The Interconnected Law Project
The Interconnected Law project is looking to be part of a paradigm shift in how we understand and use law.
Paradigms are ways of understanding things, a framework for interpreting and understanding the world. They are constellations of concepts, values, perceptions and practises that form part of a vision of reality, part of how we understand the world that is also part of how we interact with it. We could understand paradigms in different contexts and levels of abstraction, such as in a particular domain or discipline like physics, or an understanding of aspects of a whole society, or even a paradigm which covers most of our knowledge, a meta-paradigm of sorts.
The Interconnected Law project seeks to be a paradigm shift for how we understand law. It draws on existing legal and political work which is part of this paradigm shift, and aims to draw these together into a common approach (more here for some of the foundations). I am currently understanding this as the ‘interconnected’ paradigm, for within law, but it forms part of the ‘systemic’ or ‘holistic’ worldview, which is a meta-paradigm.
Two Models of Progress
There are two models for how we might understand progress. In one model, there is something of a linear and constant trend, in which discoveries are made fairly consistently and incrementally. We chip away at understanding the world, and lay down technologies brick by brick. This tends to be how we generally understand progress, history, politics, science and other disciplines.
Comforting though this is, it is not really true. The other model sees ‘progress’ as being a combination of slight, very gradual change, combined with huge lurches. To use the example of technological development: while we might look back on technological history as a nice linear narrative, it was instead a story of big shifts, lurches in the human story that throw everything out. The printing press, steam engines, electricity, motor vehicles, aeroplanes, computers, the internet, smartphones, virtual reality, and so on. When these were first invented or discovered, they were typically thought of as an interesting but inconsequential quirk – yet a few decades later, they have radically shifted how we live.
Our scientific understanding of the world, and our understanding in non-scientific disciplines, moves forward in similar lurches. This was the argument by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A scientific discipline has an accepted way of understanding the world, which experiments and applications are done in line with. Then, there are some new discoveries which don’t fit with this, or results aren’t as expected, and these eventually bubble up to be something challenging the existing paradigm. There is then a breakthrough, where it is realised that the old paradigm is mistaken, and the a new paradigm which understands things based on these developments is conceptualised. In this new paradigm, things which were previously not understood or unthinkable now make sense, and our understanding and use of technology lurches forwards. This new paradigm settles, becoming mainstream and accepted, until a weakness or mistake in that paradigm means that new understandings challenge it, and the whole cycle continues.
Paradigm Shifts
In their book The Systems View of Life, Capra and Luisi chart developments and paradigm shifts in many different disciplines, and draw these together into an over-arching meta-paradigm. They describe their new meta-paradigm as the ‘systemic’ or ‘holistic’ worldview, and the one before it as the ‘rationalistic’ or ‘mechanistic’ worldview.
The difference is between seeing the trees and seeing the forest, understanding the parts or understanding the system. The ‘rationalistic’ or ‘mechanistic’ paradigm sees the world as a machine, a closed and not too complex system made up of its parts. If you can understand each part and how they fit together, then you understand the machine. This worldview is great for understanding machines, but does not work so well for understanding things which are not like machines, or at least too complex for us to understand in this way.
Capra and Luisi describe that ‘The worldview and value system that lie at the basis of the modern industrial age were formulated in their essential outlines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.’
The enlightenment was the period of scientific breakthrough which massively increased our understanding of the world and abilities to interact with it. In physics, chemistry and biology we understood molecules, atoms, chemicals, planets, gravity, animals, plants, organs and cells. The world was seen as a machine which we could understand, break down into parts, study and control. This was not only in scientific disciplines, but also the case in humanities and ‘social sciences’.
While incredible developments were made in our knowledge and understanding, this model was imperfect. In many disciplines more recently, in the last half century or few decades, rationalistic paradigms have been displaced for a paradigm in line with what Capra and Luisi call the ‘holistic’ or ‘systemic’ worldview. In biology, for example, understanding ecosystems meant understanding complex systems which were more than the collection of animals within them. In physics, quantum physics displaced traditional physics by showing a world much more complex, confusing and connected than was previously understood.
This approach sees the forest as well as the trees. Instead of seeing a forest as just a place with lots of individual trees, we understand the ecosystem of the forest, in which trees are connected to each other and to all of the other life in the forest. We can even understand the relationship which trees have to the planetary carbon cycle, or the meaning it might have to the local community. The holistic or systemic approach sees the individual unit in the context of an interconnected system, and understand the relationships and feedback loops which make up the system.
In medicine, for example, we are somewhere in the middle of this paradigm shift. Previously we understood the body in terms of parts, and our medical system is still based in this mechanistic paradigm. Individual organs or internal systems are studied, diseases are treated mostly one-by-one, yet there is now an understanding that it is all linked. Mental health and physical health are linked, and the inter-relation of the mind and the digestive system are becoming better understood. Some of the things which doctors are prescribing are things which would previously have been more about lifestyle advice instead of medicine, such as social prescribing or a prescription of physical activity. A more holistic understanding is emerging, not yet dominant, but changing medicine. In Capra and Luisi’s book, they chart all sorts of different domains in which there has been a general shift from a ‘rationalistic’ worldview to a holistic or systems view. In their words, ‘To understand things systemically means to put them into a context, to establish the nature of their relationships.’
Law and Social Sciences
Let’s turn to philosophy, law, economics and other social disciplines. Modern ‘social sciences’ were heavily influenced on the enlightenment understanding of sciences, developing theories of humanity, science, politics and economics which aspired to be like the developments in the natural sciences. As science made incredible understandings, ‘social sciences’ aspired to be more like them both to appear legitimate and because they thought that this approach was a better one.
Liberal philosophers like Locke and Hobbes developed an atomistic view of society. This started by understanding individuals, like the way that atoms were understood in chemistry or physics, and extrapolated this to the state and societal level. Society is a collection of individuals, the state exists to govern individuals, and law is about individual rights and conflicts between individuals. This is still the dominant paradigm in law, economics and philosophy, though in economics and philosophy these have been challenged more. In philosophy and political theory, for example, communitarian and feminist approaches challenge this individualistic liberal understandings, and of course socialism and communism are different political approaches.
Conclusion
In law and legal scholarship, the rationalistic liberal paradigm still dominates. There are emerging shoots of and moves to a paradigm shift, some of which are the foundations for this project: feminist relational approaches to law, ecological approaches to law, and systems theory itself. There are also theories which look to shift the paradigm in particular sub-domains of legal scholarship. In criminal justice, for example, conceptions of restorative or transformative justice challenge the mainstream conceptions of justice, and abolitionist approaches seek to reject the way that punishment and prisons is done in our society and interpersonally, and in contract law I remember coming across scholars who challenged the the default liberal understanding.
The Interconnected Law project is set in this new holistic paradigm, which sees humans and society as being a network of relationships in which all individuals are interconnected with others and with the natural world that we live in, and seeks to further this paradigm shift.