A BRILLIANT RESPONSE BY Radu Ioviţă TO MY PREVIOUS POST ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOMS
This is an interesting topic, but I'm going to disagree with you. I've been reading a book by Sir Peter Ustinov, which he incidentally wrote in German, called "Achtung: Vorurteile!" ("Attention: Prejudice!"), where one of the things which remained engraved in my memory is the observation that not so long ago, in Victorian England, a judge who perhaps had children of his own, with whom he'd sit around the fire in the library and read them stories, would calmly go to Court the next day and sentence a 12-year old girl to HANGING for having stolen a piece of bread. Ustinov remarks, correctly in my view, that the judge would not have been able to contain his surprise if someone had pointed out his behavior as inconsistent at best, schizophrenic and perverse at the worst. This is because the concept of 'social causes' and origins of crime and unrest were not cemented as they are now. One only has to look at Dickens's stories to see how wide-spread and pervasive the problem of inhumane treatment of criminals was in 19th century Europe, especially for children, and especially for the poor. But Victorian England can hardly be described as a religious fundamentalist country – on the contrary, it is the society that produced Darwin, Prestwich, and Huxley. So, given the striking similarity of the two events, what is the common ground between the two? It is the radical acceptance of the letter of the law, of the rigid application of a code in the name of 'order and discipline'. It is fundamentalism, I give you that, but not religious fundamentalism. It submits individual and even collective judgement to an unchangeable code of rules, which in itself has no agency. Imagine that the qadi judging this case had been taught to exercise his judgement in context, and to consult with others and with old Islamic law books. I doubt he'd have come to the same sentence. That's why I will side with your dad on this. And by the way, the article I sent you does mention that convicting a girl of 13 is illegal according to the Shari'a. I don't think I have to remind you of what kinds of
crimes were commited in the name of secular law in places like the Soviet Union, Cambodia, or China...
This is why I'm suspicious of any political faction which promises "order and discipline": they always deliver. Islam seems to be in a peculiar situation. I don't think that any of the countries whose main law today is the Shari'a had it as their main law uninterruptedly since the Middle Ages (I may be wrong about this). But if the Shari'a was reintroduced recently, it is as a reaction against something else – I am supposing that it is Western colonialism and the introduced body of laws that went with it (or Ottoman colonialism – from what I know, Ottoman law was a mix of Shari'a and the various kanuns allowing the ulama's to interpret each case). In any case, it's the return to 'purism' that worries me, not the basis on which it is (rather shabbily) argumented.
I suspect that as our societies become increasingly complex, they tend to become increasingly controlled by ever-growing bodies of law. I remember that a few years ago, a women's advocacy group wanted to petition for the legiferation of their male colleagues' behavior during the period of pre-menstruation!! Needless to say, this is an unworkable situation, but the trend in legiferation in other complex interactional situations such as sexual harassment in the workplace has definitely intensified. In today's world, the easiest thing to become is a criminal! But there is hope: Recently, in Germany, several pilot projects to de-legislate automobile driving have had a huge success – they were simply trying to discourage drivers to blindly follow the rules of traffic, and to exercise their judgement rather than assume that everyone will follow the law flawlessly. To do this, they've simply removed most of the signs from the roads, therefore forcing the drivers to question their priority rights, to slow down, and to look around them.
‘Yaz’ olmalı idi ilk söylenen, ‘oku’ değil. Biz tanrısı değil miyiz bilincimizin? Bizim beynimiz değil mi her suçu unutan? Biz değil miyiz ki her düşünceyi çarpıtan? Yazmalıyız ki sözümüz kök salsın, yazmalıyız ki değişen anlamların geri dönebileceği, yeniden başlayabileceği bir evi olsun. Yazmalıyız ki, suçlarımız ve suçluluklarımız ve hatalarımız yüzümüze çarpılabilsin. Bu değil midir hayatımızın anlamı?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
The alternative that Radu's response suggests is interesting. If I gather correctly: allow people the freedom to make rational context-dependent judgments - in a sense, as judges in a court of law are, ideally, supposed to do. Taking it a step further, if we eliminate all arbitrary cultural conventions (e.g., rules of the road, courtship rules, etc.) at the beginning of this alternative situation, you have a scenario where people have to appeal only to *reason* and *logic* to make correct judgments. Note, however, that *reason* and *logic* are themselves cultural conventions/rules in some sense (though not arbitrary in the same sense - I'll hold this as presumptive for now) without intrinsic agency and so forth, just like the conventional laws of the Torah, the New Testament, the Qur'an, and so forth. Notwithstanding their appeal to formalisms supposed to capture the generalities and principles of not only their proprietary metaphysical domain but also of those empirical things-in-the-world that happen to fit the bill, reasoning/logic is still encoded in conventional forms such that they can be mastered and transmitted from person to person. To draw a parallel to Radu's *legi-feration* (legislation + proliferation, if I gather correctly), this encoding of reasoning laws becomes *sine qua non* not only to develop increasingly complex logic systems but to facilitate that development by enabling entire communities of relevant individuals to *submit* to the same basic conventions and to the standards entailed by them such that clear inter-subjective judgments can be made (to a certain extent) on the acceptability or unacceptability thereof. The world that is known through these rules becomes more complex in tandem with the complexification of the rules themselves. As the inter-subjective community becomes larger, it becomes more varied in opinion and more unwieldly - motivating increasing precision and efficiency in both the formalisms that are to be agreed upon and in their communicable encoding.
ReplyDelete[As a quasi-aside, to take a well documented historical case, as Jews increasingly became more or less permanent citizens of the Diaspora (where Judeah was perpetually taken by foreign empires and Judeans exported out) the Torah Shebe'al Peh (the Jewish oral tradition; later entextualized) was gradually supplanted by the Torah Shebichtav (the written tradition) and Synagogues in an effort to maintain *Jewishness* while-away from the legitimate place of worship, the Temple (now the Temple Mount). Some have argued, I think convincingly, that observant Judaism became, as a result, less of an individualistic spiritual deal for the masses and more of an unquestioned convention abiding deal - a rift that the movement behind Jesus and the disciples, before it was turned into Imperial Christianity (and entextualized for similar reasons), was trying to reconcile (the historical beginnings of Islam, by the way, ended up taking a derivative and similar route - Judeo-Christian-Oral first, Textual after, even though the textual was already well established by the 7th century A.D.]
In any case, I want to suggest that if you were to take the rational/logical route, you are bound to end up with essentially the same kind of system to which it would be an alternative (and which you would be supplanting to a certain extent, or even eliminating). This time, however, you end up with a flexible system, in principle, whose rules - in virtue of being formal and generalizable - that motivate general context-dependent reasoning according to all relevant data and clear judgment according to the standards of the said system - rather than situation specific folk-epistemic-given axioms, labile to disparate interpretations, with pre-scribed punishments following violations thereof, etc.. But, taking it to its upper bound, the problem with this Vulcan-like system is that humans, by nature, are not good formal logicians - mastery of this takes a great deal of developmental effort and training (effort that would otherwise go towards busting your ass at a farm, or having others bust their ass so that you can get the training). And so called common sense won't cut it - as it is, arguably, motivated by deep evolutionary internalizations (which *culture*, more or less, attempts to regulate) that are, as it were, at the root of all evil. "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by the age of 18" (or 21, I can't remember)...some famous guy once said. And I suspect that even if every human being on the planet received the same ideal training, there would still be variation in mastery of logical contextual judgments, thus implying a certain genre of dominance and submission (in addition to already submitting yourself to rational/logical rules), and even implying the possibility of criminality and injustice. Moreover, as logical principles by themselves would not sufficiently specify what we *ought* to value, exactly, as worthy of our time and effort (aside from the logical principles themselves), whatever values we tend to have (which are likely to vary in undesirable ways) as motivated by evolutionary internalizations and variations thereof, as well as by the development of personal idiosyncracies within one's lifetime, wil always have to be negotiated by logical council - again, implying dominance and submission, winners and losers, potential cheaters and cheater detectors, Rat Bastards and holier-than-thou ass-bags at every step. Perhaps learning how to lose is what we need - or maybe, as the transcendalist Emerson wrote "win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change."
With all this said, I guess I should have paid more attention to Star Trek...I wonder how Spok and the rest of them did it.