Time Cops

While I have enormous moral and ethical and economic arguments against many of the laws of our land, I am proudly a part of the huge majority of people who feel that laws are necessary. The subject of law is as old as civilization itself. The need for law is clear to most people.

But I do not wish to question the need for law. The issue here is not whether laws are needed. Instead, this is an exercise in identifying unasked questions. As soon as these questions are asked, their merit is obvious, and we chastise ourselves for being so foolish as to not raise them earlier.

So here's the question: The question is not "do we need laws?" because the answer to that is obvious. The question, rather, is "who WROTE the laws that we are all beholden to?" Long story short, we largely follow dead mens' laws.

Perhaps our most-quoted (and therefore our most misquoted) founding father was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had an idea that there should be a revolution every generation. The more famous words in this quote have to do with the "tree of liberty being watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants".

But Jefferson was not calling for the perpetual violence that seems implied by the statement. He was not calling for war every 20 years, but rather a revisiting and revision of laws and assumptions, preferably through the democratic process.

A biography of Caesar which I am currently reading does a fantastic job of articulating this shackling to the past. Just as in the United States today, Rome had become dysfunctional due to this blind allegiance to the assumptions of men who had been dead for centuries.

"Their judgment was not necessarily powerful because it was right, but it was right because it was powerful."

In other words, might makes right. This has been a fixture of American domestic and foreign policy for decades.

"From the earliest times Rome had set great store by preserving and handing down the customs of the fathers. And as no one knew or could even imagine that the Roman order as a whole was no longer able to respond to the exigencies of the age, the only possible explanation for the present crises and emergencies was that the old customs were no longer properly practised. It was therefore necessary to be all the more punctilious in observing them"

This idea also increasingly dominates our politics. Since we cannot conceive of any flaw in our system, which we consider to be inherently ideal, the only explanation we can offer for our failures is that we are failing to properly mimic men who died a century before the invention of the automobile.

In other words, we refuse to consider that Jefferson's system may no longer be relevant, so we therefore assume that our problems result in us not properly imitating Jefferson.

"Respect for the old, formerly a rule, now become a binding law. Often it was no longer the rules of the ancestors that were raised to the status of dogma, but what was written about them, as it were, in the history books."

This is an important caveat, because in our desire to imitate the founders, we selectively edit their actual conduct according to our own preconceived biases. So, rather than following the founders (which is irrational enough in its own right) we instead follow our own self-projected and self-serving images of what the founders would do in our shoes.

"The Senate regime was anything but convincing, with its insistence on complaisance and consideration, its time-wasting and obsession with trifles, and above all its utter refusal to countenance anything new.

The political order was full of absurdities, which only made sense because society still believed in them. Yet what was so maddening was society's increasingly rigid attachment to the past."

All nations reject any other nation's right to occupy their territory or meddle in their politics. But sometimes, we are not occupied by foreign armies; sometimes we are occupied by dead ones.