de rebus
Liberté Egalité Fraternité
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La liberté guidant le peuple, Eugène Delacroix
As you may or may not know that was one of the catch cries of the French Revolution. Since then it has become the national motto of France and the concepts also appear in the Indian Constitution’s preamble. I think as a national motto for a democratic nation it is very fitting. This is why it came to mind when I was listening to the usual election squabble.
Liberté — liberty. The concept of freedom is one that is considered highly important in modern society. I value it too yet I think it begs a few questions. The most pressing is: Freedom to do what?
Lets look at the first, most obvious but possibly most reprehensible answer: Freedom to do anything. I think it is clear why this answer is, in my opinion, so unacceptable because it represents a total denial of morality, responsibility or duty of any sort. Aside from the amorality — which as I think is reason enough to reject this answer — I would think that no state would be able to properly function if it were to endorse this kind of freedom. Obviously not everyone agrees, namely anarchists. I have some respect for anarchists in that they seem to hold such an optimistic view of humanity. I only wish that were a realistic one. If you don’t believe me examine this blog. Browse around the things he has marked as “total depravity”. You’ll soon get the point. *
So as I think the first option is not a viable one. What about: Freedom to act according to your own customs and own beliefs. This option is an attractive one in that it appears to be one considerate of others; an option that recognises the difference that is held between different cultures. Yet I disagree again. The source of my disagreement is possibly somewhat controversial. I hold that some cultures are better than others even if they are all ultimately fallen.** For example I hold that a culture which allows murder*** is worse than one which condemns it because there are some things which are morally-speaking wrong. (Refer to σκηνή β΄.)I do not believe that a member of the former culture should be allowed to practice his “belief”. Just as this is the case obviously for these “big” offences I think it is equally the case for apparently “smaller” offences. And so while this second answer to the question is initially satisfactory I don’t think it is ultimately acceptable.
This leads me to my third option: Freedom to do right. To me it seems obvious and yet people in my experience are not prepared to speak out against something they feel or know is wrong on the grounds that the perpetrators “have the freedom” to do it. That is not only a morally unacceptable model of society but an ultimately unsustainable one. When it becomes unacceptable for people to act upon their moral beliefs for fear of upsetting those of another, that is when the very notion of “right” is no longer at the centre of a society’s concern. When this happens it is only so long until the society slips into — to borrow a phrase from Dr West — total depravity.
So that’s all I have to say about liberty for the moment.
Now to Egalité or equality.
Justitia, or Lady Justice - The statue above the Old Bailey in London.
I found the picture here: http://nickbaines.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/
I don’t know whether that is its original location.
Equality is certainly an interesting concept. Like Freedom it is also a highly valued one. Likewise I have a few issues with the standard perception of equality. My problem with equality is knowing when it should apply. That sounds even to me like an odd thing to say. Perhaps it is my upbringing or the democratic nation I live in that makes my immediate response to that question: Always. However, it is also apparent to me that people are not necessarily equal and I think that our treatment of people should reflect that. I say not necessarily because it all depends how you are measuring. If you measure by value, I would argue that all people are just as valuable. But I do not think this level of equality exists across the board. And so I prefer to take things on a case by case basis. For example another place where I think all people should be considered equal is the law. Hence the picture of Lady Justice with her scales.
This brings me to try and tackle the question of how to obtain equality under the law. In the election I mentioned I’ve noticed two different attitudes. The first is to create an equality in the way everyone is treated. The second is to create equality in the result. A supporter of the first approach might suggest equal funding for all school students, whether private or public whereas a supporter of the second approach is more likely to suggest more funding for the public schools.**** I think the dilemma is whether or not we want equal treatment or equal results. I think both options seem on the surface to be just but actually have serious drawbacks.
First to equal treatment. This option is good because it provides a very straightforward model of how society should treat people. However it evidently fails in that equal treatment does not yield equal results because people are different and have different backgrounds. The most obvious problem to me is that of inheritance. Inheritance means that no two people have the same starting point in life. However this is not the only point in which people differ in circumstances: People have varied fortunes; the same situation can excite one person into action but render another person unproductive, and there are many other such points. These are all reasons why treating every one the same way does not lead to equality under the law; a fact which seems to have been thankfully realised by some branches of government.
However these reasons are the very same ones that the second approach is generally impractical. The second approach to have any practicality must involve generalisations of individual needs into broad groups that don’t actually satisfy the needs of very many of those individuals. So ultimately the choice voters are left with is to treat people equally but to have no equality or to try for equality by compensating but ending up with nothing. I don’t yet have any satisfactory answer to this question. Maybe somebody else will come up with something. But a good government will not stop trying to address the issue.
Fraternité – brotherhood.
I don’t have a picture for this. But if I did what would it look like?
The term brotherhood is one that has fallen into disuse at least in my circle of experience. I think the nearest concept which resonates is community. Yet this is something that seems to be lacking in the political process and that is a great discredit to the democracy of today. It is something of a trite observation to suggest that politicians are too removed from the actuality of the situation of their constituents. But I think it is true. You can see it whenever a “democratic” government takes a move that is not supported by the majority of citizens. (Whether or not democracy is an ideal system of government is a topic for another day) You can see it in the self-serving politicking. Most of all you can see it when politicians try to present themselves as “Joe Average” (as if such a thing existed). They know that they are removed from community and brotherhood and they think the way to fix that is through lies or at best deception.
Democracy was designed to work in a smaller system. The Athenian and Roman systems worked because there were no partisan allegiances in the way there are now and the societies were small enough to hold their representatives accountable. In Athens a leader was not capable of acting against the will of the assembly without serious consequences. I should note that these systems were far from perfect: The Romans’ lent itself to corruption and the Athenian system was more of a broad oligarchy than a democracy. Yet I admire the community involvement of these systems. I think that is the sort of brotherhood our modern democracies could ideally use.
So ultimately I stand by what I said at the beginning: Any democratic nation should really take the concepts of Liberté Egalité and Fraternité very seriously but at the same time be wary of the hidden pitfalls of these seemingly infallible values.
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*Here, just as anywhere else, just because I link to another blog or web page doesn’t mean I agree with them on everything.
**I mean this as in sinful.
***Another clarification: War is no murder provided the war is just. Self-defence is not murder. So on.
****Just a clarification: In this country public schools are those run by the government whereas private schools are those run independently. Private schools tend to have high tuition fees, especially those associated with any level of prestige or academic or sporting prowess.
σκηνή β΄
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Well this is the next bit of background thinking. If you haven’t yet you should read σκηνή α’.
So what is it this time?
Morality is true.
And also morality is not always what people expect.
Let’s deal with the first one first. On the grounds that my views on this are largely derivative from the great CS Lewis I have decided to – rather than essentially paraphrase – refer you to the original. This is from the beginning of Mere Christianity, a series of radio talks given during World War Two. I highly recommend reading or listening to the entire thing. None of it is copyrighted.
I apologise in advance for the lengthiness of the quote but I think you will find it quite readable.
“Everyone has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: “How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”-”That’s my seat, I was there first”-”Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”- “Why should you shove in first?”-”Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine”-”Come on, you promised.” People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups. Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: “To hell with your standard.” Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the “laws of nature” we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong “the Law of Nature,” they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law-with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
…
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining “It’s not fair” before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not matter, but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong- in other words, if there is no Law of Nature-what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?
It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologise to them. They had much better read some other work, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:
…
These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.”
Lewis continues to address some important concerns later on. You can find the full version here.
With regards to the second point, namely that morality is not always what is expected, I shall try to be brief.
While I believe that morality is absolutely true, I do not believe that it is necessarily absolute. What I mean by this is that while the exact same action in the exact same situation always has a rightness or a wrongness, and this is unchangeable. It is my belief that this is one of the absolute truths I discussed in σκηνή α’. If you have read that you will also realise that I believe mankind is not fully capable of recognising what is morally correct by their own power. We have a warped and imperfect view of this. Yet we have some idea.
What I mean when I say that morality is not necessarily absolute is that the same action in different situations can be right or wrong. For example abortion when the mother’s life is threatened clearly has different moral implications to abortion when it is not. (I will leave my specific views on abortion to a later date)
Thank you for taking the time to read this lengthy post. I hope it has made some small portion of my beliefs apparent. I think they are reasonable. Do you?
PS
Sorry but I couldn’t find a suitable image
Some blogs I Enjoy Reading.
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http://abetterpossession.wordpress.com/
http://thecrucialityofnappies.wordpress.com/
http://pleasingsacrifice.blogspot.com/
Though I do enjoy these I do not necessarily agree with them on all points
σκηνή α’
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The Greek word σκηνή or, transliterated, skēnē, refers to the backdrop of the theatre in Athenian drama. It is the word from which we ultimately derive the English word, scene. α’ is the Greek numeral for one. This is to be the first of a series of posts that will attempt to provide the background and framework for the rest of the blog.
So I think we should start with the basics.
A thing is what it is. This is a deceptively simple statement, but as I think, it holds true.
I say it is deceptively simple. How is that? One objection that seems to crop up against this seemingly basic idea is that one thing is not perceived in the same way be every person. A simplistic example is this painting:
Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte
What’s the point? This painting is one done in the style of pointillism by George Seurat. It is quite well known as an exemplar of this style. But what is interesting about it to me is that when you stand up close to the painting all you can see is dots. However when you stand from afar you get an entirely different impression of the painting. The same object has two different forms, apparently.
I disagree.
There is but the one object and that object remains the same the whole time. All that changes is that the perception of the observer. The thing is what it is.
A more sophisticated sense of the argument against my initial premise is that everyone has a relative view of the universe. No one can understand what it is that someone else experiences. I think there is some truth to this argument just like each viewer of the painting is (without effectively becoming the other viewer) unable to grasp the experience of the other, so is there some incommunicable difference in the perspectives we all have of the world around us. Yet the part of the argument I do not agree with is when someone suggests that the world itself has no single and true form. Yes we all have different perspectives and we are all scratching away at some corner of what we perceive to be truth, but I believe that underlying that there is a truth and one that is undeniable: the truth that a thing is what it is; the truth that the universe and everything in it is of a particular form whether or not we recognise that form.
So the thing that I take away from this discussion is that absolute truth exists but that mankind is incapable of recognising it with certainty of its own efforts.
Discuss.
initium
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To begin with I should make a few things clear. This blog is entitled de rebus, my intended meaning being “about stuff”. Essentially my intention for it is to explore ideas whether or not they relate to present events: My only criterion is that what I write about is something that interests me. I hope that other people will be interested enough to respond to my posts but I maintain my right to remove replies I deem inappropriate or offensive. Something that would classify as inappropriate would be discussion, especially defamation, of actual people; this blog is meant to be about ideas not about people.
Now I should make a few more things clear, namely give a broader sense of my opinions and background as a whole. I am Christian. My views are shaped by this and if you think this is likely to be problematic I would caution you that I will not compromise my moral views unless I see good biblical reason to do so. That said I do not wish this blog to become a battle-field between the various denominations of Christians. Discussion is encouraged but if I feel that it is getting out of hand I will shut it down.
I am also a student. I feel it necessary to at this point signal that I do not claim to have certain knowledge of anything I say; rather I claim only what I think are a consistent set of beliefs. The only way, as I believe, to obtain real truth is through God and His* word. That said, on matters not pertaining to my religious beliefs I will be flexible – or will try to be flexible – in my views. My particular interests are in the classical world. I have been studying Latin and Greek for sometime now and would recommend them to everyone. I am also interested in Music, its performance, composition and enjoyment. I should specify that I mean classical (in the broadest possible sense of that word). I myself am a bassoonist and dabble in the piano.
That’s about it for now.
I hope you enjoy reading.
*I have here capitalised “His”. This is my normal practice for pronouns referring to the Christian God. Likewise I use AD and BC for years. CE and BCE are illogical since their purpose is to secularise but they still define themselves from the year when Jesus was thought to have been born.
post scriptum: initium means beginning
