JUNGLE KA RAJA: A FOLKLORE OF AN ANIMATED SOCIETY

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)