Delphic Maxim 2: Obey the Law
The challenge I’ve set myself — in order to get in the habit of writing regularly — is to respond to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes every morning, and the paste it unedited into Medium. The Delphic Maxims were carved on stones around the Oracle at Delphi in Ancient Greece. They’re a kind of guidelines for living your life. Now, just because an ancient culture made these prescriptions for life doesn’t mean that they’re still relevant today. A lot of young men (Jordan Peterson fans) worship Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. And there’s a lot that’s admirable about Stoic philosophy — but there’s also a lot that’s missing or dated. And even more importantly: any ethical guide to life is of its time. There might be some principles you can carry forward — and definitely with each translation some of that work gets done — but in the main, life has changed dramatically over time.
So let me attempt to unpack the Delphic Maxims and translate them, in my own terms, for a contemporary world.
2. Obey the Law
For the most part, people go about their lives obeying the law. And if you were to confront someone about whether or not it is right to obey the law, they would — most probably — say yes. But I see two issues with this.
First of all, our laws are hugely complex. It’s why there’s so much money in practising law (and why ‘justice’ is such an act of interpretation). It’s pretty unlikely that an individual would happen to know every single law that applies to them in a given circumstance. People generally go about living their lives, doing what we think is the right thing to do. It’s only when we encounter the Law via one of its functionaries (the police, for example), that we get a sense of how much we don’t actually understand.
It’s kind of like Josef K in Kafka’s Trial. He goes about his business, and then one day is summonsed to court. He is led through the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the law, he is unsettled, he’s unsure of what exactly it is that he has done. He is found guilty, and late in the book — spoiler alert — is executed. It’s all so impersonal and dislocating, and it’s also a classic case of why we refer to bureaucratic processes as ‘Kafkaesque’. People can get lost in the law, because we don’t understand the detail.
I say that we don’t understand the detail — that we couldn’t possibly (even lawyers spend time researching precedent in cases, they don’t have a memory of everything that has come before) — so if we can’t be across the detail, how can we obey the law?
Which brings me to my second point: what if the law is unjust? At the moment in my country we’re having a debate about Pill Testing — whether or not the government should test illicit drugs at music festivals in order to prevent harm. This is a classic case of the law as it currently stands — opposed to drugs, zero tolerance — being ineffective and in a sense unjust (how could a law that doesn’t take a pragmatic approach to reality, that effectively compels people to take unsafe risks, be considered just or sensible)? In this case, I would say the law needs to change, or the moral code of people should compel them to obey a greater good.
This is a weak argument, and I feel like I am apologising every day for the unvarnished blog that 15 minutes produces BUT: there’s that conscience we have, that moral voice within us that tells us we are doing something wrong. Freud might have argued that this is the ‘superego’, a manifestation of external control, internalised and telling us that what we are doing is wrong. But even that might is a tricky thing to qualify, because what exactly are we internalising? Whose logic, whose law?
I can’t say with absolute certainty that in all circumstances you should obey your moral imperatives. It’s my view that ethical behaviour is contextual — there may be moral principles that apply in most (even all) situations, but context here is really important. And it may be the case the the moral code, the ‘law’, to which you subscribe is different to somebody else’s. This is a rough one to translate in 15 minutes!
So how to obey the law given all this mess? At least stick to the basics: Don’t harm others. Be careful. Be disciplined. Be just.
