Rules, Law and Lore

More word play but was thinking that maybe the word "lore" should be resurrected.

The point follows from the long running investigation into "law". A "Law" cannot be contravened - by definition. Thus we have the "Laws" of Nature which state that a man cannot fly. We can't get around that. Yet the legal world uses the same word - but it is different. No-one enforces the Natural Law because it is a Law (some argue that God does the enforcing = complex argument) . The legal law, by contrast, must be enforced because it is not a "Law". In this sense the legal-law that murder is wrong is no different from the off-side rule in football - both are rules that must be enforced - and precisiely because they are enforced they are arbitrary and not Laws.

The legal system is thus the lowest point of human existence to date. Before the legal system the world was governed by Laws - which now that people have forgotten them have been replaced by Rules. Murder is Wrong - it is a Law. It is wrong whether there is a legal system to capture perpetrators or not. It is wrong in the jungle as much as in the city. Why it is wrong? because there is a Law that punishes those who murder: but this is very hard to see for those indoctrinated with the concept of "legality".

I chanced upon a copy of the Tao Te Ching yesterday (Book of the Way, of Life) given by a friend a while ago. It occurs to me reading it that this blog is seeking like a man in the dark toward the Dao, which i realise is the same "place" that both Buddha and Jesus spoke. In our core we know the Dao, or at least we recognise it, but we have lost sight of it. We are exactly like the child who perceives that the teacher is asking them to do something, yet as they can't work out what it is, they feel belittled and "out of the loop" and so like that child we egotistically escape the pressure and diminusion by rejecting "whatever it is" as nonsense and unimportant. The Dao is like this. It is unfathomable to the childish mind - even Confuscius is supposed to have been confounded by the Dao. We would rather it wasn't there so we can continue to believe that everything is at it seems and we are in control.

Buddha will remind us this is the illusion. Jesus will remind us to hang on the cross for a few hours and wonder what death says about us. And Lao Zi will simply remain quiet as the Dao is eternal, but hidden in everything.

Yet most of what we call legel law is really just customs that have become accepted. Like driving on the left hand side, paying taxes, accepting the soverignty of the queen and the power of parliament, education, money exchange etc. These things are not God given and differ from culture to culture. Indeed murder is cultural since we accept murder of enemy combatants in time of war, and some cultures accept murder of criminals. Other cultures have famously accepted human sacrifice. They are all murder, but cultures (and hence laws) view them differently. I was asked recently why gold is considered valuable. There are physical reasons, but the "value" has its roots in culture (i.e. law). When the global culture was rewritten (when Bretton Woods was abandoned) gold lost a good deal of its value, altho cultures as deeply engrained as gold take a long time to be forgotten (as the current battle in the markets demonstrates).

So I would go as far as to say that all Legal Law is really culture. And as culture its proper name is thus Lore.

So Three (3) distinctions can be made now.

Law is immutable. They are true in all times and all places for all people. That is the meaning of Law. Law requires no enforcement. For this reason all man-made laws are excluded. The idea that anything man-made could be a law stems from arrogance as discovered by King Knut. Laws are the realm of God, or Nature whichever you prefer. That is they are Spirituality (cf Religion in next paragraph) or Science whichever you prefer.

Lore is historical. Lore is mutable, but society resists change. Anything which is the way it is because "that is the way it is done, or always been done" is Lore. Often Lore immitates Law so that it seems that Lore is immutable. The test always is Law requires no enforcement, while Lore must be socially enforced. The arising of Government, the writing of Lore and the creation of central Power to enforce Lore required a change of language. So there is also "lore" with a small "l" to denote the child of Lore which is enforcement of culture decided by the social subset of "ruling" authority. Lore is actually the largest part of Religion including all the traditions, customs, festivals and values. British lore (Law) is generally accepted to be based upon Christian Lore (which crudely matches the real Law in places).

Rules are arbitrary. Rules are highly mutable. These must be strictly enforced because they are arbitrary. The existence of "Rulers" suggests that actually they enforce "rules". Maybe "lore" with the small "l" is actually just Rules (to be considered). Examples of rules are the change of try value in rugby from 4 to 5 points in 1992. Another example is the change of VAT from 17.5% to 15% this year in UK. Another example was the deprication of capitol punishment in UK in 1969. It is odd to think that people have lost their life just because of arbitrary rules! This is more the attitude we have to cultures that allow sacrifice - yet sacrifice is often Lore and much more deeply engrained and authorised in the minds of the people who accept them than rules. Invading Rulers discover that the closer their rules mirror the native Lore the easier it is to govern. Consider Thatcher challenging ancient UK taxation lores in 1990 - the Lore won, the rules failed even under a strong right wing government. In Tibet however it is different because it is one Lore versus another.

So there is a revised and improved examination of the notion of Law split into 3 quite separate elements.

The reason for the analysis is to examine the only Real one more closely - that of Law. This blog is about Life and its nature and characterists. Life is characterised in essence by Law not Lore or Rules. In UK we may have turkey on Christmas Day (this is Lore) and we may be limited to one wife (that is Lore and Rules) but if we live at this level we will never know what the Real nature of life was. Personally I think that eating turkey violates the Law so I reject the Lore, and I think all murder violates the Law so I reject the Lore and the Rules in places. This is the foundation of conscience and why I am arguing at length that it is not good enough to follow "orders" (rules) or perform one's "earthly duties" (Lore) to be correct. If we ever doubt this we need only remember the Nuremburg trials and the claim by so many Nazis that they were following "orders" - a robot yes, a human with freewill?

Just to attack the other side of the argument we might do well to remember Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper) who said that God ordered him to murder. One might argue that he was following his conscience and he rejected the Lore and the Rules. A better example is more famous - Abraham who went onto a mountain side to murder his own child! (see the Bible or Koran). Kierkegaard examines this in depth in "Fear and Trembling". Abrahan is the father of faith precisely because he so blatantly rejected both the Lore and Rules (Ethics) and his own desires as a father (Aesthetics) to perform some higher duty (the Religious) Law in the present analysis.

It is more complex if we consider the Bhagavad Gite where Krishna explains to Arjuna that his duty as a soldier is higher than his duty to his family. This reminds us of Sophocles' Antigone also where she is torn between obeying the King's order not to bury her brother and her family duty to entomb him. She follows family and is killed by the state. Arjuna follows God and wins the battle.

There is much to pick through here and I've run out of time, but 3 types of Law is progress.