NATURAL LAW vs. HUMAN LAW

At one time I used to puzzle over the differences among natural law (like gravity), “divine” law handed down by God ("Thou shalt not kill."), and human law hammered out by governments trying to keep order.  Now I’ve added a new way of dividing the territory, which is “sin” versus “Evil.”  It’s really the same old “human law” versus “natural law” so I suppose the only change is some slight re-definition, and the elimination of divine law, which on examination turns out to be mostly institutional human rules anyway.  ("Thou shalt not wear mixed fibres." Leviticus 19:19)

If the dogs design Heaven, it will probably not be like this.

Human laws are negotiable and therefore controversial and liable to change.  They are generally “emergent” from a specific time and place where a certain set of persons in power can enforce what they think is behavior that will benefit at least themselves and possibly others, including the general state of things.  ("Thou shalt dress up when thou comest to the Montana legislature.")  One of my duties as an animal control officer inventing and guiding public and internal education was to support a citizen committee charged with rewriting the animal control ordinance for Multnomah County, which included the highly developed urban city of Portland as well as rural and even wilderness lands farther out, esp. up the Columbia Gorge.  It took a year.  I did a lot of research, not just on existing law but on what works and how and why.  It's easy to say dogs should go to heaven, but hard to decide how to define a leash length.  Is three feet too short?  Is thirty feet too long?

Burgwin, our boss, specifically hand-picked the members of the committee which was not a democratic thing to do except that it was meant to produce interaction that would serve everyone.  Therefore, he chose people from completely opposite sides of the problems but not the crazies, the parasites raising money, or the tools for outside organizations.  Looking back, it’s interesting that there were no clergy and no environmentalists, but it was the Seventies and those institutions had not yet begun to address animal issues.  We had an excellent chair, Francis Smith, who had proven himself as a calm lawyer friendly to both sides of animal issues.

The ultimate cubicle

So now let’s look at my distinction between “sin” and “Evil” and my theory that sin is about human-defined rules and Evil is about natural laws and forces gone wrong, mostly uncontrollable by humans but making laws crucial and inevitable.  Cruelty is Evil, emerging from emotional deformation in humans and inflicted on the vulnerable for no cause but personal gratification.  It can power laws like those imposing amputation for stealing and also laws that authorize the removal of children from their homes, even though the homes may also be cruel.  Of course, if the new alternative of fostering turns out to cruel, it is no improvement.  Whatever squats in our own culture to make us want to watch movies about torture, avidly follow cases of gruesome murders, use "disrespect" as an excuse to kill the innocent is Evil.  Sin is the labyrinth, Evil is the minotaur.  Sin is a construct, Evil is an unnatural force emergent through the natural.  The "natural" is neither sinful nor Evil -- it is a human construct, created by inventing the "unnatural."

H.M. King 'Abdul 'Aziz al 'Abdul Rahman al Faisal al Sa'ud

Chieftains can be modern if they want to be.

It is sinful to break into a magazine office and murder everyone there, obeying the laws of tribal chieftains millennia ago, not realizing that the template is old and broken.  Acting like the loyal subjects of a prophet defined by that conviction will not work in modern urban Paris.    Human laws won't allow it.  Not even if French bureaucrats act like ancient tribal chieftains in the Middle East, destroying villages.  Refusing to redefine Mohammed on deeper human terms for the greater good is the bigger heresy and an expression of the Evil of wanting to dominate everything without growing.  Good prophets , like good Popes, are not so stupid.

A Victorian patriarch, another broken template.

As the Montana legislature begins, some people -- mostly by polarizing and emotionalizing -- will try to make sins into Evil.  Sometimes this will be silly, misguided, ineffective, or resulting from the pretense that an institution (corporation), a pretense based on special interests accumulating power, is a “person” and entitled to all benefits accruing to a human citizen.  They don’t really mean “person,” they mean the privileges of the patriarch who controls his family, who are only incidentally human.  Patriarchs commonly sacrifice family members.

Both sin and Evil are survival-based, but sin and legislation tends to be confined to a specific delineated group while Evil in its purest form undermines the survival of the entire species, maybe -- in the case of climate change with the consequent impact on continents and oceans -- the world as we know it.  We can make laws against sins, maybe about carbon footprints or frakking, but we seem helpless against the great Evils of human greed and ignorance.  The cause of sins is almost always economic profit, but the Evil consequence is emergent, sudden, and lethal.  Must I point out ebola?  Not without pointing out our constant erosion of stable ecologies like tropical jungle.  Sooner or later the tipping point is reached.

On the other side, the virtue side, it becomes more and more possible to accumulate information and design governing principles that, after all, saves the soaring raptors, cleans the broad rivers, and connects the human planet via small handheld devices.  For all the warlords on their slimy thrones, there are still long tables where earnest people sit together and explore the possibilities of new rules and laws or new strategies of supervision, penalties, funding, points of view.  Who should be able to do what where and why.  Distribution.

The dead from a drone strike in Pakistan.

A website names the victims.  Know whom you kill.

Feedback loops are one key to success.  Incarceration for minor drug offenses (the War Against Drugs) turned out to be Evil.  But it produces so much profit that it’s hard to stop unless the feedback includes the suffering involved and the simple ineffectiveness of it, the encouragement of racism it supports.  Surprisingly, our appetite for witnessing suffering, as in movies like “Oz” or “Orange is the New Black,” has made us identify with forces for reform.  Seeing the results of a predator drone attack makes us question the use of such a dragon.

Returning to the local, I ponder the difference between the economic assumptions of the old agricultural order, the Jacob/Esau dichotomy that hangs on even in Euro vs. Native American assumptions:  wheat vs. wild grass, if you like.   I am the Paternal BIA or I am the obedient/defiant AIM son.  The survival of that order depends on the generational passing of lands without the fractionalizing of ownership that we’ve imposed on tribes.  It wasn't THEIR idea!  

The patriarch imposes his motives on his children with all the cultural entailments: the oldest son becomes the new patriarch, the daughters are excluded unless they use guile.  In Europe younger sons were confined in religious orders, sacrificed in the military, or reduced to employees.  Now on the rez they may simply be pushed to the margin, even off the rez, maybe even off the rolls when blood quantum provenances are changed.

Good and successful men of the ag life in Montana have lived through hardship and then industrialization of agriculture up against competing industrial natural resource development, even industrialization of recreation (transportation and the idealization of the natural) and animal management (going after wolves in helicopters to collar them), and the constant undeclared world wars.  They have concluded that their children could escape through education and professions.  But both of those have been captured and corrupted by the constant drive to commodify (more walls for the labyrinth).  It appears that the minotaur has slipped under the walls as toxins and infection, still claiming our young.

Every wall is a mirror.

We’ve been wall-builders, no better than Hadrian or the Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang who began the Great Chinese Wall.  The walls shielding Israel and the US are not protecting them from invaders or illegal immigrants.  We attempt to make physical boundaries to protect from the sins of economic struggle (drug wars, for instance), when the real problem is Evil on the side that builds the wall, the side that is benefiting from a gradient.  The side addicted to power.  There is no law that can address drug addiction -- laws only increase the value of transgression.  Addiction is Evil.  The hallmark of Evil is its depth in our natures, in our old reptile brains.

Out-dated image.

How do we confront Evil?  The old ways, largely “religious” and institutional, don’t work anymore.  We’re too various and fluid now.  We can gerrymander our walls and laws all we want, but if the problem is Evil, it is a spiritual problem.  No amount of sitting around a conference table will make a difference.  

BUT, as is repeated over and over in historic wisdom, spiritual answers are fire, are wind, are emergent from the ordinary.  Mercy comes as gentle rain.  The more that human understanding and generosity are supported by laws and practices, the more survival will grow and prosper.  That doesn’t mean more land, more money, more control, more uniformity.  Fire, wind, grass are wild.  They are best described in images and music, not words.  They are a resource, not "ownable."

The substrate of religion rests on what it is to be a human being, not what it is to be God.  It is not a matter of divine command, but an emergence from the kind of creatures we are.   We are creatures of the planet, evolving from codes first etched in mud and now so elaborated that we can write code ourselves, even in our cells.  But the planet does not care what we do with that.  The planet will survive until the sun explodes.  It is not Evil.  It is our substrate.

FAMILY STORIES

Paternal Great-grandfather's family -- Grandfather in center rear

My birth family has dissolved: parents dead, one brother dead, the other one incommunicado, cousins gone off on quite a different path than the one I took.  My father’s family originated in our consciousness with my father’s grandfather, Scots Archibald, bringing his family to the Dakotas where the Brulé Sioux had just been forced onto reservations, so completely removed that my father knew none.  For my father’s family, Archibald's grandchildren, all that counted was that small group -- all for one and one for all, Sam's three sons and a daughter.  They all married successfully, no turbulence, no skeletons.  Except for my father.

Maternal patriarch

My father married a woman who could be described as the daughter of an Ulster man whose family had been in the States since near the beginning, always struggling to get ahead, always struggling to marry “up,” always moving West.  My mother was a “Daughter of the Oregon Trail” and could have been a “Daughter of the American Revolution.”  There were Civil war veteran ancestors on both sides, one imprisoned at Andersonville.

Third family patriarch in a chicken eating contest with my mother.

My mother thought “up” meant a man of the city with education.  Her sisters thought of local land-wealthy men.  This third family, also Brit, was competitive to the point of turning on each other.  They believed in the old Euro concepts of patriarchs and primogeniture, fertile ground for war.  Their patriarch mocked my mother’s father as a loser.  My mother said that her parents started every day with breakfast arguments over family matters, partly rooted in social inequality at marriage in previous generations, where the wives were the ones stepping down to marry.  Each partner felt embedded in supposed family superiority.  She determined never to argue about such matters, but when she was really angry with my father, she burst out,  “You Teuton!”  In those days, a German connection was a big insult.

The consequence of my choices, which were an extension of my parents’ efforts to understand themselves and their belief in education, has led me to turn a sometimes coldly analytical eye on my “three” families: father’s, mother’s, and the fathers of the cousins since my mother’s sisters married brothers.  I find that none of these people are prepared to hear the speculations I’ve developed.

Disgraced and dismissed.

Each “blood” grandmother had a brother who fought in the Philippine War and returned home damaged (undefined PTSD) and alcoholic.  They probably had the famous genetic vulnerability to both high temperament and the comfort of drunkenness.  The response of the families was to erase and deny them, so that my cousins didn’t know about them.  My paternal grandmother (that couple was intensely progressive, near socialist though nominally Republican) joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and banned alcohol.  Her granddaughter loosened the ban for social reasons -- so much business is done over fancy suppers and drinks -- with the result that her son is now crippled by the same vulnerability.  My living brother is a beer alcoholic.  My dead brother preferred pot and speed, which eventually took him to the street where he died.  This appears to be a genetic glitch that expresses only in our males, but -- just in case -- I never drink.

My father's nuclear family plus wives and children

When my paternal grandparents married, they had been homesteading adjacent claims and simply combined households, including livestock.  My cousin’s daughter asked for family stories, so I told her a little story meant to represent the bumps of such a change in arrangements.  My grandfather hitched up his wife’s team, which hadn’t been worked for a while and were used to a different style of driving.  They were disorderly, so he “touched them up” with the buggy whip.  Seeing him from a window where she was washing dishes, my grandmother stormed out, shouting,  “You’ll not whip MY horses!”

The cousin and her daughter took this tale in a new direction.  They have been raised in an upscale neighborhood, which didn’t save them from misery but gave them quite Liberal values -- intensely anti-violence, so all they know about horses is what they see on TV.   They don’t know real horses.  The danger of an uncontrolled team is not in their minds.  They imagined “whipping a horse” as being the use of a bull whip to knock the horse down to its knees and flay the hide off its back.  Horrified, they accused me of maligning our grandfather and stopped wanting stories.  As far as I know, these cousins, unlike my sibs and I, were never spanked, never had a switch taken to their legs, but were managed by guilt and shame.  Upscale.  Alice Miller stuff.

Father with sibs

When I suggested to this cousin -- who always insists that my fatally flawed father was her mother’s dearly beloved protector and hero -- that my mother was not happy about my father continuing to treat his sister like a princess, maybe paying closer attention to his sister than to his wife, the cousin was aghast.  

My mother was raised to be “as good as any man,” and to resist all signs of landed gentry class titles as hints of popery.  Attempts to push her into princesshood were hopeless and, in fact, her worse epithet for me when she was angry was “the duchess.”  My cousin reacted to the idea of a man being emotionally closer to his sister than his wife as if it were enacted in an actual affair.  She was horrified.  Of course, moving from sympathy to sex is common and even accepted today -- at least judging by Dear Abby.  And consider the Lannisters, eh?

My father believed in salvation by books, esp. those about curtained subjects, like birth control.  He made a great fuss about condoms in a time when they were illegal -- not because they were a sign of prostitution but because limiting the number of children was vital to prosperity.  But my mother became pregnant a third time, causing comment on the streets.  “Are all those children yours?”  She had a tubal ligation.  He did NOT have a vasectomy.  Ponder that.  There was no pill.

Maternal family

There never was quite enough money but we weren’t in real poverty.  My father’s cameras were justified as part of his job.  My mother’s standards were those of a Depression prune farm with a low-producing well.  She found ways to cope: quiet bookkeeping for friends, picking fruit, and one tight summer “working the bean belt” where she took on the union head for his corrupt practices.  When I suggested that our third sib was the result of a hole in a condom, my living brother was incensed.  How could I suggest such a thing?  It was shameful to suggest that our dead brother was unwanted.

Uncle, Father, Brother (the third sib)

The paternal Scots side of my family has been “into” genealogy in perfect confidence that they would only find admirable characteristics and proof that the family was superior.  They go back to Scotland and look up the village that supplied the family name, though no one in the family lived there.  The Archibald Strachans were from Kilmarnock. 

The maternal Ulster Scots (really more Irish) were constantly attacked by each other and by that third land-owning family who cared only about money and would even cheat each other.  One woman who married a cousin began researching his father’s family.  She soon found evidence of genetic defects (not alcoholism, but polydactyly -- irregularity in the development of fingers and toes -- and an uncle who was frankly psychotic, possibly dangerous), marital unfaithfulness, and crooked land deals.  The family resisted her and she has been divorced.

Reading “Born Fighting” by Jim Webb has been both explanatory and relieving, because he makes it clear that what I think of as family tension has long-standing cultural foundations as old as Jesus.  The Romans on one side with their bureaucracy, military force, land-craving, admiration controlled by hierarchies, top-down.  On the other side, the Celts, trained by their own rocky land to be fiercely self-determining, accepting governance only if it were earned and then loyal to the death, settling for relatively ascetic lives to spare themselves from scuttling after wealth.  It is the suggestion by both Webb and others that it was these restless people who emigrated to populate the US, not so much along the coast as at the frontier represented by the Appalachian and Allegheny mountains, where they were allowed to do things their own way so long as they were a barrier against war with the Indians.  George Washington, William Clark, and a host of other tall, red-headed, stiffly determined, violence-accepting men and women didn’t just participate in our history -- they created it.

And now, too busy fighting to take a care for education and access roads, their penchant for drinking and drugs, their clannishness, their refusal to accept any standards but their own (which settles everything with violence), combined with a limited but emotional understanding of the Old Testament, has trapped them into being hillbillies.  No longer useful.  Discarded.  Enraged.  Armed.

Stonewall Jackson

This is so explanatory and relevant that I’ll be following out the implications in terms of the fur trade with the Blackfeet and the ensuing lines of development, including the present polarizing politics.

EXPECTATIONS SHAPE POPE FRANCIS

A child, worried about his pet, asked a famous theologian whether dogs could go to heaven and whether they had souls.  The theologian thought for a moment and said there was really no way for us to know this, but we ought to act as though they DID have souls that went to heaven.  Then we would treat them with dignity and love.

There’s a second story.  The Hell’s Angels finally got to thinking about their image and resolved that they would improve it.  So they were roaring down the highway one day and came to a motorist stopped alongside, tinkering under the hood of his car, clearly broken down.  These guys were pretty good mechanics, so they stopped to help out.  The motorist, looking up and seeing these scary guys advancing on him, panicked, pulled out the oil dip stick and defended himself by slashing at them with it.  So they beat him to a pulp.

With those tales in mind, let’s think about the new Pope Francis presumably named for Saint Francis with all his associations, especially the Zefferelli movie “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” which was the favorite movie of Mother Teresa’s nuns.  There are three movies about Saint Francis but they won’t stream.  I’ve ordered the discs.

But what if the new Pope was thinking of Sir Francis Drake, Vice Admiral (1540 – 27 January 1596) who was an English sea captain, privateer, navigator, slaver, and politician of the Elizabethan Era, knighted by his queen in 1581.  He was second-in-command of the English fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588. He also carried out the second circumnavigation of the world, from 1577 to 1580. He died of dysentery in January 1596 after unsuccessfully attacking San Juan, Puerto Rico.  

Or how about Francis M. Drake, an Iowa governor and Civil War veteran.  (Union officer.)   Or what about Frances Drake (1912 - 2000), an American film actress best known for playing Eponine in Les Miserables (1935).  She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“Pope” is one of those jobs that changes people because it reveals so much privileged knowledge to them that it transforms their understanding of the world.  “Dear Abby” became far more tolerant and human after reading her mail for a few years.  Something like the same has happened to most of the Supreme Court judges (not Scalia or Thomas who remains cloaked anyway.)  Everyone is looking for small clues: Francis said “Brother Cardinals” instead of “Lord Cardinals.”  What shoes are he wearing?  (I haven’t heard.)  At meals he looks for a space among the others instead of insisting on a reserved special place.  Suddenly everyone is reading up on Argentine history, which is very mixed.  How does this Francis fit into that?  Did he oppose cruelty and corruption?  http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-eisner-pope-and-argentinas-dirty-war-20130317,0,166222.story  It sticks in my own mind that the worst of the Nazi torturers and genociders were finally found in Argentina.  (But also a major population of Jewish refugees.)  I don’t even know the specific story of their indigenous population.  Only 25% of the population is observant Catholic.  (45% in the USA.)  

Here’s a friendlier version. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/14/opinion/ghitis-pope-argentina/?hpt=hp_c1

 He strongly opposes gays but rides the bus.  He fights poverty and inequality, but he opposes Liberation Theology, a great source of reform.  He is friendly and cooperative with Jews (says he will open the Vatican archives to discover what really happened during WWII) but no one knows what he thinks about Buddhism or Islam or indigenous religions.  His “in-house” charge seems to be double:  get rid of the predators of children and get the money straightened out.  We’re not used to this face.  Does he remind you of Gomer Pyle or Jonathan Pryce? 

In seminary there used to be talk -- mostly when the denominational people were around -- about the way that congregations shape their ministers through their expectations and reactions.  This was why internships were so important: would the “teaching congregation” have enough patience to tolerate blunders, maybe fairly serious ones?  Would they expect or even insist upon the qualities that people want?  We know how our media invents and feeds on quarrels, exaggerates honest differences into deadly rivalries, does its part to create martyrs because that sells books.  (Even though no one seems to read the very books they vilify or exalt.)  But do reporters really dig deep for facts and dynamics?  Any more than congregations examine their ministers closely?  

In the major professions where people have great power (medicine, law), the practice in the past has been to depend upon peers to govern each other, but technically at least, the Pope has no peers.  Until now.  How much will Benedict interfere with Francis?  His assurances don’t mean any more than they did when he had no peers, but now he has an equal, too.  What if Francis finds out that Benedict’s dear attendant, nicknamed “Gorgeous George,” is more than a helper?  At some points in history such problems are dealt with quietly -- the offender disappears.  We don’t do that anymore -- except in Argentina in the recent past.

What a cliff-hanger.  Slightly mishandled, this papacy could be the end of the Roman-style Catholic Church.  We already have the Anglican, Lutheran and Episcopalian shards from past controversies.  But they say the real rival in the Southern Hemisphere is the Evangelical church -- going directly to God through the Bible, discarding the machinery of earthly institutions.  Everyone is his or her own Pope, Archbishop, Cardinal and Priest.

The wild card is poverty.  Whether one considers it a cause or a result, whether one thinks poverty is waxing or waning or just changing shape, it is the marker for the effectiveness of religion in guiding us to survival, whether individual or en masse.  And the even wilder card -- indeed, the whole deck -- is planetary climate change and the accumulating pollutions and erosions of the Anthropocene Era which will certainly require us to be fewer and possibly force the death of billions on us.  It does now -- except that the dying are mostly anonymously poor.  No one misses them -- not really.  Will the Pope lift them up?  With a blessing or a scourge?

It seems to me that the people who demand equality assume that it will mean lifting everyone up to a middle-class American standard of living and education.  This is impossible: there are not enough resources on the whole planet.  We assume that everyone everywhere will live the same, but this is also impossible.  Some will live where there is plenty and some will live on the desert.  The way we think about this, including the way our expectations affect our leaders, will deeply affect how we act.

___________________

NOTE:  The four ancient patriarchates (splinters of the original Christian catholic church) enjoy the highest prestige.  Patriarch means the same as Pope.  These men do not meet.  As Popes, they do not require celibacy but are otherwise quite conservative and ceremonial.

Two among the many sub-groups still have some power.  In the Greek Orthodox Church: Patriarch Theodore II is young for a Pope (b. 1954) and seems altogether honorable and progressive, devoting himself to art and charity.  He doesn’t seem particularly political, coming to power because his predecessor was killed in a helicopter crash, and unanimously chosen.

Head of the Russian Orthodox Church is Patriarch Kirill, who has extended friendship and suggested collaboration to Pope Francis.  He is in the midst of a scandal over a $30,000 wristwatch and other luxuries.  He and Putin are buddies.  Kirill is the man who had Pussy Riot, the female rock band, arrested for demonstrating against him in front of the church.  The women were imprisoned for five months.

Read more: Orthodox Eastern Church: The Patriarchs and Churches | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/society/orthodox-eastern-church-the-patriarchs-churches.html#ixzz2NitJbK3T