Of course, the fact of written law does not eliminate injustice or oppression; powerful interests arrange to have the law written and interpreted to their benefit.  But even though the weak are at a disadvantage, the law still operates to their benefit, because the enormous expense and risk of physical conflict is replaced by the lower risk of legal conflict.  This is an important point: even though a nation with a fully functioning legal system still retains monstrous injustices, the people, especially the poor people, are better off than under a system of force and feud.

Every system of laws cries out for improvement, and those agitating for change are often tempted to describe the current situation as close to lawlessness.  Sometimes they have argued that a flawed legal system is tantamount to no legal system at all, little more than a velvet glove that hides the mailed fist of power.  Marx had such little regard for law that The Communist Manifesto has no discussion about it beyond noting the political constitutions that accompanied the emergence of free competition.  His mechanical metaphor clanks like a steam locomotive; everything is force and power: feudal lords over peasants, and bourgeoisie over proletarians.  Property, whether the property in slaves of the masters, in land and peasants of the feudal lords, or in factories and workers of the bourgeoisie were an expression of power, not of freedom.  The absence of law in Marxism is not surprising.  If history is a class struggle, then laws are but the peace treaties in the breathing spaces between episodes of open class warfare.  With Lenin, who had read and approved Clausewitz, war is no longer the continuation of politics by other means, but politics the continuation of war by other means (Odom 1998 p15).  Whereas historian Paul Johnson characterizes the great achievement of the last millennium as the idea of bringing of government under law, in the Soviet Union a Communist Party member was above the law and could not be brought to trial in state court until after expulsion from the party (Odom 1998 p19).  In the Fabian Essays on Socialism, the British socialists envisaged sweeping away the Individualist laws and replacing them with socialist laws.  In Discipline and Punish, Foucault contrasts the legal process of the ancien régime and modern society.  He pictures the violent public executions of the ancien régime as frank demonstrations of royal power.  In the legal system of the bourgeois era, the government hides its power behind prison walls and faceless bureaucrats.  But it is still all about power. 

These ideological theories may seem to have little importance for everyday people, but eventually these ideas may debouch from the rarified air of the ivory tower into the street in the form of rabble-rousers like Rev. Al Sharpton.  His slogan: “No Justice!  No Peace!” brilliantly encapsulates the meaning of Marx and Lenin for the average inner-city proletarian.  Meanwhile left-wing activists continually attack the criminal law as unfairly biased against the poor and minorities and designed to harass and oppress them.  Center-left politicians routinely rail against unjust laws and argue for the substitution of government power for private property relations.  All these activities hinder the progress of the pilgrims on the road to the middle class.  They reduce the prestige of law and confirm red proletarians in their natural instincts.  They discourage them from making the cultural step of abandoning their tribal culture of force and feud and learning the remarkably sophisticated culture of law and contract. 

The understanding of the relationship of power, law, and community in modern society is a fine muddle.  The proletarians experience only power, and do not understand law, except as another tactic to exploit them.  The left extols community, and marginalizes law as the velvet glove of power, yet proposes to base its ideal community on the naked power of a elite answerable only to itself, and maintains itself in power by a resort to class warfare.  The right loses sight of the reality of power in its dreamy love affair with the rule of law, reciting Maine’s apothegm about the progressive societies moving from status to contract as though law were a force of nature rather than a political program.  It regards the left’s vision of universal community as a hallucination.

The Spiral Dynamics perspective avoids these mistakes, because its way of seeing is precisely to regard modern society not just as a problem of power, or of law, or of community, but a problem that involves power, law, and community.  It recognizes that power is real.  Even after a society changes from a regime of power to a regime of law, it does not mean that power is vanquished.  Power remains, reflected in custom and law, but it begins a retreat from open display.  Law is also real.  It is not just the velvet glove of power.  The bourgeois citizen living under the rule of law derives real benefits from conducting his affairs under law.  He does not have to confront power in every moment of his life.  His property is secure, his business is lightly taxed, and he may sue for damages when he has been harmed by another’s tort or negligence.  Community is also real.  It is not just the hallucination of left-wingers, but the quality of mercy and caring that transcends the worlds of power and law, offering the practical benefits of social cooperation without conflict.  It understands the finding of Frederick Turner, that in the contractual relations of commerce, businessmen learn to give and take.  They learn to transcend the mechanical terms of a contract and understand that in an atmosphere of trust give and take can occur.  He can be merciful to his contractor’s mistake if he trusts him, and he expects similar forbearance when he makes a mistake.  The quality of mercy is not strained, forced into the clauses and sentences of a contract.  It transcends mere words and rules, falling as the gentle rain from heaven.  Law transcends power, but does not abolish it.  Compassion transcends contract, but does not nullify it.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill