Ransom,
Quote:
|
Basically, I'm wondering if your statement that compeling a "moral behavior" (whatever that is defined as <http://forum.barrowdowns.com/cgi-bin/smilies/tongue.gif> ) is wrong would lead to a direct (or indirect) condemnation of the modern system of judicial thought.
|
I would answer this by examining first your initial assumption that the obverse of ordered society is anarchy and second by taking the point back to Tolkien.
Most of North Americans' general assumptions about constitutions and governments derive from the Age of Reason, the eighteenth century. We assume that these are good things and represent a progressive, positive form of social organization.
However, not all contemporary thought accepts this. Here, I am thinking particularly of the philosopher Michel Foucault, who argued that the ideas of a "disciplinary society", of a society marked by systems of judicial thought, supervision, regulation, discipline and punishment, institutionalization, and mechanization were formed in the eighteenth century but were not constituted as such in earlier structures of society.
The question of how we come as cultures to create government is not, I think, as cut and dried as saying that a government is established by a written constitution to act upon the will of the people. Anthropology, sociology, philosophy, psychology would all have very different ways of looking upon how governments come to have power.
In fact, there is one form of argument which suggests that the very act of institutionalizing human conduct in governmental organizations, penal insitutions and madhouses, factories creates a very different relationship between moral and immoral behaviour. This placed these concerns within an authoritarian order rather than within a moral order, linking them to civil law. I am greatly simplifying the complex argument here, but essentially it is an argument which says that the very forms of immoral or anti-social behaviour which we now fear are created by the social constructs we now have in place. (Note, he does not say that theft, murder, madness, cruelty did not exist before this form of social organization, but that they were differently understood and handled.)
What I find fascinating here is to look at Tolkien's ideas about power, domination, personal moral responsibility and obligation and consider how he depicted his various races. We know little about dwarven social organization, not terribly much about Rohirrim or Gondorian social order. We probably know The Shire best. All of these societies are what modern rational thought would call primitive and even pre-literate (with the possible exception of Gondor here). Tolkien seems to harken back to some kind of "organic" form of social organization where the people as individuals were responsible for their society.
Think of Saurman's supervisory tower, his desire to impose his will upon others, the nature of The Shire when the hobbits return. It is true that Tolkien creates a Shire initially under the protection of Rangers and then under the jurisdiction of Aragorn, who closes it off to men. But I cannot help but wonder if Tolkien's view of the horrors of modern mechanized society extends also to a sense that moral order should not be relegated to civil order.
This is a very greatly generalized statement which I offer for suggestion only.
Bęthberry