This woman was sitting across the desk from me, 50-something but looking twice as old: wizened, weathered, and all decked out in East African silks, a headpiece and mountainous jewelry. She looked back at me with complete calm and patience. Almost 20 years earlier, she’d been living in an illiterate East African village, raising five boys under 15. Then a local militia came through her village and killed her husband. She decided it was time to leave. Somehow, she got her boys through hundreds of miles of jungle to a refugee camp in Kenya, where an aid worker registered them as Convention Refugees. When they got to Canada, her boys attended a Canadian high school, and now one of them sat beside her, signed in as her interpreter.

She had a Backbone of Iron. Unfortunately, she spoke no English or French, and she knew nothing about Canada. Once she had got all her boys to safety, alive and settled in a home of unimaginable luxury, fed with unimaginable abundance, and coddled with central heating, not surprisingly, she decided that she’d done enough. It was now her sons turn to take care of her. So she hung out in the “East African Community,” drinking coffee, gossiping with her girlfriends, and observing Canada only from afar – and who could blame her?

We had a three-way conversation. She wanted a Canadian passport to visit back home. But you can’t get a passport without being a citizen. You can’t become a citizen unless…

“Your mother doesn’t speak any English,” I told her son – a graduate of Fowler High.

“I know, but she expects me to do something about it,” he pleaded hopelessly.

“I got’ta follow the law,” I told him.

“I know, but she thinks you’re a judge, so you can do anything,” he stated the obvious.

By now, Momma was realizing she might not get her citizenship. Staring straight at me, slowly leaning forward, her upper lip starting to curl… an angry Backbone-of-Iron is no joke.

“I’m a judge, so I’ve got to follow the regulations,” I told the son.

“I know,” he sighed, “but that’s not what she’ll say when she’s back in th’ community.”

“I know,” I admitted, resigned to having another person hating me. “She’s going to say, that sonavabitch judge could have made me a citizen, and he just screwed me over.”

He nodded. And nothing will ever convince her otherwise.

In the course of two or three thousand hearings, I learned there really are “two kinds of people in the world”: those who’ve become imbedded in the Rule of Law, like that lady’s sons, and those who haven’t, like that lady. Some cultures almost unconsciously train their young to “play by the rules.” In other cultures, the only rule is family, clan or tribal loyalty – “benefitting friends and harming enemies.” There, the whole purpose of a judge is to help his tribe.

American political scientist Edward Banfield first analyzed the absence of the Rule of Law in the 1950’s, among the camorra and mafia of southern Italy. It’s funny to think that an American, imbedded in their Constitution, had to “discover” this Tribalism (which he labelled “amoral familialism”). But people breathing the Rule of Law don’t understand the grip of the clan. In wide swathes of the world, any governor or magistrate enforcing the Rule of Law – thereby “benefitting his enemies” –becomes a traitor to his own. But he’s never befriended by his enemies – they just think he’s crazy. So, now without allies, his days are numbered.

These people aren’t stupid. I’ve had extremely smart “Third World” engineers and scientists, sitting across the desk from me. They know their homelands are rich in resources, but impoverished by Tribalism. They come here, sadly, because they see no way to transform the culture back home.

The Rule of Law didn’t just happen in the West. It took ten centuries of social and legal habituation, hammered out in tedious struggle and accommodation, disorder and debate. Other civilizations are trying to learn it. Some had it and lost it – and it can be lost.

Sadly, having risen above Tribalism, the West now suffers the opposite problem. Just courage is “a mean between extremes,” between stupid cowardice and stupid recklessness, likewise the Rule of Law is the blessing between the curses of Tribalism and Bureaucratic Despotism (today represented by the HUMA, the Homogenous, Universal and Managerial Administration).  Under the Rule of Law, the Law itself is the shared gemstone of the Common Good. Sharing in free citizenship is the font of excellence and mutual respect. Citizens want voluntarily to be law-abiding.  However, Regulation erodes all that, just like Tribalism.

Under Tribalism, there is no Common Good, simply the contest of tribe against tribe, clan against clan. In such societies, “the law” is simply another weapon in a skirmish. Likewise, Bureaucratic Despotism erodes that voluntary commitment to the Common Good, as it becomes obvious that the limitless multiplication of regulations serves only the Administration.

Here, so far, there seems some residual reverence for the regulatory regime in sectors like recycling (aided by the HUMA sect of Earth Worship). But small businessmen and industrial entrepreneurs, for example, have lost all respect for the regulatory regime. Compliance is no longer eager, and enforced compliance becomes increasingly expensive.

All that said, however, when you sit across the desk from an East African refugee or a West African petroleum engineer, they remind you of the value of a land where you’re not habitually robbed, kidnapped or shot.

A few years back, a local college invited me onto a public panel discussion on the challenges facing refugees, trying to settle in Postmodern Canada. My partner on the panel had been one of the Sudanese “Lost Boys,” a child-soldier, kidnapped and trained to kill by a local militia (gang). Rescued by the UN, and admitted as a refugee, this young man had been here almost 20 years, and he was still adjusting. During our panel discussion, I mentioned the central challenge for refugees of absorbing the Rule of Law, and the man suddenly came alive.

“That’s it! That’s it! The Rule of Law!” the man cried. “I never understood the Rule of Law! I’d be driving down a street, looking for a building, and I’d see a patch of grass…” – the lawn outside the office– “… and nobody was parking there, so I’d just park there on the lawn.”

Funny.

“Or I’d be talking to a girl in a bar, buying her drinks, and suddenly I’d realize she wasn’t coming home with me,” he continued. “And why wasn’t she coming home with me?”

Not So Funny.