Some Laws Relating to Speech Are Surprisingly Uplifting

James Alexander
Dr James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.

I thought I’d amuse the Daily Sceptic readers a bit: mostly by quoting from a couple of books I found in the library here called Murphy’s Law. Arthur Bloch in 1977 tried to assemble all sorts of laws, and recounts in the introduction of the first book that Murphy was a Captain at Edwards Air Force Base, and coined the original law after something or other malfunctioned. It wasn’t so much a law, as a complaint. The year was 1949. Murphy said of the technician who had wired this something-or-other incorrectly: “If there is any way to do it wrong, he will.” So here is Murphy’s Law:

If anything can go wrong, it will.

Look at this law. It is amusing. It is trench humour, black humour, grim humour. It is not a law like Newton’s First Law of Motion, since Newton’s law is about reliability:

Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed.

Murphy’s Law is about unreliability. That’s why we like it. That’s why Arthur Bloch compiled a vast number of derivative laws, some of which were real laws, like Parkinson’s Law, and others which were probably made up, or sent to him by idle humourists. Ho hum, that’s the way of the world.

Why mention this in the Daily Sceptic? Well, 1. It is amusing. And 2. You may remember that one of the great questions that divided sceptics early on was whether Covid-19 was a cock-up or a conspiracy. The reason why we like ‘conspiracy’ is because it enables us to blame someone – and ain’t it ironic that Murphy was originally trying to blame someone? – and it also encourages us to think very hard about the structures of power that exist in our world. It is personal. It finds fault. But the reason we like ‘cock-up’ is because it says, “It was Nobody’s Fault”. (Dickens’s first title of Little Dorrit was Nobody’s Fault.) Sometimes it is wise to say this; but, leave that to one side: what we do when we quote Murphy’s Law is shrug our shoulders, forgive and forget. It is a philosophical response, stoical, hands-in-pockets, ‘I know my place’.

I should quote some more little gems before you object to this analysis. The logic is fairly similar all the way through.

O’Toole’s Commentary on Murphy’s Law: Murphy was an optimist.

Some are profound:

Scott’s Second Law: When an error has been detected and corrected, it will be found to have been correct in the first place.

Reminds me of Einstein, and the cosmological constant, that one. Others are just amusing. I quoted this one to my eldest son:

Issawi’s Second Law of Progress: A shortcut is the longest distance between two points.

The general tone is cynical:

Erhmann’s Commentary on Murphy’s Law: 1. Things will get worse before they get better. 2. Who said things would get better?

But there is also a satire of science:

Finagle’s First Law: If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Fett’s Law: Never replicate a successful experiment.

And surely this applies to the ‘climate crisis’:

Finagle’s Third Law: In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct, beyond all need of checking, is the mistake.

The level of wit is very high:

Osborn’s Law: Variables won’t; constants aren’t.

Though there is something here for everyone:

Anthony’s Law of the Workshop: Any tool, when dropped, will roll into the least accessible corner of the workshop.

Back to Covid-19. This is the sort of law that would appeal to Neil Ferguson (though actually it is a rule, not a law):

Maier’s Law: If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.

And we have an actually profound paradox:

Peer’s Law: The solution to a problem changes the nature of the problem.

Bloch mentions the Peter Principle, which is well known:

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to the level of his incompetence.

And Parkinson’s Law:

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

There are always more. And some are famous.

Mencken’s Law. 1 Those who can – do. 2. Those who cannot – teach.
Martin’s Extension: 3. Those who cannot teach – administrate.

Being a teacher [cough], I wanted to think about all this a bit, even if this means spoiling the quotations. I mentioned above that one of the laws was not a law at all, but a rule. The difference between the two is that a rule says ‘Do this!’ whereas a law says, far more dismally, ‘It always happens thus’.

This is important because it enables me to refute Tony Blair. Blair’s First Rule of Politics is not in Bloch’s book, but I unearthed it a few years ago when I was idly trying to compile a list of law of politics:

The first rule of politics is that there are no rules.

This is amusing. But unfortunately it breaks as soon as one realises that it is not a rule but a law. This would have been correct: The first rule of politics is – ignore the rules! Or: The first law of politics is that there are no rules. But this would not have amused the audience in 2006. Here is a better rule of politics, Jim Hacker’s:

Don’t believe anything until it has been officially denied.

A Boston boss offered the following rule of politics, also apt:

Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.

The academic political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith in The Dictator’s Handbook in 2011 actually offered some fairly serious rules:

Keep your winning coalition as small as possible.
Keep your nominal selectorate as large as possible.
Control the flow of revenue.
Pay your key supporters just enough to keep them loyal.
Don’t take money out of your supporters’ pockets to make the people’s lives better.

Not bad, though a bit alarming. In general, laws are better for the soul than rules. Vodnoy’s Law is pretty good:

The same person often advocates government regulations in areas in which they are ignorant and opposes them in areas where they have knowledge.

I got this one from Gödel, Escher, Bach:

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Hugh MacPherson’s Laws of Politics are beguiling:

Politics is conspiracy.
Conspiracy causes cock-ups.
Cock-ups cause further conspiracy.

It is hard to know what to make of that. Oddly enough, famous names don’t do very well. Walter Bagehot’s laws of politics in Physics and Politics are trivial (e.g., the strongest nations dominate), while RG Collingwood’s laws of politics in The New Leviathan are not much better (e.g., every state is divided into a ruling class and a ruled class).

Though Hooker did well in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, didn’t he?

He that goeth about the persuade a multitude, that they are not so well governed as they ought to be, shall never want attentive and favourable hearers.

James Burnham, over three centuries later, in The Machiavellians, is a bit Pareto-Mosca-Michels boring by comparison:

The primary object of every élite, or ruling class, is to maintain its own power or privilege [etc].

But let us end with a classic. These are the humorous and famous laws which were seemingly put together by Robert Conquest and John O’Sullivan in the 1980s. These are often spoken of as Conquest’s three laws of politics, though, in fact, O’Sullivan, who is still with us, was responsible for the second (O’Sullivan’s law), and Conquest for the first and third (called Conquest’s second law). These are:

Everyone is right-wing about what he knows best.
All organisations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
The behaviour of any organisation can best be predicted on the assumption that it is headed by a secret cabal of its enemies.

And, aha! with that last one we have left the contented and ho-hum world of Murphy’s law with its the Eternal Cock-up and re-entered the big bad world of Noggin the Nog, Behemoth, the Whore of Babylon, BlackRock and Vanguard and the Trilateral Commission, whoever they are, plus Susan Michie.

Ach, there are a few more good ones from Bloch’s books.

Hoare’s Law of Large Problems: Inside every large problem there is a small problem struggling to get out.
Baruch’s Observation: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Ruckert’s Law: There is nothing so small it cannot be blown out of all proportion.
Hall’s Law. The means justify the means, i.e., the approach to a problem is more important than the solution.

This one is true:

Hartz’s Law of Rhetoric: Any argument carried far enough will end up in semantics.

And since most political arguments do not end up in semantics, this indicates that almost no arguments in politics are carried far enough.

The Lippman lemma: People specialise in their area of greatest weakness.

That one is sobering for me. (I got low marks in political philosophy.) And this one is a pure gag:

Walton’s Law of Politics: A fool and his money are soon elected.
Hiram’s Law: If you consult enough experts, you can confirm any opinion.
Mayne’s Law: Nobody notices the big errors.

I like this one though it lacks an attribution:

Exceptions always outnumber rules.

This one has a tincture of Oscar Wilde about it:

Felson’s Law: To steal from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.
Pinto’s Law: Do someone a favour, and it becomes your job.

I was surprised to read Coleridge’s law quoted by Bloch. “Extremes meet.” Indeed, Coleridge said this to almost everyone he met in the 1820s. But funnier is this one: