Saturday, October 20, 2012
Just Some Universal Themes...
I've noticed some very similar underlying themes within ancient Islamic, Roman, Indian, and Chinese cultures. The first one that I'll adress is the division between custom and law. Confucius' Analects, The Ramayana, and to some extent One Thousand and One nights all adress this theme. Law is the action on custom, custom is physically manifested in law. Confucius argues that this is harmful, claiming that law could be abused, but custom, if intricately tied to a region's culture, makes law almost unnecessary. For instance, if my cultural upbringing placed a huge emphasis on not killing, then would there need to be a law for me not to kill? The Ramayana adresses the division between law and custom when Sita is held above the fire. This is a crude form of justice to uphold the Indian custom of chastity. Finally, One Thousand and One Nights show that the enactment of custom into law can be detrimental. The idea of one's wife not being chaste leads the king to kill many women through law. The arguement would be made by Confucius that the King's wife's upbringing was the cause of her cheating, but the greater arguement that the custom within Sharazad's world was skewed towards men. Well, I said themes, but that's about all I got.
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In a few cases, I would agree with Confucius on the law being abused to enforce the violation of customs to a very extreme extent. For example, when Sita is being tested for supposedly cheating on Rama, her punishment is a bit extreme (or really extreme, but who am I to judge?) Rama had a duty to his people to prove her innocence and loyalty to him as a powerful husband and ruler, but I would say the custom-law combo did a horrible job of providing justice. The law was more of a way to assure Rama's efficiency as a good leader than to vindicate Sita. So yes, I would agree that the customs and laws were definitely skewed toward men and were inefficient when it came to providing justice and proper order in the society.
When I was in NYC this week, I sat in on a Columbia Theory class. Most of the stuff they talked about went over my head but one of the things I understood from the conversation was an idea that modernist (I think) philosophers had. It’s something like “The universe is chaotic with no direction or coherence. But since humans find it unacceptable (and not possible) to live in such a world, we impose measures on the world to make it livable.” We try to impose “measures,” or false coherence on something that has no coherence. (So we’re basically lying to ourselves.) Perhaps laws are one of those measures that tries to control the chaotic mess around us. We know people have an inclination to do bad things and good things and the laws are a way of guiding us towards the good thing. Most cultures/societies/religions have laws like the 10 commandments, but the common thread between them, overall, is the Golden Rule. Laws provide a frame for us to shape our lives around; otherwise, if we didn’t have laws and consequences for breaking them, it would be a really big messed up world. Laws don’t stop people from doing bad things, they’re broken all the time and our world is pretty crazy as it is, but What if we didn’t have laws? I can tell you, I wouldn’t think twice about trying…..you know what…nevermind.
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