| | |
|
MeaganBurrowsFirstPaper 7 - 03 May 2012 - Main.MeaganBurrows
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper" |
|---|
| | | Legal and Political Ritual: The Danger of Transcendental Nonsense | |
<
< | The American creed can be likened to the legal rules we have discussed in class. Both doctrinal fictions are Cohen’s ‘transcendental nonsense’. The ideological values and the legal rules we adhere to are self-referential. They exist in a hypothetical, ethereal vacuum, with no tangible meaning or grounding in reality until they are applied. As Arnold notes, these revered “legal and economic principles…have made our learning about government a search for universal truth rather than a set of observations about the techniques of human organization.” | >
> | The American creed can be likened to the legal rules we have discussed in class. Both doctrinal fictions are Cohen’s ‘transcendental nonsense’. The ideological values and the legal rules we adhere to are self-referential. They exist in an ethereal vacuum, lacking any tangible meaning until they are applied. As Arnold notes, these revered “legal and economic principles…have made our learning about government a search for universal truth rather than a set of observations about the techniques of human organization.” | | | But what if there is no universal truth - no polarizing right and wrong, good and evil, us and them? While we value the supposed experience of discovering we are a part of something larger than ourselves, clinging to the folklore we have been fed by ancestors, political parties and judges might not be worth the sense of community we derive from our dependence. Blind adherence to abstract principles comes at the cost of making critical observations about “techniques of human organization” and using these observations to create a composite for what we normatively want to see in both law and politics. As Arnold notes, “out of pure mystical idealism…men were opposing every self interest both of themselves and the community, because the scheme went counter to the folklore to which they were accustomed.” | | | Arnold’s Capitalism, Communism and Fascism are really just another form of Cohen’s transcendental nonsense – fictions, folklore, and ceremonies created to distill complicated realities into convenient and manageable compartments. But things are what they do, not what they are called. Just as rules don’t actually explain how legal cases are decided, ideological labels fail to account for the opportunities presented by the actual application of the rhetoric embodied within them. They are far too simplistic and discrete to explain the mass influx of individual personalities, societal forces, economics, history, and institutional dynamics at work in each case. What we really have are malleable constructs that can be adjusted, refined and applied to become living, breathing systems with the potential for positive social consequence. | |
<
< | Acknowledgment of the restrictions posed by faithfulness to folklore in both politics and law enables us to capitalize upon political and legal opportunism. Creeds, symbols and slogans don’t need to be completely abandoned – in fact, they may be successfully manipulated for our own purposes. But we must also recognize that the comfort provided by blind faith and the fear of disillusionment and uncertainty can stifle creativity, imagination and improvement. Only then can we move forward to create complex composites that more accurately reflect reality, enabling us to engage dynamically with society and effect substantive change. (856) | >
> | Acknowledgment of the restrictions posed by faithfulness to folklore in both politics and law enables us to capitalize upon political and legal opportunism. Creeds, symbols and slogans don’t need to be completely abandoned – in fact, they may be successfully manipulated for our own purposes. But we must also recognize that the comfort provided by blind faith and the fear of disillusionment and uncertainty can stifle creativity, imagination and improvement. Only then can we move forward to create complex composites that more accurately reflect reality, enabling us to engage dynamically with society and effect substantive change.
Word Count (903) | | |
\ No newline at end of file |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |