Pictures often bring back memories, same applies to music, or for that matter any comparable visual/audio/sensory inputs. So, spend enough years listening to heavy metal, and overlap those very same years with motorcycle rides, odds of them converging increases. Basically certain riffs are now for time travel, to some motorcycling experience! Listening to opening riffs of Bleak rewinds time back to that 2:00 AM lonely highway ride, actually journeying to this small college town for seeing Opeth live. Jazz-fusion like bass lines in Surface’s Echoes brings back late autumn rides, and glimpses of peninsula sunsets. Honeycomb is a lot about early summers, exploring forts around Port Townsend. Frankly, it’s not an exhaustive list; somehow these experiences got overlaid in memory. One begets the other. But, this is not intentional and they don’t happen all the time.

Often such recurring patterns motivate study of the underlying causes. In the past we were satisfied with merely discovering that correlation. Just like how animals keep returning to a spot where they got food, but without knowing what’s the underlying reason. Quite similarly, primitive men were satisfied with different degrees of correlation. Eating this herb cured this disease, or freezing food or using spices helped in longer shelf life etc. Seems like modern scientific mentality was not satisfied with mere correlation. It sought to discover underlying causes, theorize and apply those mechanisms in multiple diverse contexts. For instance, the underlying mechanism for overlapping memories could be used for curing depression or as motivational tool, basically the application might extend beyond motorcycling metal heads. Same idea applies to something as simple as Pythagoras theorem. The inference that a triangle of particular dimension satisfies specific properties is used in multiple contexts. To paraphrase Louis Rougier, it’s a mentality to move from specific to the abstract. This idea is relevant in every sphere of modern science, including politics.

For instance, moving from specific rules to abstract rule of law is an illustration of same concept. Instead of directing everyone to specific duties, we enabled a framework to exercise free will. But exercise of freedom based on general qualities like respect for property, life and human rights. So, instead of celebrating good rulers, we started inferring good laws. We basically abstracted qualities of a good ruler into this new found mechanism called law. Movement from Magna Carta to American federalism is sort of that steady evolution from specific to the abstract. In fact, seems like Federalism adds one more layer to that dispersed rule-of-law framework. Sort of a higher level instrument to institutionalize development of good laws itself. An attempt to automate generation of good laws. As James Madison famously explained, all this checks and balances should automatically lead to good legislation. Results of this experiment can be debated, but the scientific argument for Federalism seems obvious. In that spirit, if we see legislation with specific directives assigning us tasks, it’s safe to say they are primitive artifacts in an otherwise sophisticated system.