Law and eternity

The efficacy of law as a voluntary pursuit in a modern age

At the core of political theory there are two mutually exclusive views on the means by which society could be organized. One pole is occupied by the view espoused by Thomas Hobbes or his intellectual heir, Carl Schmitt. In essence, Hobbes and Schmitt are pessimistic about the innate qualities of their fellow men and it is probably the male of the species they have in mind. People to them are selfish and prone to violence against each other. To these pessimists an all-powerful central authority is necessary for the maintenance of social order. Coercion, or its threat, is the glue that binds humanity together.

The alternative viewpoint is that humanity can inter-relate with one another in peace and harmony without the need for one person, or a group perhaps, to wield coercive power or sovereignty as it is called. There are traces of this thought process in Classical Greece and those influenced afterwards. Apparently, Stoics were sceptical of political authority but more, perhaps, with the intention of absenting themselves from the hurly burly of politics. Some detect an anti-authoritarian strand in Taoism. What Lao Tzu espouses may be far more radical still as he laments “civilization” in totality. It is not until the 19^th century that anarchism is given a theoretical footing. Unfortunately, it was also associated with violence and tainted accordingly. In between there stood Jean Jacques Rousseau with his idea of nobility residing in those not marked by “civilization”.

Rousseau is, or was, condemned as naïve by those who instinctively think Hobbes and his ilk are realists. Such people might do well to reevaluate their position. The work of Luke Kemp as expressed in Goliath’s Curse may provide compelling evidence that Rousseau was right and Hobbes was wrong. Nonetheless, most people living in modern urbanized societies would think it inconceivable for a society to exist where institutions did not hold the power of compulsion. Law must have, in those minds, the ability to enforce, physically or financially, in the face of non-compliance. Law as voluntary seems absurd. This brings us to the creation of Muhammad.

I described my understanding of Sharia, or Islamic law the term I prefer, in an earlier essay with the title The travesty of misconception disfiguring Sharia. To the ill-informed Islamic law is a vast compendium of enforceable rules that are cruel or trivial by turns. Simply put, those who espouse this position have distorted Islamic law to taint it with a character that it simply does not have. It is entirely voluntary. The notion of compulsion or coercion is anathema. Those who subject themselves to it do so willingly knowing there is no earthly external force which will punish or dispossess if they violate the rules. I appreciate that there are polities in existence that claim to operate Sharia which systems are draconian, punitive and repressive, particularly against women. The adoption of a label does not ascribe the character of the label to that which is labelled. After all, calling a rotting fish a rose does not make it any less malodorous.

Law without a means of enforcement sounds, to many ears, like a contradiction in terms. The implied threat of force is the indispensable condition for efficacy. Yet in its heyday Islamic law was effective in, for example, regulating commerce. The proof lies in the Islamisation of the Malayan peninsula and some of the islands of what is now the Indonesian archipelago, especially Java. The indigenous peoples recognised and appreciated the inherent ethos of the traders from the West, being Arabs, which is why Islam was adopted. However, it would be remiss to claim that Islamic law was without sanction. It had the capacity of a sanction. It is just not of this world. Adherents considered compliance was a binding duty to their deity, being God or Allah as is one’s preference. It follows that Islamic law, as conceived here, would be an abject failure in the absence of a fervent belief in the Almighty. For any self-respecting atheist Islamic law in its pure form seems interesting but useless. The lynchpin, the deity, has been ripped out and tossed away.

It further follows that we are condemned to the realpolitik of Hobbes or, more relevantly in the present, of Schmitt. If ethics cannot come from within, they must be imposed from without. A thinker who confronted this problem was Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is reputed to have said: God is dead. The witty response to which is that God said Nietzsche is dead and he was. Neither is true. Certain characters in his works utter the words, including the Devil, but the seminal expression is put into the mouth of a madman:

The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances. ‘Where has God gone?’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him — you and I. We are all his murderers.

The Gay (or Joyous) Science ¶ 125

In Nietzsche’s telling the foundation underpinning conventional morality in traditional Abrahamic societies depended upon the existence of supernatural intelligence. When it is gone morality goes with it ushering in a state of nihilism (see The Will to Power ¶ 55). Nietzsche is terrified by his own thought. Nietzsche had a range of ideas as to how to negate the deleterious consequences of the rise of nihilism but he descended into catatonia before he could put flesh on the bones.

I think Nietzsche reconstituted a concept resembling a deity in his doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. I say his doctrine but he retrieved it from Presocratic thinkers, specifically Heraclitus (as he acknowledges see Ecce Homo: The Birth of Tragedy ¶ 3):

In a circle the beginning and the end are one

Fragments ¶ 70

I form my opinion on the role of eternal recurrence from Nietzsche’s claim that it is his most important concept (see Ecce Homo: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (TSZ) ¶ 1). I also make the claim because the idea is predicated upon infinity which is the singular property of the deity in monotheism. Nietzsche doesn’t really prove the doctrine. He intended to but his collapse put paid to that (The Will to Power ¶ 1057). He does set out a strange drama where Zarathustra (his alter ego?) explains the idea to a dwarf:

‘Behold this moment!’ I went on. ‘From this gateway Moment a long, eternal lane runs back: an eternity lies behind us. ‘Must not all things that can run have already run along this lane? Must not all things that can happen have already happened, been done, run past?

TSZ Of the Vision and the Riddle

Nietzsche posits that each life repeats itself in minute detail over and over again to eternity. Some commentators believe it was intended to be a serious cosmology. Others, thinking it juvenile, consider it only a thought experiment. It’s a pointless debate because it matters not but, in any event, that he thought it amenable to proof must mean he considered it real.

It is instructive to contrast the doctrine with the lynchpin in Muhammad’s conception. To be Muslim (in the true sense) there is a kind of consequence for non-compliance. It is not of this earth nor of this life. It is when the believer appears before the ethereal judge at the end of time or some such. Transgressions will be judged. I am not quite sure how as the judge is all compassion and mercy where lenity must, by definition, be writ large. In other words, each individual will voluntarily comply for otherwise their deity will slap them on the wrist or send them to hellfire or something in between. To me it is a silly idea but to them it is not. Their deity inhabits their thoughts constantly ensuring they act as judge of their own conduct and, as I say, it works.

The eternal recurrence operates the same way. Nietzsche refers to it as his abysmal thought. That is, all the errors, false steps, transgressions, misfortunes that the person experiences at any point in their lives will recur forever. The incentive, therefore, is to make decisions that you do not regret. In other words, the eternal recurrence in the atheist has the same effect as the internalized deity in the Muslim. You judge yourself and will therefore behave the same way as if you had to answer at the end of time to the supernatural being. I can’t see much difference between the two concepts if any at all. In the one case the individual internalizes a supposed external being characterized by infinitude and in the other the individual is judged in infinitude by recognizing the abysmal thought and behaving accordingly.

Quite how either group resolves the paradox of predestination with individual choice I am not sure. Qadr (destiny) is one of the six pillars of Islam. The deity is omniscient and omnipotent so already knows what you will do in the future. Islamic scholars believe free will and determinism are capable of reconciliation. Nietzsche’s way of dealing with the identical problem is to advise that each individual deals with their destiny by looking at their past in a positive light. “To redeem the past and to transform every ‘It was’ into an ‘I wanted it thus!’– that alone do I call redemption!” (TSZ Of Redemption) That might work for Islam as well. I suppose ultimately the resolution may well entail a conception of time and its flow different from the conventional idea of sequence.

No matter that they suffer the same paradoxical problems, both belief systems I have described are capable of sustaining law as a voluntary pursuit. Do I think voluntary law could work in reality? I am reminded of a hypothetical case presented by Kemp in his book. He presupposes two groups of people living adjacent to one another in a pre-civilizational context. One produces a psychopath. The psychopath foments distrust of the neighbours, suggesting the other tribe would attack to rape and pillage. He (it must be a he) persuades his fellow tribesmen to attack first. He has engineered a great victory even though no enmity pre-existed the violence. Because he is a hero and has induced fear in his tribe, he becomes the leader and they are on the way to being “civilised” including the attendant hierarchies and exploitation. In the face of incurably malign character in a minority of people the system I would borrow from Muhammad might not function the way I wish.

That would leave humanity with the dismal visions of Hobbes and Schmidt in which humanity is condemned to authoritarianism which invariably degenerates into decadent tyranny. I think that what those two “realists” describe becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Far better to have a self-fulfilling prophecy that Muhammad and Nietzsche would recognise as their own in slightly different ways.