`Ping Pong 9; The Three Threads of Truth
In the course of the English Civil War, three quite distinctive theories of law emerged in Britain. Law is either a property which is arrived at or uncovered, within a system of anarchy, as a something which was already there (albeit in only an implicit form), and which can be allowed to pull through an entire mental system in some way, and which will thereby define how that system is understood. Hobbes, who is the very great exponent of this system, in effect argues that a state comes into being when the rights or demands of one robber baron amongst all the rest become paramount. When this occurs, all kinds of happy (if unintended) consequences follow. Alternatively, one could argue that certain key elements of laws are really universal (or at least ought to be universal, or if they were universal then humanity as a whole would benefit). The role of government is to refine (rather than to define) these well known principles: It is to allow them their place in the political system, and so allow humanity the rich rewards of following these eternal laws. Finally law could be caught up in local practices, and therefore be evolving and changing. The game of allowing its true creative power was (is) the game of allowing at once these differences to exist, but also to then allow for a language that allows these differings to communicate (and so augment) one another. These three great theories, which were by and large forged in the dull red hot heat of Civil War, were then taken up and developed in rather different ways by the generation which followed the Civil War. - A series of moves that will be examined in detail in this rant.
The last move is perhaps, stated baldy, the most esoteric and hardest to grasp. This was certainly the case in the Seventeenth Century, but can seem just as true today. How after all can differences communicate and be creative? The latter half of the Seventeenth Century did find however rather a neat answer to this problem. Whilst in terms of politics this communication of complex differences is tricky to define (or perhaps more truthfully to realize), the same is clearly not the case for science. In setting up the (royal) society for science, Cromwell found a place where those Digger ideals of local practice, and laws could reach their fruition. Within such a society, individuals were free to experiment, and to derive laws based on these small scale experiments. It was this juncture of local practice (experimenting) and explanation, which was then taken up as directly communicable. It was the royal society’s role to be at the hub of these communications. The idea that scientists should (indeed must) know of, and communicate their own practice to enhance the work of others, was thereby enshrined.
However, why this process mattered, why it was so very creative, was that there was nothing that imposed any particular communication or explanation upon different scientists. The same experiment might (when drawn into other systems or explanations) appear rather different. Each experiment and the theories that went with it, served then not simply as a description of the world, but also as a point of instigation which inspired others to think the same point, but differently. Knowledge was then the bastard child of the shuttlecocking of difference.
On the level of science, the Digger hypothesis bore clear and rather creative fruit. The problem was - how one applied this stratagem from this republic of letters to political life? Here the critical problem involved in this move was also very clearly worked out in the Seventeenth Century. - Namely that these competing political theories have a marked tendency to drop out of the orbit of political activism and into the underworld of crime. London of the Restoration was a hothouse of not only criminality but also small revolutionary sects, either individuals moving apparently rather easily between the two (the obvious example here is Colonel Blood, the only man to have successfully stolen the Crown Jewels and who was at once a criminal and an Irish revolutionary). The stepping beyond a state became inextricably confused with being a criminal. Or rather, the underworld of criminality functioned as the prism through which one could relate to elements outside a state as if they were a state in themselves. In effect, the forces of the state could very easily translate the worrying anarchy of different viewpoints and conflicting possibilities (which perhaps is revolution’s real threat), into the mere expression of criminal tendencies. It was the great triumph of the forces of law and order in the Seventeenth Century, that this move became accepted not only by the general public but also by the potential revolutionaries themselves, who all too often confused themselves with criminality. The legacy of which move, haunts the world of revolutions and criminality to this day courtesy of their bastard child - terrorism.
The first theme identified in the introduction to this rant turned around how a system might be transformed as elements of that system were transfigured and allowed to become its defining dimension. A monarch was therefore the transfiguration of an element of the system, such that the entire system was forced to turn upon the needs and rights of this single element. Anarchies, from this perspective, arose when there lacked such a central point to pin the entire system to, and it was the duty of government to ensure that this never in fact occurred. Such a system directly addresses the problem of absence which was otherwise endemic to law. The Lawgiver was not absent so much as differently present. The King was at once a mere man, and distinct from the law. And yet he also was at the same moment transfigured into the embodiment of law itself. His presence was therefore of itself enough to guarantee something whose resonance lay beyond any one individual. The apparent absence critical to the practice of laws was not the absence of a creator (who was elsewhere) but rather the absence enshrined in the difference between an individual mortal, and the system which that mortal enshrined.
Such an argument had two rather interesting corollaries. Firstly, it is clearly the case that one might take many (if not any) power within the world and transfigure it into a universal system. Such a move was of course explicitly outlawed by the dominant system in the case of politics, but not thought. Newton was free to generalise from the mere fact that things fell downwards, an entire system by which the dynamics of the universe might be fixed down and explained. - A paradigm for certainty which would then in years to come, haunt the political world itself, which would eventually come to wonder whether a ‘Newton’ might be found to explain political life.
Secondly there is of course a great deal of hypocrisy that is hidden in the doctrine of the transfiguration of the individual. Once a single human is able to be both themselves and the state in itself, then the path is open for that individual to act in any way they choose, so long as they do not countermand their own transfiguration. A Monarch might therefore might not be able to be mad and stay a monarch, but they certainly can spend recklessly, and ignore the poverty of their people….Additionally there is nothing preventing this basic doctrine of transfiguration being applied to elements other than the state. Colonialism was by and large configured by individuals, such as Cecil Rhodes, who made just such a claim. The only difference was that in this case the claim centred around human history rather than the formation of a state. Rhodes as agent of human history was allowed to enrich himself as he chose, and destroy whatever he wanted, just so long as he extended the remit or progress (understood in this case as the rights of Western industrialism) across the world.
The final theme identified in the introduction above, referred to the discovery and then imposition of supposed universal rights onto the world. Here the problems always revolve around the fact that these supposed universals are never actually (or at least actively) present in the world itself. They are then derived at a fairly high level of abstraction, and can only be imposed upon the world, if a great deal of force (one way or another) is used. One faces then, the paradox that that which is meant to be shared by us all on the abstract level, is that which actually requires the most interference and greatest amount of applied energy to enforce.
Two corollaries immediately follow. On the one hand it is very easy to see that if one is following up the rights of the abstract to use force to impose itself upon the world, it is all too easy for the story to become about the force, and to lose sight of the nice little abstraction that should be animating (or at least justifying) the force. This is all the more the case when one remembers that it is the nature of abstractions to defy any particular embodiment. An abstract principle is therefore likely to claim whatever the result (bar out and out war) of the violence carried out in its name, as a success (and there is very little beyond common sense to stop it doing so!). (Surge strategy.)
On the other hand, it is all too easy for those outside the magic loop of abstraction to look upon the violent acts carried out in the name of abstraction as merely yet another act of colonial aggression. All the more so when one considers that these acts will, as they serve the cause of supposed universal abstractions, necessarily undermine whatever existing customs or habits that had been commonplace. Indeed this disruption of local practices and their replacement by systems that are all too often inferior, given the oddities and peculiarities of any local situation to the ones they are replace, is often the only clear successful feature of the apostles of the abstract. That is, they might not have made the world better (that was impossible anyway) but at least they have rid it of those pesky local rules (and so opened it up for globalization…)
The paradigm case of this imposition of a supposed abstraction upon the world was of course the creation of the free market. A Market while it is supposed to reflect the natural urge of all humans to barter and truck, is only imposed on the world, through constant regulation and intervention. Indeed the ‘well ordered’ anarchy of the free market is itself only possible if one makes three interlinked moves. Firstly one has to allow that market its head to rip though whatever existing customs already exist. The world is therefore, for the free market a mere virgin territory, to be exploited or pulled about at will. Secondly the market itself will need constant protection for any other elements attempting to make the return move back on it. Finally the market will, as abstract truth, be freed from the consequences of its own failure. The market itself never fails, it is merely the way it was imposed that created the problem…
The effect of these last three points is that in effect in many cases, the imposition of the market is almost identical to the imposition of law and order through the transfiguration of a single element. And yet there is a clear difference in that while the latter has the decency to understand each such move as a particular case, the former claims almost exclusive as well as universal rights to the transfiguration process itself. That is, the free market makes the claim that it and it alone is what should be transfigured… and all else should go hang!
It is of course the case that the full consequences of the megalomaniac claims of the free market had not been worked out in the Seventeenth Century. And yet in the various royal Charters issued to the West and East Indian companies, which enshrined the rights of the English (and Dutch and French) to trade, the potential for a free market clearly lay. There were after all, stated quite explicitly in such Charters, those two great tenets of the free market: The right to trade in as yet quite unexplored land; and the right to treat anyone who stopped such activity as a hostile enemy…
In a sense these theories resolve around three different takes upon the nature of anarchy. Is there one particular true (or real) anarchy (the free market or the principles of man in the raw) which must be defended against those false anarchies of violence? Or alternatively is all anarchy in fact synonymous with criminality, and therefore to be suppressed? Or is it possible to allow for a genuine anarchy a free hand, if it is only bound by certain limits (beyond which it must not then overspill), be they imposed by the royal charter, or social policy? - Three deep problems whose origins lay in the Civil war, and yet whose implications were codified in the generations which immediately followed that war. They left it then to subsequent generations to attempt to synthesize these arguments into a single explanation. However before one turns to this Lockean synthesis, it will first be necessary to look at views in the rest of Europe, and look at how they viewed their century, and why again their arguments matter so much to us today.
