Usually we don’t hear much that is profound on +MSNBC news commentary
shows. Last night one of them I don’t remember which one of the talking heads
said, I don’t remember, that we talk about law and order without really thinking
about order. I like many others seem to be tired
of hearing about the troubles in +Ferguson Mo. but he/she made the point that
the people who were demonstrating were following the law but we anything but
orderly. To me that was worth think about; therefore, was profound.
Society has an established order, which seems innate in the sense
that we really don’t usually think about where that order comes from or what it
is. +George Lakoff discussed this in his 1996 book, Moral Politics. There is an accepted “moral order” we have incorporated
into our culture at all levels and to some extent codified into our laws. It is
based on our evolutionary biology, the concept of evolutionary psychology,
which has met with a great deal of controversy in the scientific literature. Family
structure is based on a strong father figure, and obedient wife and well disciplined
children. An army is organized with a general at the top and obedient soldiers
in the “rank and file”. Even the most primitive society, people organize them
selves around a leader seemingly in the same fashion as a pack of wolves or a herd
of antelopes. This is moral order we often give the name hierarchy dominance. One
person or group is the leader over the other, which gives the power of authority
to the leader; the leader is to be obeyed.
In modern society, we have fashioned a moral order of sorts
with individual, then family, followed local governments, city governments,
state governments, and finally national government. Within each government unit,
we have a group we have given, formally or informally, the power of
enforcement. The father is the head of family and the president is the head of
the nation—codified or not, this is “moral order” and has deep political implications.
Remember the Clevin + Bundy and a small group of people we labeled as
his followers who had an altercation with the government over grazing rights.
They made a point of “selecting” a level of authority they would obey. Bundy
said he would submit to arrest and incarceration if the county sheriff came to
arrest him but if the state or federal government authorities come to arrest
him he would fight to the death, or something equally asinine. What he was
saying is that he would submit to the highest authority below that which had an
interest that differed from his; he wanted to graze his cattle on state and
federal land free. To him that was moral order. To the great majority, it was
not a county issue, it was a federal issue and handled properly.
More recently, the people in Ferguson were saying they would
submit to the authority of a police force they wanted. For the majority of people
in Ferguson, the existing police force was not morally constituted. Law and
order were disharmonious. The point is that the headline grabbing guilt or innocence
of either the police officer who shot him or the young man who lost his life is
not the point. The question is, will we as a society be mature enough to see
these two things, the “incident” and the “lack of moral order” as two separate thing or
not. In addition, the question is; will we see it at a local level or state
level, or as we should, see it at a national level. When you really think about
it that is exactly how we have slowly and painfully established order in our
society over 150,000 years—I call it humanization.
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