Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Love Letter to Law

A Love Letter to Law

By John Taylor; 2006 June 27


A few days ago I quoted these words of J-J Rousseau, "...man acquires with civil society, moral freedom, which alone makes man master of himself; for to be governed by appetite alone is slavery, while obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself is freedom." (Social Contract, 65) Having mulled this over I now think that J-J was wrong about this, at least in part.

In order to obey a law that one prescribes to oneself, that law has to be valid, both subjectively for yourself and objectively, that is, it must correspond to the universe outside of you. You cannot just say, "I want to make this a law unto myself," and expect to go out and make it work. Only well understood laws that work both within and without can work this magic. In other words, J-J forgot to factor knowledge into the equation of moral freedom. A person who knows the law can obey and implement it, for love and knowledge are two sides of one coin. Science is investigating the laws of the universe, religion the laws of God. To apply law, you need to know, love, obey, apply. The more you know the more likely inner and outer application of law will connect, in other words, the more power we will be able to handle without corrupting it.

Take as an example the decision of certain hawks in the White House a few years ago to push for an invasion of Iraq. I have read that the Canadian Prime Minister at the time thought to himself, "I do not want to get involved in that because it is illegal, it goes against the letter of international law. As soon as you break the law the result is always the same, a quagmire, a money sink." So he wisely kept our soldiers out of Iraq and firmly ensconced in Afghanistan, a cheaper quagmire. Going over what I was writing at the time, I could only resort to ineffectual anger and bitter sarcasm:

"I saw Donald "Rummy" Rumsfeld on CNBC the other night saying ... `Saddam Hussein wasted his entire rule in just maintaining through murder what he had taken.' Rummy's junta, of course, basing action purely on morality and idealism, will have no problems maintaining what they have taken by force. All who observe are charmed by selfless idealism and their natural sense of justice attracts them to join in and help en masse, for principle contains the seeds of its own success. We shall see." ("Kant's Vision of Perpetual Peace," 13 April, 2003)

Morally speaking, there is no difference between this behavior on a governmental level and a group of teenage boys who rob a convenience store in order to avenge themselves upon a clerk who shortchanged them. Two wrongs do not make a right and Realpolitik is policy that dichotomizes, corrupts, kills truth. It is, in terms of what J-J says above, slavery to passion, caused by ignorance of law. Rummy would have any deluded boys who rob convenience stores jailed but for one reason only, because he is bigger, stronger and higher up than they are, not because he knows or cares about the first thing about law. There is nothing new here, Machiavelli understood it when he made his "The Prince," written for autocrats, a short volume, and his Discourses, written for republics (democracies, in modern terminology), he made into a long, complex and hard-to-understand book.

I ask you this, why is it that if you go into the fiction section of a bookstore and somebody tips the shelves over onto you, you would be buried, crushed by the masses of love stories written about non-existent lovers -- yet there are no love stories about law? Why no Harlequin Legal Romances? Abstract as it is, there is nothing in the universe more real or important or indeed more loveable than law. Who was it that said that justice was "best beloved in my sight?" Oh yeah, God. God said that. Yet who ever marries justice? Who cares? Even the Prime Minister of Canada at the time thought about the Iraq invasion in purely pragmatic terms. He reasoned, "Hmm, this will be expensive because it is illegal." A lover of law would have done what it takes, even to the extent of going onto his knees in public and begging, pleading with anyone, no matter how powerful, who proposed to break it.

Think of it this way, you see a child about to be run over by a car. You act immediately, even if it puts your own life in danger, to remove that imminent, unthinkable catastrophe. Law is like that. Break one and you kill them all; allow law to die, and justice dies too. Yet we are blind to illegality and gross injustices that are a just little out of our immediate field of view. Bill Gates put it beautifully in an interview lately, he said that if an airliner goes down killing a few hundred people it fills the headlines for a week, and at the same time thousands of people die every minute from easily preventable illnesses, and that hardly merits a mention anywhere in the media. I call forth the blessings of God upon him and Warren Buffet, the second richest man in America, who a few days ago gave much of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A sign, surely, that America may soon turn from its longstanding distinction of being the world's most corrupt to a new, spiritual, hegemony.

I am sorry. I have been ranting. Let us get our feet back down on the ground. Here is what I have been meaning to get at for the last few days, a proposition that acts as the climax of Kant's Science of Right:

"The best constitution is that in which not men but laws exercise the power."

Even those who care nothing about airy fairy spirituality or metaphysics still uphold this, Kant says. Yet they wish to break the law by effecting change by means of revolution. But what is science but ordered revolutionary change brought about by increased knowledge of the laws of nature? A Baha'i would say the same about religion, it is ordered change brought about by increased love and knowledge of God's law, accomplished within His Covenant, not outside it. The laws of science or of God cannot be advanced by breaking them. Okay, I will let him speak for himself. This is the last paragraph of "Science of Right."

"For what can be more metaphysically sublime in its own way than this very idea of theirs, which according to their own assertion has, notwithstanding, the most objective reality? This may be easily shown by reference to actual instances. And it is this very idea, which alone can be carried out practically, if it is not forced on in a revolutionary and sudden way by violent overthrow of the existing defective constitution; for this would produce for the time the momentary annihilation of the whole juridical state of society. But if the idea is carried forward by gradual reform and in accordance with fixed principles, it may lead by a continuous approximation to the highest political good, and to perpetual peace."

The last two words of this work, "Science of Right," are "perpetual peace," and that for good reason. Kant had already established that peace is the purpose of science. Science seeks law; law seeks justice; therefore the rule of law leads to eternal peace. In his words,


"It may be said that the universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason."

You can come to your own conclusions about this but here is mine. First principles may not always be self-evident but this has to be if any are. Anyone who learns science, seeks, ultimately, peace. Anyone who obeys the law, seeks peace. Anyone who upholds the law, upholds peace. Anyone who loves One God loves His Peace. This, my friends, is why I am revisiting now Kant's crowning work, his "Sketch on Perpetual Peace." This is what one scholar said about the Sketch,

"Kant's short but important essay on Perpetual Peace acquires more and new relevance in the light of events today and continues to inspire many contemporary thinkers. Kant's thought contributes in important respects to our globalised world: it paved the way for our contemporary understanding of human rights, the United Nations and human freedom." (Anja Steinbauer, 2005)



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John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

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