Rogue
GOVERNMENT
is founded on the formulations of laws
which define various functions in society,
specify social responsibility and ensure
the fair investigations of all evidence
before a decision is reached.
The hundred offices are organized;
commerce follows its regular course;
the essential needs of clothing and food
are prepared for;
the cattle are fed and looked after;
the state granaries are filled;
the old and the weak, orphans and the destitute
receive sympathetic consideration
— these are the ways to sustain the people.
Zhuangzi trans. by Hyun Höchsmann and Yang Guorong, Book 33 Under the Heaven
There have been many philosophies, each a snapshot of “how it was” in various times and places. Every one of this collection of roughly consistent concepts can be thought of as a “language game”. Each discloses a distinct vocabulary and grammar of expression. Even in translation each manifests the flavor, or said differently, a style of thought and discourse to disclose the bias, the resistances as well as the desirables of peoples in places and times.
In the concluding book of the Zhuangzi “outer chapters” (considered later additions) – the bedrock of any civil society is unambiguously expressed. Civil government and law are correlates. A civil government is the administration of a society that has the well-being of those residing within it’s protection foremost in mind. Autocracy, military dictatorship (rule by terror), or kleptocracy is ruled out of this concluding soliloquy.
This descriptive sketch of iron age society of ancient China can be extended with little imagination to the globalized social experience that we presently know. The essential elements remain: clothing, food stuffs, livestock husbandry, storage reserve of cereal grains and provision for the least fortunate of our people. The last class of solicitude is a bellwether of the health of a civil society.
Perhaps it’s unnecessary to say that the United States is widely regarded as a rogue state, outside of the circle of civil societies.
But I want to say it anyway.
2 thoughts on “Rogue”
Our current situation is a sad state of affairs but one that was self inflicted. An authoritarian strongman (in appearance only) meets a weak and disjointed Democratic Party. A recipe for disaster.
And Voila, here we are.
These lines from The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats come to mind:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
One more additional thought. This contest for the “soul” of America at this juncture is a standoff between a segment of the populace convinced the patriarchy is the way to go. “Father knows best” even if he is brutal, seething with ill will, erupting on a daily basis with invective. We who oppose, who favor an egalitarian distribution of power, viewing the earth itself as meriting at place at the table of discourse are bereft of any means to talk with our opponents. Reason is abandoned as weakness The ebb and flow of extreme emotion is what they attend to and prefer.
Whereas we cannot oppose, and cannot negotiate — what is left?
Ineptitude and hubris has a single result: implosion of much that we have held dear.