A Call for the Rememberers
I recently wrote a piece considering whether our common law constitution provides a safe container for our anarchy. Although I was careful to explain the true meaning of the word anarchy, there are those who decried the use of the word anarchy. There are those who still believe that anarchy means causing chaos, looting, throwing missiles and starting fires in the streets. This is the way that anarchy has been portrayed over the years. Many people believe it means lawlessness and chaos. In fact, it means the absence of an external ruler; self-mastery.
However, I have come to consider that anarchy is missing something. It is missing the elders. It misses the hierarchy of the elder. Not a hierarchy in an imposed sense, but the voluntary wish to seek out the counsel of the wise elder. The wise elder has been lost from our society for a long time. For more on the Loss and reclamation of Elderhood within our society see Stephen Jenkinson’s thought-provoking book “Come of Age”.1
Without elderhood - which is implicit in our constitution - in the form of the King, and the Kings peers for him to turn to, anarchy may well lead to chaos. Not because there is a deliberate intention to cause chaos, to dress in black, throw missiles in the street and cause disruption, but rather because it does not provide protection against human error. When I speak with true anarchists, they can be offended by the idea of needing anyone to govern them, even through the authentic Trial by Jury. They believe that they can call out wrongdoing and take appropriate action themselves. They believe that they are capable of taking the law into their own hands. For sure, they have called out the ills of our society, the fact that belief in the authority of the state is a dangerous thing (“The Most Dangerous superstition” to quote Larken Rose, this the title to his excellent book on the subject).2
Natural law requires us to call out wrong-doing: to stand up when someone transgresses the rights of another, when another is not taking right-action. But what if, when we call out wrong-doing, we get it wrong? It is one thing to act immediately to defend oneself or another, in a situation where, were we not to act, we would be harmed. However, where we have the time and opportunity to be careful, we should. Because we are not Gods.
It is important to ensure that no innocent man is punished. Various iterations of this ideal have been expressed over the centuries. It is said, for example, that King Alfred hanged a judge for having executed a defendant ‘when the jurors were in doubt about their verdict, for in cases of doubt one should rather save than condemn” 3, or the English jurist William Blackstone: “Better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer,”4 or more recently in memoir: “Justice belongs to God; men only have the law. Justice is perfect, but the law can only be careful.’5
Being careful means we cannot take the law into our own hands. We need the Other Eleven to help us. And, in our constitution, we call to our highest public servant, and elder, our King, to hold this all in place. This is the promise in his Coronation Oath. To help us to call out and punish wrong-doing where appropriate.
But none of this will work without a call to all our elders to hold the constitution in place. To remember how it should be, and work every day to keep it so. Our elders are our Rememberers, and we need to find them again, urgently. And if our elders have all gone AWOL maybe we must become them, we must remember, and be ready when we are called.
There are moves afoot by our “government’ to further remove our Trial by Jury6. Many people who claim to want freedom believe that our legal system, and many of our other institutions, are too damaged to repair; there is a push to let them collapse, let the chips fall where they may. But is this the best course when all the vestiges of our true constitution remain in the system we have? They just need to be unearthed and reclaimed. And, if we fail, and the whole system does indeed collapse, at least in the attempt to reclaim, we will have remembered. And we will need to have remembered, if we are to rebuild.
References:
- Jenkinson, S. (2018). Come of age: the case for elderhood in a time of trouble. North Atlantic Books
- Rose, L. (2012) Most Dangerous Superstition. Larken Rose
- Volokh, A. (1997) N guilty men. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 146(1), pp.173-216.
- William Blackstone Commentaries 352
- Burnett, D.G. (2002) A Trial by Jury. Vintage.
- https://www.gov.uk/guidance/independent-review-of-thecriminal-courts