On Politics Part Three — On Civilization
The word “civilization” originally meant life behind city walls. This definition is accurate enough for common parlance, because, due to the nature of human life on Earth, tilling and reaping the soil in fixed locations and retreating behind walled fortifications during times of raid and assault is a natural if not inevitable outgrowth of social cooperation on a scale larger than tribal operations. There are disadvantages to forsaking the life of wandering shepherds or nomadic horsemen, but the advantage of having a settled seat of power is that it naturally lends itself to the invention and diffusion of writing, calculation, astronomy, the erection of walls, towers, canals and monuments, and other civilized arts.
However for the purposes of this essay, “civilization” here shall mean the customary and habitual submission to the rule of law, whose purpose is to mitigate the ills which follow the natural anarchy to which the passions and self interest of men incline them. There is nothing innate in the nature of nomadic life or life in a band of hunter-gatherers which prevents the elder or patriarch from establishing clear albeit unwritten rules, to be chanted or recited and strictly obeyed by successive generations.
The primary civilized art, and the one which allows all others to exist, is the art of law, which is the reduction of the ineffable organic complexity of those customs and practices seeking justice, peace, and civil order to a few simple or stereotyped commandments, written or recited without redaction, enforced by recognized formalities of court.
Law, in other words, is the attempt to reduce the operation of justice to ritual. The purpose of this reduction is manyfold.
First, the purpose is to turn private acts of vendetta or vengeance into public or social acts of retribution or compensation or correction or punishment.
Second, to instruct all reasonable men to know what is expected of their behavior, that they may comply with the law.
Third, to measure uniformity and regularity in the impositions of penalties, in order to eliminate personal passion and arbitrary decree.
Fourth, to prevent disproportion, either in undue severity or undue slackness, from one generation to the next, so that each child knows the laws he obeys are the same as his fathers and grandfathers obeyed.
Fifth, to eliminate insofar as possible the personality or personal opinion of the judge or king, so that it is not his will which imposes the penalty, but the law itself; and to dispel confusion between expressions of opinion, specific commands, and general decrees or sentences.
Sixth, to establish the hierarchy by which the law is carried out and maintained, including sanctions against contempt against the officers and agents of that hierarchy.
It is to be noted that in a democratic society, hierarchy is eliminated insofar as possible, and is based on merit or election rather than birth. Nonetheless, special forms of address and garb reserved for judges on the bench, special forms of address for Congressmen or special uniforms for police officers, as well as special penalties for signs of contempt or insubordination or interference with these minions of the law still exist even in the most democratically sentimental of nations. And this is because a judge or police officer or lawmaker acts not in his own person but as a representative of the terror and majesty of the law.
It need hardly be said that we are here speaking of authority, not power. It delights certain writers of the Marxist or Anarchist bent to conflate the two. In truth they are opposites. Imagine one of his subjects coming across Aragorn son of Arathorn, last king and heir of the combined kingdoms of North and South in the dungeons of Dol Guldur, in chains and broken by torment. Clearly if the lawful king gives a lawful order to the subject, such as, for example, to smuggle out a message or smuggle in a cup of water, the subject cannot be coerced to obey, but neither has the subject any legal right to disobey.
On the other hand, if Aragorn is not a despot of unlimited power, his command to confiscate the land of his subjects or evict the innocent serfs would be a violation of his authority, even if countless knights from Dol Amorath or rowdy cavalry from Rohan stood ready to carry out the unlawful order.
In this case, we can identify the sources of authority: by the recognized and customary forms of Arnor and Gondor, the coronation has taken place according to due process and ceremony; and the laws vest the father’s authority in the eldest son; and the customs and laws of the people consent; and the supernatural powers of the Valar across the sea ordain it.
In an imperial form of government, some other form or ritual, such as election by the Praetorian Guard, or appointment to the purple as Augustus by the current Caesar would be used; and in Republican and Democratic forms of government, the sovereign body is collective, and the forms depend on election, and the franchise passes from father to son, or is restricted to landowners, or to veterans, and so on, or is restricted by age or sex, depending on the rituals and usages, laws and customs, of the people.
Yet this is aside from the point. If all the voters in a democracy are withered and blind old women, and they pass a law according to due process, all the young and heavily-armed circus strongmen under their jurisdiction are rightfully bound by that legislation, whether the assembly commands the physical power to terrify them into obedience or not. Not only is authority not the same as raw power, authority is that which allows physically weak leaders to command physically strong followers to command physically invulnerable mobs and hordes of civilians.
The only exception to this rule is when a father or mother exercises a natural authority over his underage children, and the greater physical strength of the parent can compel obedience through terror of his strength. But even in this case, the case is soon reversed. When Aeneas picked up Anchises to bear him on his back from the flames and ruin of Troy, the demigod son’s physical strength far exceeded his mortal father’s, and yet pious Aeneas had no moral right to disobey his father or abandon him.
Hierarchy, hence, refers to the moral and legal ladder of superior and inferior authority, also called chain of command. It is an improvement in the art of law when a hierarchy is restricted to matters of law making and law enforcement, so that the person of the officer, be he king or judge, does not place him above the law. In a healthy legal system, drunk judges or corrupt policemen are held to account for crimes they commit when off-duty, or when on duty but in excess of their delegated authority.
It need hardly be said that, like all arts, the art of law has periods of improvement and innovation and periods of corruption. The innovation of jury trials rather than trial by combat, for example, clearly aided the administration of justice, as did the right the accused to confront witnesses and compel their testimony, as did the presumption of innocence and the prohibition against self incrimination. Contrariwise, the growth of administrative law courts who are not bound the same prohibitions and safeguards as a civil court, or granting bureaus the right to make determinations without due process which have the force and effect of law, is just as clearly a corruption, lacking even primitive safeguards against arbitrary ruling or abuse of power.
Having identified in rough the passions and interests which incline men to wickedness in the natural frame of things, it behooves us to identify those which incline men to civility.
The first is a rational apprehension of fraud and violence at the hands of strangers, neighbors and kin. Outlaws and exiles placed in environs where no law stands ready to avenge ills done him have a right to be fearful.
Outlaws and exiles also have no right to expect to achieve the fine things in life. While there are hermits and ascetics and celibates and other outliers who do not participate in the benefits of human civilian life, in general the second basic motive for loyalty to civilization is love of companionship, of family life, of peace and good order, not to mention security in the fruits of one’s labors, and the leisure to investigate and invent the useful and decorative arts and sciences, and to cease laboring on Sabbaths and holy days, both in fasts of penance and rituals of thanksgiving.
If it seems odd to the modern reader to list public festivities, civic games, and rites of worship as one of the primary passions that inclines the human spirit to prefer civilization to barbarism, the oddness is not in the human spirit, but in the reader. If the reader satisfies these passions by watching ball games on television or listening to televangelists on radio, rather than attending Ovations and Mayday Fairs and Olympic Games and Cathedrals and Pilgrimages, and if the reader does not adorn his brows with ashes at Lent or with flowers in the Eastertide or don an antic goblin mask on All Saint’s Eve to sing and carry on with all his neighbors during all his people’s high holy days, then indeed the reader lives perhaps less fully than civilization might afford him, but this does not obviate that love of public rites and devotions are one of the main motives sustaining civilization.
The third passion which inclines men to civilization is love of the bonds of marriage, which affix fathers to their children, and man to wife, both to make clear the duties filial and paternal, and to make clear when a rivalry for the erotic affection of a mate must end.
It may not be the common experience of any man who does not comb the crime gazette or criminal court docket to recognize, but such rivalry for mates is a prime source of male violence. It is common enough to alert the lawmaker and lawgivers of every eon and race of man to ceremonialize the bonds of mating with public celebration and mating ritual, and to criminalize abridgement of those bonds.
It is true that in rude and early days or among pagan people, the penalty both social and legal affixed to female infidelity was greater than that affixed to the male, and among pagans the cruel institution of polygamy was and is practiced, much to the offense of the equality of the sexes. Nonetheless, the imperfections or incompleteness found in the art of law does not obviate the plain observation that the sanctification and celebration and protection of marriage is a primary motive for the creation and maintenance of civilization. It is to be observed that in no legal system known to history is the violation of a promise between friends to remain friendly been a matter for legal ceremony or lawful penalty, whereas a promise between man and wife to remain chaste has been a matter for sanctification and sanction in all civilizations and among all barbarian tribesmen, even those too primitive to understand the fire drill or the bone needle.
Hence, in sum, the passions and interests which incline men to civilization are a love of life, a love of the good life, and a love of family life.
To Part Four
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
