The Chinese expression “wú fǎ wú tiān” (无法无天) is usually translated as “lawless,” but that’s not the literal translation.
The literal translation is “no law, no Heaven.”
Heaven is an ideal state of being, but because we aren’t angels, we need law to help us get closer to Heaven. It sets down the “rules of the road” for living in harmony with other people. So law makes it possible for us to get closer to an ideal state, “Heaven.” Without law, no Heaven.
But that ideal state, Heaven, is also what makes law possible. Without Heaven, no law.
Unless we know what we want our society to be like — its ideal state — then we have no basis for enacting or obeying any laws at all. If law isn’t based on what’s right and wrong, good and bad, then law is nothing more than power: it’s only people with guns forcing everyone else to do what they say.
That’s why the U.S. Declaration of Independence invoked “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” The American Founders knew that law had to come from Heaven, however we interpret its actual existence.
The Thousand-Year View 
That is a distinction taught in law schools – the difference between laws that prohibit things that are “malum in se” (outlawed activity is wrong in and of itself) and laws that prohibit things that are “malum prohibitum” (things are outlawed because we have decreed so). At least they used to teach this.
This is what makes me uneasy about a society that becomes too multi-cultural – there is less wide agreement on what is right and what is wrong.
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I agree. Libertarians usually think that only malum in se acts should be illegal, but they ignore law’s broader “rules of the road” functions that help build social cohesion. And multiculturalism is deadly, especially when it involves systematic destruction of all previous mores and institutions. I make the same point in the second edition of my book on belief, which, ahem, will be published next Tuesday:
“In order to survive, a society needs a majority population who agree on enough to work together for the common good and see each other as members of the same in-group. It also needs some general agreement about what the common good is.”
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DH2V58YF/
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