“Without justice what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers? And what is a band of robbers but such a kingdom in miniature? It is a band of men under the rule of a leader, bound together by a pact of friendship, and their booty is divided among them by an agreed rule. Such a blot on society, if it grows, assumes for itself the proud name of kingdom.” — St. Augustine
In recent months, I’ve written about Venezuela’s outright support for and complicity with the Tren de Aragua worldwide enterprise (see here, here, and here).
Sociologists tell us that one of the important indicators of a society’s or culture’s ability to withstand or defeat the lawless chaos it may be confronting is “resiliency”. Ronna Rísquez, in her courageous exposé, El Tren de Aragua, cites a sociological definition from the Índice global del crimen organizado (The Global Index of Organized Crime): “… the capacity of state and non-state actors to resist and dismantle the activities of organized crime through political, economic, legal, and social means.”
According to the index, the indicators which serve to measure the resiliency of a country or community include their “political leadership, governance, civil government [state] transparency, accountability, international cooperation, the judicial system, law enforcement, territorial integrity, the fight against money laundering, and the support and encouragement of victims and witnesses”.
Ms Rísquez goes on to note that Venezuela has negative numbers in practically all those indicators, principally because “authoritative states have lower levels of resiliency than do democracies….”
However, seemingly oblivious to the irony, she then goes on to say that such resiliency, as defined, has also decreased significantly throughout the continent and the world. In other words, regardless of political structures, criminality has filled in the vacuum left by the loss of resiliency worldwide.
So, whether democratic or authoritarian, peoples across continents have lost resiliency.
Seems an important indicator might be missing from the list cited above.
The late Harvard Professor, Harold J. Berman, wrote in his magisterial Law and Revolution (1983):
“The traditional symbols of community in the West, the traditional images and metaphors, have been above all religious and legal. In the twentieth century, however, for the first time, religion has become largely a private affair …. The connection between the religious metaphor and the legal metaphor has been broken.”
Is it any wonder that bonds of race, religion, soil, family, class, neighborhood, and work community have dissolved into abstract and superficial nationalisms? “It is impossible not to sense the social disintegration, the breakdown in communities, that has taken place in Europe, North America, and other parts of Western civilization in the twentieth century,” Berman wrote in 1983
In other words, the loss of resiliency, as defined above, has very much to do with our willful ignorance if not outright hostility towards our Christian heritage and this loss has resulted from a total absconding of the Christian religious jurisdiction by those who should know better.
In his follow up volume, Law and Revolution II Berman writes:
“Why is it important to remember the influence of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity on the Western legal tradition in past centuries? First, because we are the heirs of that tradition and our law is a product of those influences. We cannot understand what our legal institutions are if we do not know how they came to be what they are, just as we cannot know who we ourselves are if we do not know how we came to be who we are. Our history is our group memory, without which we as a group are lost. If we live only in the present we suffer from memory impairment, a kind of social amnesia, not knowing whence we came or whither we ar going.”
Berman notes what most of us have understood since childhood but has been effectively blotted out of our collective consciousness: without a knowledge of the past there can be no true commitment to the future. All of life becomes an existential — and short-lived — fling.
Berman goes on to state, “For many centuries, [the West] would be identified very simply as the people of Western Christendom.”
“From the eleventh and twelfth centuries on, monophonic music, reflected chiefly in the Gregorian chant, was gradually supplanted by polyphonic styles. Two-part, three-part, and eventually four-part music developed. The contrapuntal style exemplified in the thirteenth-century motet evolved into the harmonic style of the fourteenth century ars nova, exemplified in the ballade. Eventually, counterpoint and harmony were combined. The sixteenth century witnessed the development of the great German Protestant chorales, and these, together with Italian and English madrigals and other forms, provided a basis for opera …. Eventually Renaissance music gave way to Baroque, Baroque to Classical …. etc. No good contemporary musician, regardless of how off-beat he may be, can afford not to know this story….”
Not too long ago, American citizens, and certainly lawyers, judges, and justices were required, in a similar way, to know the story of the development of our institutions and their great debt to Christianity.
For example, about a century ago, in the early 20th Century, just about everyone in the United States understood that [church] canon law constituted the first modern Western legal system. Eventually, canon law and royal law complemented each other and formed a basis for the Western legal tradition. It was understood, at least inchoately, that rejecting the religious heritage of the West has always led to tyranny.
(This knowledge encouraged or otherwise allowed even children to appeal to the Christian tradition when rebuking behavior contrary or opposed to it. Behavior such as we see on just about every American street today.)
However, today, our rich heritage is not only generally unknown but should it be even mentioned it is only to have it dismissed outright, even by clergy who delight in writing books or preaching sermons denying our Christian legacy. In so doing, we greatly err and worse: we join forces with those who would destroy our legal and social foundations.
We encourage the bands of robbers that mark the disintegration of a civilized society.
It is no mystery that many who most despise the American heritage have an undisguised hatred for the Christian religion because that religion places man and his institutions under an eternal, Triune God and His law. And this is unacceptable.
Once we understand this philosophical enmity, much of the violence and chaos in our era — such as the invasion and disruption of church services in St. Paul, Minnesota, two Sundays ago — becomes not only intelligible but compellingly so.
Previous Revolutions, even the execrable French and Russian, may have altered or amended our Christian legal tradition; however, they ultimately remained within it because the former peoples understood their heritage far better than we do today.
The present upheavals are far more concerning because the secularization of the modern mind has succeeded in obfuscating the minds of even intelligent, courageous allies like Ronna Rísquez, who neglect to acknowledge that ours is the Christian heritage and without it there is no resiliency.
Without it, we have bowed the knee to our ostensible enemies:
Engels: “We … reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatever as eternal, ultimate, and forever immutable moral law ….”
Lenin: “We repudiate all morality derived from non-human and non-class concepts. We say it is a deception, a fraud in the interest of the landlords and the capitalists … We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the toilers around the proletariat … We do not believe in an eternal morality.”
Marx: “Man makes religion, religion does not make man … The abolition of religion as an illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness….
Anyone who has read the detestable Communist Manifesto will recognize the above sentiments, and more.
Such sentiments, so fashionable today, are the polar opposite of our legal and cultural heritage, which no amount of “indicators” will ever restore, absent a genuine return to the Christian faith which transformed the world.
“Without the fear of hell and the hope of the Last Judgment, the Western legal tradition could not have come into being.” — Harold J. Berman
Harold J. Berman (1918-2007)
The French Revolution (late 18th Century) was characterized by rivers of blood and debauchery
Unearthed bodies massacred by the Soviet Communists in 1940. Mass graves are a feature of atheist regimes. But even they had enough understanding of their remaining Christian heritage that they sought to conceal their atrocities.