Law in Contemporary Society

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JackSherrickFirstEssay 11 - 02 Apr 2021 - Main.EbenMoglen
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 This analysis is intended to provide helpful heuristic framework to understand some Christians' psychological relationship to secular law. It is not intended to be a hatchet job on Christian thinking nor an exoneration of the behaviors that arise out of this sort of thinking. This analysis could be further nuanced by considering factors such as political ideology and racial attitudes or by extrapolating my argument onto other faiths. While many Christians may have a fatalistic and unengaged attitude towards secular law, they still have outsized political influence in America. White Christians compose only 43 percent of the American public yet they make up 55 percent of American voters. This indicates that fatalistic attitudes may not necessarily depressed turnout.
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"Acceptance of secular jurisprudence" and "fatalism" are not in any sense the same but they are more than once conflated in this draft, so one obvious improvement is to be clear about the difference. Making clear that the lunchtime conversation of one Christian is not "what Christians think" let alone "the Christian view of _X_" would be similarly useful. "Fatalism" could be some variant of a "Christian" (meaning in this essay, so far as I can tell, "Protestant") view of Fate, but perhaps not.

I don't understand the point of the mathematical expression of the fact that life is short and eternity is a long time. There's no hypothesis of the uniform nature of utility across the domain boundaries of time and eternity that would make this work. The "heuristic" isn't particularly sensitive to any numerical values you could put in it, so it all feels like excess precision and unnecessary Greek typesetting. If this is needed, why?

Which brings us to the larger why. From Jesus' comment about rendering to Caesar and God, to Augustine's two cities, to the revision of the Roman law by Justinian and Tribonian, the Christianity of the late ancient Mediterranean fully absorbed and represented in all aspects the dualism of divine and secular law that you are trying, from a perspective beginning 1,000 or 1,500 years later, to explain. From the historian's point of view, nothing can be more conducive to misunderstanding than picking the story up in the middle. Indeed, the famous and—for the Church—highly objectionable argument given by Gibbon in the 15th chapter of his Decline and Fall is that Christianity succeeded precisely because of the dualism that allowed the Emperors to be at once the heads of both Church and State, and to be of two bodies in doing so.

So what is gained by leaving historical analysis behind, and hypothesizing that Christian understandings of the division between secular and divine law are newly made in each generation, if not in each lunchtime, by the untutored but economically rational speculations of individual Christian workers? Why would such a perspective, assuming it has explained its raison d'etre to its own satisfaction, want to take on a view from Marx, who by his nature will be indigestible to an ahistoical approach? I understand what is said here better than I understand why it is said, which might be the best route to the overall improvement of the present draft. What is the reader actually supposed to get from it that justifies the jettisoning of what others would begin from?

 

Thoughts on how to improve this essay in the next draft


Revision 11r11 - 02 Apr 2021 - 17:34:56 - EbenMoglen
Revision 10r10 - 02 Apr 2021 - 17:03:39 - JackSherrick
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