ‘a perpetual work-in-progress – evanescent, dynamic, messy, productive, tantalizing, and bottom up’. The author Kevin Williamson reminds us to be astonished by this fact: ‘The most successful, most practical, most cherished legal system in the world did not have an author. Nobody planned it, no sublime legal genius thought it up. It emerged in an iterative, evolutionary manner much like a language emerges.’ Trying to replace the common law with a rationally designed law is, he jests, like trying to design a better rhinoceros in a laboratory.

      Judges change the common law incrementally, adjusting legal doctrine case by case to fit the facts on the ground. When a new puzzle arises, different judges come to different conclusions about how to deal with it, and the result is a sort of genteel competition, as successive courts gradually choose which line they prefer. In this sense, the common law is built by natural selection.

      Common law is a peculiarly English development, found mainly in countries that are former British colonies or have been influenced by the Anglo-Saxon tradition, such as Australia, India, Canada and the United States. It is a beautiful example of spontaneous order. Before the Norman Conquest, different rules and customs applied in different regions of England. But after 1066 judges created a common law by drawing on customs across the country, with an occasional nod towards the rulings of monarchs. Powerful Plantagenet kings such as Henry II set about standardising the laws to make them consistent across the country, and absorbed much of the common law into the royal courts. But they did not invent it. By contrast, European rulers drew on Roman law, and in particular a compilation of rules issued by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century that was rediscovered in eleventh-century Italy. Civil law, as practised on the continent of Europe, is generally written by government.

      In common law, the elements needed to prove the crime of murder, for instance, are contained in case law rather than defined by statute. To ensure consistency, courts abide by precedents set by higher courts examining the same issue. In civil-law systems, by contrast, codes and statutes are designed to cover all eventualities, and judges have a more limited role of applying the law to the case in hand. Past judgements are no more than loose guides. When it comes to court cases, judges in civil-law systems tend towards being investigators, while their peers in common-law systems act as arbiters between parties that present their arguments.

      Which of these systems you prefer depends on your priorities. Jeremy Bentham argued that the common law lacked coherence and rationality, and was a repository of ‘dead men’s thoughts’. The libertarian economist Gordon Tullock, a founder of the public-choice school, argued that the common-law method of adjudication is inherently inferior because of its duplicative costs, inefficient means of ascertaining the facts, and scope for wealth-destroying judicial activism.

      Others respond that the civil-law tradition, in its tolerance of arbitrary confiscation by the state and its tendency to mandate that which it does not outlaw, has proved less a friend of liberty than the common law. Friedrich Hayek advanced the view that the common law contributed to greater economic welfare because it was less interventionist, less under the tutelage of the state, and was better able to respond to change than civil legal systems; indeed, it was for him a legal system that led, like the market, to a spontaneous order.

      A lot of Britain’s continuing discomfort with the European Union derives from the contrast between the British tradition of bottom–up law-making and the top–down Continental version. The European Parliament member Daniel Hannan frequently reminds his colleagues of the bias towards liberty of the common law: ‘This extraordinary, sublime idea that law does not emanate from the state but that rather there was a folk right of existing law that even the king and his ministers were subject to.’

      The competition between these two traditions is healthy. But the point I wish to emphasise is that it is perfectly possible to have law that