The Need for Laws

 

If we were a just society, we wouldn’t need as many laws as are on the books, with more being added every year. I mean, should we really need laws against child molestation, murder, rape and robbery? If we were truly moral, we’d know already that such acts were wrong and not need laws to tell us so.

We are certainly more evolved than our forebears who practiced slavery or who held women as second-class citizens, but in many ways -- such as the need for much of our legal system -- we’re still very primitive. Indeed, many people practice an ethic whose foundation seems to be whatever they can get away with, especially in the area of property. They flout the purpose of the law and use courts to fight the letter.

In an ideal world, people would be oriented toward doing what was best for the community, rather than exploiting the system to get a bigger share for themselves. On a mundane level that illustrates the difference, when people would come to a four-way stop, instead of trying to enter first, they would wait for the others to proceed. Generosity, cooperation and collaboration would replace meanness, aggression and corruption.

No, I’m not taking drugs, and I know this doesn’t seem like something just over the horizon, but it is important to remind ourselves of what are our goals, even if they sometimes seem out of sight.

We must remind each other of our hopes and aspirations for a healthy and productive society so that when opportunities arise to share higher aspirations -- when the need appears to defend good against evil -- we don’t have to dig into our consciousness to come up with a response.

Our national psyche was ravaged by the Nine-Eleven attacks, but the damage was made more severe because our spiritual ground has lain fallow for thirty years. Whatever the cause -- sloth, greed, fear, ignorance -- the point is that we have much work to do to get our society back on track.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.

 

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