Ping Pong Seven: O England! O Law!
Two deep themes have been developed in the last two Rants. The first of these themes dealt with whether a society was centred on individual freedom and the property that supported that freedom, or else on humanity itself, with the implied lack of personal freedom or property. The second theme revolved around the issue of the law, and a set of rules that spliced the individual to what was otherwise absent (be it God or King), as opposed to a negative theology which understood through what a thing was not, the mystery of its actual being (be it God or health). These themes, both to a degree present in Moore, were taken up in the very early seventeenth century, and blended into two new and rather potent brews. The first of these moves, exemplified by Francis Bacon, sought to understand how rules and laws might be inferred from the particulars of everyday living. The World then would pass from anarchy and mystery, into law, and so on in gradual and careful stages. The second, the work by and large of Edward Coke, centred on the splendour and mystery of one system, that of English Common Law, and derived from that system, a nationalist legend.
In considering these moves, it is always important to remember that both of these individuals, Bacon and Coke, were Lawyers in the English system of common law. They both therefore assumed that laws needed not to be understood from on high, as they were not decreed by some almighty act of God (or latterly Brussels) but rather were the careful evolution of tradition, within which certain rights became enshrined, whilst others were lost. This last fact implied for both thinkers, a deep connection between the heritage and history of a country and its system of ‘rights’. It is worth nothing that this connection was in the seventeenth century, neither an issue of the left or the right. Both monarchists and commonwealth men in the Civil War would come to appeal to this notion of tradition. As an aside one might note that in the last thirty years Britain has had two Governments in Thatcher and Blair, which illustrate the opposite case. That is, one had a Prime Minister in Thatcher who clearly had no feeling for customs or cultures, and therefore no real grasp of the nature of society and the social laws it spawns (she denounced the idea of society, and ignored the law…); While on the other hand in Blair, one had a man who actively sought to replace common law with rights-based law, and had an associated inability to grasp the importance of heritage.
To connect law with custom and history, is then to offer a complex synthesis between the two sets of themes outlined above. Or rather it is to offer two kinds of syntheses. Either that synthesis might start in the domain of the particular, the individual, and derive from the individual cases, the nature of a general law which overarches all those cases (and bind them within others). This is a system which is as true for natural science as it is for wider society. Or one might directly laud a system of customs and traditions and the peculiar property of a people. Law, and being ‘a people’ are tied to being in a land mass (England), and through it, to property. What is more, the deep mystery of God’s purpose is then worked out in the gradual giving of these laws across the centuries. Individuals become merely the pawns in a destiny that sweeps them up, and turns their actions in ways they could never have intended. In the rest of this Rant, both these moves will be analysed in some depth.
At the heart of Bacon’s philosophy, lies two moves. On the one hand there is the problem of tempo. That is, it is too easy in thinking to move either too quickly or too slowly, from the domain of particular to the general. On the other hand, he outlines a system or a mode of practise, which he hopes will allow the mind its proper tempo, (and so knowledge its proper domain). Each of these issues need to be considered in turn separately.
The problem of tempo essentially comes down to the point and speed at which, one draws abstractions. On the one hand one might attempt to move too quickly in one’s thought. This was the mistake Bacon argues, of Aristotle. Aristotle took a facet of perception (i.e. that it needed a content) and a facet of understanding (that it grasped a world composed of forms), and attempted then to understand the entire world in itself as the product of these two human elements. Moreover Aristotle naively (for Bacon) assumed that because within the human mind, understanding claims priority over perception, that this priority was itself a thing of nature. The world in itself revolved around the twin human concerns of form (which allowed one to conceptualize) and final cause (which gave a world a purpose). The problem was then, for Bacon, not that one could not make a system of thinking from these ingredients, but rather that in making it, one lost sight of what pertained to humanity and what pertained to the world. The two, our minds, and the world, became synonymous. Or rather, the rules from the one, could simply and naturally be applied to the other. The effect was that the world immediately took on the features of our minds. The world then revolved around a generality based upon a logic of form and purpose. The individual world, that is the rich and diverse world of complex (and changing) nature is then, Bacon complains, simply lost within a too quick jump into generality.
To move too quickly, is therefore to always risk confusing oneself, and one’s own thoughts with the concerns of the world. This formula, is a formula which is more than evident today. One only has to think of Bush’s reaction to the 11th of September to see that. Here was a man already preoccupied with the thoughts of revenge upon a violent dictator who had strangely ‘beaten’ his father (or at least not been utterly defeated by him). Come that September, his mind then readily rushed from the desire to fight a war against whoever (or whatever) had caused the death of three thousands people, to this already existing instinct for revenge. The result was of course that he believed, come what may, that it was right to attack Iraq, and was prepared to make any claim to support this deep inner belief. That is, he confused himself and his own thoughts and desires with the ‘American People’, and acted accordingly.
However it s just as big a mistake, Bacon argues, to move too slowly in one’s thinking. If one moves too slowly, if one over analyses a particular set of events, turning and returning to them, then those events naturally become transfigured into the single dominant element in all reality. That is, if one over analyses a series of experiences, one risks actually increasing their mystery, and apparent importance within the mind. Empiricism when bogged down in the mechanics of one process, is transformed into alchemy, and an index of mysteries.
The modern equivalent is very much seen in the world of the Media ‘story’ and government’s reaction to those stories. A while ago now, the Media discovered that one really does not need to search the world to find ‘stories’. All one needs to do is to dwell, and re-dwell on a certain series of events. The more one examines them (the more one rakes up), the deeper the problem and mystery appear to be. If one works at it long enough, the story will not just pick up a life of its own (the alchemist’s quest for the secret of life) but also in the process, will become all the more important and singular (lead becomes gold).
What is more, as in the case of the alchemist, there is a real randomness in the nature of the experiences or stories that are chosen for this transfiguration. Take the example this week, of the abolition of the 10p rate of tax. It has been one of the odd facts of the last thirty years or so in British politics, that it is alright the persecute the poor. Thatcherism could never have got off the ground if were not! The fact that the media suddenly changed take, and it became suddenly not right to hit the poorest, was itself unpredictable, as was the building up of the story into the single dominant political tale of the week. The problem then for the government is that they certainly have to respond to this story in some way. And yet as it has at its heart almost a mystery, that is an over blowing of affairs, it is rather difficult to see how to act. One knows one wants the story to go away, and will do anything, pay almost any price to make it stop, and yet what that price ought to be, is not so clear. In the end policy becomes decided by what will shut the media up, and make them practise their dark alchemies elsewhere, and not on what makes sensible policies.
Francis Bacon suggests that this problem of tempo will by and large be solved if one follows a certain and proper order and speed of thinking. One needs, he suggests, always to start from the realm of particular experience. And yet here one needs care in defining the nature of that experience. All experience, Bacon suggests, involves an interaction between a human and the wider world. All experience is therefore already a matter of humans applying something else to the world that they see. All experience is then fundamentally also an intervention. From which it follows that there really is no qualitative difference between using tools to experience the world, or the human body (microscope or human eye). And as tools increase one’s ability to experience at all, Bacon suggests that individual experience should in most cases be associated with tool use (think of telescopes). One then needs to derive, from a series of interrelated particular occurrences, a more general principle. That is, one needs to derive from individual cases, a local system of laws. What matters about this general law, is that it is not reducible to facets of the individual experiences themselves. It is rather, a principle which comprehends them all equally. Moreover these laws, will, if formed correctly, suggest further experiments; that is, other ways that one might use the same tool to see other things, or develop a new tool, or use existing tools and existing experience slightly differently, to produce other results. These new results, will then inspire the mind to form new general rules to explain these particular results, and/or in the process allow it to form an overarching theory uniting these experiences with the previous ones. General theories therefore inspire new experiences, and thereby spawn the possibility that further, even more inclusive theories might be spawned.
The mind properly deployed, moves from the particular to the general; as it moves from interventions in the world, off to laws which explain those interventions, and then back to interventions again. The Particular’s power lay in inspiring one think of the more general cases (which were nonetheless irresolvable to the domain of the particulars themselves). The General’s power lay in being able to inspire invention, and the creation of new experience, and new particulars. Here then was a theory for knowledge, but also for government. Government was the expression of the more general principles. Its power lay then, not in the individual concerns of everyday life, but rather in a domain one removed, - the domain of law. It was the role of law to at once comprehend the world of individual experience, but also through that comprehension, to inspire both further experiences, but also new experiments, and so open up new possibilities (and this led to the possibility of further laws).
And yet, as became clear in the generation after Bacon, there was a problem with at least the political hierarchy which this system imposed (the problem with science emerged much later, but broadly follows the same lines). This problem rested on the inclusion of the lesser general laws within the greater ones. This inclusion might well occur, and yet that will fail to understand or restrict or ever properly define all the creative power of the ‘included’ generalities. The same set of laws enriched with other experiences might (and usually do) behave differently, forcing new rules to emerge. That is, a system that derived the general from the particular, through the intervention of lesser generalities, is only any good as long as those lesser generalities behave themselves, and agree to conform. If they do not, all hell breaks loose. This was then exactly the case in the Civil War just after Bacon’s day, or Iraq in our’s. One simply cannot assume that individual generalities armed with a series of particulars will chirpily agree to being included in a generality. They might not, and if they do not then there is almost nothing the general principle can do about it – a fact that haunts the nightmare of politicians from Bacon’s day onwards (and Gordon Brown, the lord {or Stalin} of the general, and the fool {or Mr Bean} of the particular perhaps more than most).
The second system outlined at the start of this Rant, was first developed by the great lawyer Edward Coke, and at around the same time as Bacon was writing (well ten years after or so). He was the first to enshrine the idea that there was something rather special about England, and English laws. These laws he suggested, were the product of a certain history and a certain evolution. It followed that any existing government (monarch) was beholden to a system of laws that had enshrined his/her position within the constitution. The Monarch was not to be held to be above the law. From which it followed, that as those laws were the product of a flow, a history (and associated with a certain land mass), the Monarch was also caught up in honouring that certain history. Monarchs were then to be divided according to their ability to ride this great historico-geographical surge. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were according this pantheon great in this respect, while James I and even more Charles I were failures. What is more, implicit at least in Coke’s writing, is a mistrust of the Monarch as an institution itself. That is, the Monarch was always tainted by the suspicion of autocracy and the failure to regard the common weal: the Seventeenth Century monarch was for such a way of thinking, caught up in the imposition of the Norman Yoke, and the rejection of all that was British in the name of Europe (or at least France).
Once again there is a real fire within the writings of Coke. His glorification of the English law system and his attempt to hold the monarch to account according to that system, were ideas that could be easily adopted and twisted. The succeeding generation found that one could laud England and its common traditions without the need to confuse these traditions with a series of laws. And that if one made this move, the position of the Monarch as upholder or keystone of the law become not only less than necessary, but also suspect. However one needs care here, to not pre-date into Coke’s thought what was not there. He eulogised law, and saw his system as the best explication of that law. It was then up to subsequent generations to take that thought, and twist it, according to the political necessities of their times, into a rather different doctrine, a move which will be considered next week.
In the generation before the Civil War, one sees then a concerted attempt synthesize the themes of the two previous Rants into one system. One might argue with Bacon, that this system went for the world of mystery through property (that is memory which remembers experience) to law. One then made the return journey through discipline and careful and regular intervention (according to the laws given), back into the world of property. The alternative argument, saw in England, and its law (and latterly religious) system, something special. - Something that directly tied a people to a land, a system of laws with a mystery of God’s purpose, a double knot tied together by history and tradition. In their own time and in ours this potent series of arguments appears curiously naïve. That is, curiously unaware of the revolution that lies implicit in their words, a revolution that allows lesser generalities their voice, and directly pitches history against the world. A naiveté that centres around the problem that one cannot simply assume that others will use one’s way of thinking as one oneself did. To understand and to simply conform are not the same thing. Likewise to follow a tradition is to also evolve it in some way. A naiveté therefore that haunted their times, but also as assuredly haunts ours.
