There are a bunch of topics I would like to explore critically in a way that will allow me to not only make better choices, but also to maybe learn more about myself. One topic in particular has grabbed my attention, and that is Government. Perhaps it is the fact that the elections are coming up again, but I think I have had this interest in the back of my mind for several years now and have not really examined it until lately. I want to explore what government should be, and to do that, I feel I need to examine the creation or discovery of government by humans and the purpose to which we employ it.
I thought about doing this by writing an Apocolyptic story, something like Stephen King's The Stand or any of the the contemporary zombie stories with the virus that wipes out most of humanity. I think that I could start with such a scenario and see how the survivors would rebuild society and how their goernment would evolve. I may do that yet and this blog may simply serve as notes. But you see, I really want to get at the roots of how and why we started this institution that we call Government. I want to take Kant's Primitive Man and throw him in with a bunch of his Primitive Peers and see how they agree to the Rule of Law.
I'm thinking now that I should look at the ways in which different tribal societies govern themselves since those smaller communities are closer to what we our larger organized governments evolved from. I should look at the Code of Hammurabi, the Magna Carta, the Napoleonic Code and other milestones in the codification of written law. I am particularly interested in the ancient Greeks and Romans and how they arrived at their republics long before such incidents as the American and French Revolutions cast off their monarchs. I definitely need to read the Federalist Papers in regards to our government here in America.
Perhaps it would serve for me to lay out my assertions, or rather assumptions that I have made to this point in my own mind regarding the subject. My first assumption is that our earliest human governments were the ones with which we are most familiar now - the family unit. In order to maintain harmony amongst the family unit, and keep the entire group or individuals working toward some common goals, the mother or father, matriarch or patriarch took a leadership role and established the laws as set down by them. Families with better leaders, better governing amongst themselves, were able to get ahead of those who did not. Those families grew into a clan organization and tribal organization.
The clan would still have a matriarch or patriarch at the head of it then and governed as a large extended family. Having an elder at the head of the family made sense since experience passed from generation to generation, particularly before writing had been invented, would seem to be extremely valuable. At some point a couple other factors would probably come into play.
First there would be the the matter of incorporating members into the tribe who were not related. I could forsee this arising in cases where the tribe conquers or otherwise assimilates a smaller clan or tribe of people. In such a case it is obvious who the rule-givers would be, but to those being incorporated, the authority granted to the leader would have to come from somthing more than familial respect. The authority would need to be maintained by more than a father's "Because I said so!". I would think it would require strong leadership to assimilate additional outside members, but it is probably a tribe with strong leadership in the first place that can dominate weaker ones, or has the resources for additional members.
Along with asimilating outsiders, there would also be the issue of how leadership passed along upon the death or other removal of the head of the tribe. The transfer of leadership must have been one of the first customs established in regard to government. I would imagine that out of that, grew the systems of monarchy which reigned over much of humanity in our known history.
I am further assuming that what we know as law evolved from what was then simply custom. There must have been some form of tribal law long before writing was invented, and these rules would have been passed down from generation to generation through customs and traditions. In some manner, what we know as the three branches of government would have to have been incorporated in tribal law: the creation of new rules, the enforcement of those rules and the interpretation of the rules along with justice meted out for violating them.
One of our earliest accounts of tribal law being codified comes from Exodus in the form of the Ten Commandments. I am not quite ready to frame religion in the context of this discussion yet, so I think it will be something that I come back to. However, in terms of the the purely secular, the Commandments give us insight into what the eaeliest laws pertained to.
The Ten Commandments, as I was taught, are as follows:
- I am the Lord your God and you will have no other Gods before me.
- Do not worship idols
- Do not use God's name in vain
- Keep the Sabbath holy
- Honor your mother and father
- Do not murder
- Do not commit adultery
- Do not steal
- Do not bear false witness
- Do not covet the posessions of others
The first four have to do with religion and is a whole other cookie that I don't want to bite into just yet. So, starting with number five we can break these down into the root of establishing law. The fifth commandment sets up the authority of the parents and presumably the authority of those governing over us. The sixth, to me it seems, is the most obvious rudimentary of human laws - do not kill other humans. The earliest humans must have had a pretty tough row to hoe, and it would seem an excellent reason to give over your individual autonomy to a governing body would be for the protection it offered in terms of protecting your life. The seventh, eighth and tenth all refer to those things that we possess beyond just our own life. This isn't to say that one "possesses" their spouse, though you really can't rule that out of the original intent based on much of the rest of the Old Testament, but to say that it was recognized that the relationship possessed between spouses should be protected by law as well as a person's material things.
Basically we have early man asserting that beyond God and God's divinity, the things that need to be protected are his life, his wife, and his "stuff". Oh yeah, and for good measure, don't lie in court about taking any of those things, because that's against the law too (commandment #9).
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