How can there be a problem with Law ? Surely every civilised society makes and enforces laws to be obeyed on pain of sanction ? All societies have laws. Indeed, an objective code to which anyone with a grievance may appeal is a mark of civilisation.
The rule of law is much vaunted in democracies. Law provides the objective code according to which all behaviour must be judged. Where the law rules, then no person may claim exemption from its constraints and its sanctions, no matter how rich or important they may be.
All this is true. All this is vitally important. So why is there a problem with Law today ?
In the western democracies, law has become more than just regulation of human behaviour according to moral norms. Law is no longer just a matter of imposing criminal sanctions against murder, theft and rape. It is no longer just a matter of regulating differences of interest among parties to a contract, or imposing taxes on trade. Law has become something more.
The something more began to be manifest in 19th century England. In the wake of the industrial revolution, certain problems emerged. People moved from country life and farm work to urban living and work in factories.
In the countryside, the local squire or landlord oversaw local life and people worked as families in the fields and exercised crafts in the home. But in the towns, there was overcrowding in housing and no proper sanitation; there was employment of children in often dangerous environments in factories; there was complete upheaval of the settled social and economic life of the countryside.
Government stepped in with social legislation to counter the abuse of child labour and to combat life threatening diseases in overcrowded and insanitary towns.
The great English Jurist, FW Maitland, commented in a series of lectures at the university of Cambridge in 1888, that English law had developed over the previous 50 years to such an extent that it now affected every domain of life by imposing new general duties and a plethora of particular prohibitions.
Much concerned the growth of law relating to Administrations tasked to improve the common welfare, from a duty to register the birth of every child to compulsory education for all children.
The State was intervening to promote improved physical conditions for the general welfare. In 20th century England, that continued with compulsory provision for sickness, pensions and unemployment.
While intrusive, such laws were concerned for improving social conditions for all, and they were ad hoc responses providing specific remedies to particular problems.
But by the 21st century, the law has become an instrument for something more sinister. It has become an instrument to fashion peoples mindset – their very attitudes and their thinking.
Previously, the State was merely making up for the material deficit in people’s lives by, for example, providing hospitals and schools. This of course entailed a serious expansion of both public expenditure and government control.
But because the State pays for all this, it has come to assume the right to dictate how people think and behave. This conforms precisely to the Marxist mentality where the Enlightened Ideological Elite takes total control of the State and the Political Agenda in order to enforce social and economic Equality.
The domain of life and culture which once belonged to the family and to social networks such as churches, has now been usurped by the All Providing, All Knowing State. Individual liberty of thought and feeling is to be corralled and channelled into politically and philosophically ‘correct’ thinking which absolute social justice demands.
One extreme example of this today is China’s emerging Social Credit system. In this mass surveillance system, a person’s every action is monitored, recorded and assessed with punishments and rewards determined automatically by specially engineered algorithms. This has been made possible by today’s internet connectivity. Today everything about us is recorded by computers and by mass surveillance cameras.
Under the system being piloted in China, people have actually been excluded from normal, everyday activities without any form of indictment or examination of the evidence to show they have contravened a specified law. Deified MAN now rules, using man’s creation: Technology. MAN no longer accounts to God.
The West is not immune from this mentality. Witness the extensive controls applied to combat the Covid 19 Virus in western democracies.
Prior to March 2020, even the scientists and specialists advocating extreme measures to combat Covid 19 doubted that such constraints could be introduced in western democracies because of the cultural and legal tradition of individual liberty.
I am shocked and deeply disturbed by the totalitarian measures taken by western governments to counter a threat the like of which has happened before [eg AIDS in the 1980s] but which no western government ever dreamed of containing so drastically.
It is a symptom of the dramatic shift in the mindset of the Materialist Western Intelligentsia. The presumption that the elite knows best in every way, on every matter, has now shoved aside all previous norms, including respect for responsible and intelligent adults who disagree with current official thinking.
It is a God-like attitude, and it reflects the nature of the abuse to which Law is now put. Law has become an instrument of the Materialist Religion. It reflects the mindset and values of that religion. It implements rules to ensure that its interpretation and its answers to problems are not only paramount, but that they are the only possible answers.
I was already middle aged when the Human Rights Act 1998 was passed into law in Britain. I was under the distinct impression that I lived in a free country, albeit one increasingly subjected to the hostility emanating from the politically correct mindset.
Today, Law is no longer simply a framework to define serious wrongdoing, or a mechanism to provide justice – including economic ‘justice’. In order to guarantee total Social Justice according to MAN centred ideas, it now redefines and constrains every aspect of thought and behaviour.