Speculative
reason carries a burden of legitimacy, of past, of present, and of course, of
future. Legitimacy and justifications are the outcome of artificial
intelligence- rationale (logic) and causation are not necessarily two
sufficient methods, comprehensible enough to depict the truth. If an ultimate
object of epistemology is not to unravel the truth but to paint some blurred
imaginations, mankind will be homeless in the ‘state of society’ instead of in
the ‘state of nature.’ In fact, state of society, though coined by philosophers
to dissect the very empire of Mankind from animal kingdom, is a sham term, more
or less created to legitimize all the sins a man commits in the name of shared
values, you name it; a nation or call it a state, but a transition from tribal
society to aristocratic, and a liberal order is a story of movement from
harmony to conflict, from transcendentalism to instrumentalities, from equality
to hierarchy, from customary belief to formal bureaucratic laws.
Bureaucracy is a
replica of social order; telling not much a different story; when custom was
defining factor for a society, privileges were predetermined under the guise of
societal hierarchal structure, in a way state reinforces that old structure, in
the form of bureaucracy, as if old wine is packed in a new bottle. At least,
custom is nothing but a reflection of human colony, organically evolves, in
folklores, in mutual transactions, and in societal inter-relationships,
however, a bureaucratic law is an imposition, backed by command, duty, and
sanction, devoid of any sort of internalization by cognitive minds. Interestingly,
obedience to the bureaucratic laws could not survive if it depended solely on
even the most enlightened calculus of efficiencies by private group of
individuals. For there is always the chance that the advantages to be gained by
any given party in disobeying the law or subverting the legal order itself
outweigh the risks of loss (R M Unger, Law
in Modern Society, P. 129).
For millennia, men viewed nature and society as
expressions of a sacred order, self-subsisting if not self-generating, and
independent of the human will. According to this outlook, the test of wisdom
was the capacity to apprehend harmony of the world and to submit to it (Id. at 130). It is only within a
relatively recent compass of history that a truly different form of existence
and of consciousness appeared. The new vision was inspired by the discovery
that order could and indeed had to be devised rather than just accepted
ready-made (Ibid). Hobbesian rhetoric
of positivism, influenced by Machiavellian lust of power, changed the very definition
of nature, tend it prone to power, and only power. It is apt to remember
Shakespeare when he writes: “What a piece of work is a man: how noble in
reason; how infinite in faculty; in form and moving how express and admirable;
in action how like an angel; in apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the
world, the paragon of animals (Shakespeare, Hamlet,
1604).
People distinguished society from nature. They began to treat the latter
as something to tamper with in their own interests and the former as an
artifact of their own efforts…It brought conventional and contingent character
of every form of social hierarchy so that the exercise of power had to be
justified in new and more explicit ways (Unger, Law in Modern Society, 131).
Rousseau asks, “if
the origin of the inequality among Mankind; and whether such Inequality is
authorized by the Law of Nature” (Rousseau, The
Origin of Inequality, P. 2)? He
asks, “The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his
head to say, “This is mine," and found people simple enough to believe
him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how
many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved” (Id. at 18)? By saying, nature has a rule
of might is right, and state has right is might, man claims his upper hand for
righteousness and justice are concerned, however, private interest, which works
on the methodology of conflicts, relegates human species to the state of war and conflict which turned nothing but a costly affair. The hyphenation of conflict vis-à-vis
utility, nay efficiency had created anomic situations, resulted into fragmentation of natural bond of all the habitants on this planet. Our
folklores, which gives a place to Lion as a king of jungle, bring despondency
in form of structural vices, because the mightiest has the power to rule, and a weaker
species withers away (Charles Darwin, Origin
of Species). We turn our head towards a rule centric life to ensure order over chaos,
though rule turns to be too insignificant to deliver justice to a weak, and
overall society suffers heavily when law is manipulated for the sake of
promotion and protection of an individual interest. Such bureaucratic laws, later on developed as a legal order, are legitimized through hope, and by fear to ensure docility before rule, though better interests are served for those who creates a market of hope.
The crisis of
social order and the failure of attempts to resolve it throw men into a
condition that may revive in a higher form a predicament faced by certain
nonhuman primates. Levi-Strauss once suggested that the behaviour of these
animals has lost the unreflective determinism of instinct without acquiring the
conscious determination of conduct by learned rules; the genetic program is
silent where the cultural one has not yet begun to speak. Hence, their acts
seem without rhyme or reason, presenting to the observer the image of a
restless bafflement forever incapable of hitting upon an order of group
relations that would allow them to ascend the evolutionary order (R M Unger, Law in Modern Society, P. 132-133).This statement
is no less relevant for an autonomous man whose rationale choice is as
illusory as will-o-the wisp, baffling forever, without a goal of collective
excellence. Unger rightly writes, “Whenever the certainties of interactional
law begin to dissolve, human beings seem relegated to the situation of the
nonhuman primates-denied the experience of an unreflective order, they are
powerless to create another (Ibid.).
The true welfare of Mankind lies neither in Darwinism, nor in individual positivism, but
in collectivism-where life receives weight and direction from an order that
precedes the human will.
Posted By: Mrityunjay Kr. Singh (Research Scholar, Faculty of Law, University of Delhi)
Posted By: Mrityunjay Kr. Singh (Research Scholar, Faculty of Law, University of Delhi)
