There are moments when you realise how thin the civilising veneer is. Never thinner than in an emergency. I was reminded of it on a warm evening in August, when I witnessed a minor traffic collision on a narrow street and had to watch, half curious, half aghast, the conflict logic of the two drivers involved.
Two damaged bumpers, two annoyed people, no injuries — a trivial matter. And yet, within seconds, the voices rose, the hands gestured wildly, the accusations went back for years. The civilised exchange of names, insurance details and polite goodbyes of the kind we all think we'd handle with composure would have been possible. It did not happen.
I don't tell this anecdote to moralise. It is not about "back in my day" or "these younger people today". I tell it because it says something about the relationship between conflict and law. Because this is where the law, in its modest but essential function, steps in.
The veneer of civilisation — a turn of phrase made famous by Freud and certainly not invented by him — describes exactly the thin layer that keeps us, in everyday interaction, from reverting to the tribal response to insult: louder voice, bigger threat, nearest fist. What a constitutional order does, with all its apparent clumsiness, is to prevent that slide. It says: in a conflict you do not shout at each other, you call the police, you exchange data, you wait for the insurer, you hire a lawyer if needed, you go to court at worst. The law is therefore not only a protection against criminal conduct — it is civilising behaviour.
Anyone who sees the law merely as a service provider for their personal advantage misses this dimension. Of course we lawyers take care of advantages — that's the job. But we do so within a procedural framework whose first and most valuable quality is that no one has to resort to the fist. Our office is a workplace in which people would otherwise shout at each other, and where at best reasonable arguments now travel between the two parties in writing.
This is why I am so suspicious of people who loudly proclaim the idea of taking justice into their own hands. I'm not referring to criminal cases; there the error is plain for all to see. I mean the everyday version: neighbours who "give a lesson" to those opposite, consumers who get physical with the cashier, drivers who deliver little educational slaps on the motorway. Every one of these moments is a tiny collapse of the veneer. And the people who do it rarely have the sense of humour to laugh about it afterwards.
A healthy society does not prevent such moments through campaigns of virtue. It prevents them because there is a functioning system that takes conflicts out of people's hands in time, processes them professionally and hands them back with an acceptable outcome. The civilising veneer is thin. But the state — with its courts, its lawyers, its insurance companies, its registers — does not polish it. It lays it down every day.
For the drivers on the street that evening, none of this mattered. They yelled, they handed over papers, they drove off. The next morning, the local insurance office will have called them, politely and competently, and that will have taken care of the matter. What the law did that evening was not a heroic act. It was the quiet provision of an alternative to the fist. Which is, in the end, the greatest gift a civilisation can give itself.