Hello everyone
Bob writes:
>After reading everyone's cogent analyses and criticisms, I gave them
>some more thought and decided that since obviously a country (society)
>and government are not the same thing, then are government and law the
>same thing?
> This makes things a bit simpler for me. Let's say law is an inherent
>part of society. Society cannot exist without it.
> But is law something that is created or discovered? That to me is an
>extremely important point. Seems to it is has to be discovered. If it's
>'created' then it's anything rulers make it to be! Slavery's ok,
>genocide's ok!
> It's like the 'law of gravity.' It was discovered, not created. You
>just can't create a law that says "Ping-pong balls will now float."
> In this case, I put 'discovered' laws inherently in society. 'Created'
>laws--laws that mean anything--belong firmly in biology, since they can
>only be enforced through violence. Biological 'might makes right.'
> I thnk this explains why certain countries are much better to live in
>than others. The good countries have a tradition of 'discovered' law.
>The rest believe in 'created' law--whatever the rulers want. The
>'created' laws in Nazism, Fascism and Communism led to who knows how
>many hundreds of millions dead.
> It seems that 'created' law leds ultimately to either of two
>things--tyranny or chaos. Hitler or Genghis Khan.
> If this is true, the conclusion I come to is that the purpose of
>intellectuals is to 'discover' law, which then advances society.
>Intellectuals who believe in 'created' law are the ones who make society
>go backward, since they destroy society and allow biological values to
>reign supreme. Then, again, there are only two courses; tyranny or
>chaos.
> Governments that believe in 'discovered' law exists in the level of
>society. Governments that believe in 'created' law exist in the level of
>biology.
> Every tyranny has its intellectual apologists and propagandists.
> Any comments?
Hi Bob
You raise a very interesting question in my mind with your discovered vs.
created laws
thesis which I would like to address... namely, how do we know when a law
has been discovered or when instead it has been created? Isn't the discovery
of a law in essence its creation too? What exactly are we talking about when
we say "law"? To my mind, we are not talking about some independently
existing "thing" that we can call a law... we are talking about an
unambiguous agreement which cannot be said to exist beyond our agreement.
I sense that you mean to invoke a universal nature to the discovery of laws,
meaning that they are indeed independent by nature from the observation of
them. But because laws are experiential events by nature (static quality),
when there is no
experience of events, laws no longer exist either. Laws may seem eternal,
but they are only so as long as awareness of them lasts.
Created law on the other hand would perhaps be a localized event rather than
universal in scope... made in response to certain localized environmental
phenomena, perhaps, would you say? Yet we are all suspended in the culture
which we inhabit, therefore all laws are localized events which we only can
assume contain a hint of the universal... "God is on our side" type of
thinking is an example of this, I suppose.
Best wishes,
glove
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