Moses and the Ten Polite Requests
What is a commandment? Who says so?
Bolted to the outside wall of my home is a rather heavy reproduction of a sign the likes of which would at one time in the dim and distant past have graced some location on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. It reads: Notice. Any person who shall not shut and fasten this gate after passing through it is liable to a penalty not exceeding forty shillings and will be prosecuted for the offence. Look both up and down the line before you cross. By Order.
I located its prototypical original on the Internet:
The sign does not reveal by whose order the command is issued, but it derives its ultimate authority from an act of parliament (the Manchester and Leeds Railway Act (No. 3) 1847 (10 & 11 Vict. chapter CLXIII)). That act starts on page 2137 of the laws for the 10th to 11th year of the reign of Queen Victoria, and it finishes on page 2155, and is therefore comprised of 19 closely printed pages. It contains copious references to other acts of parliament, not least the Manchester and Leeds Railway Acts Nos. 1 and 2, the Railway Clauses Acts, the Conveyance of Mails by Railway Acts, and so forth. In short, there is little or no chance of the average Joe ever ascertaining whether or not the sign depicted above was erected in accordance with law. The assumption is that one shall read it, understand it and comply with it. For that is easier than trudging laboriously through all that printed legislation.
So, if we’re to comply, what does it mean? For instance, does failure to look up and down the line before crossing constitute an offence as well as not fastening the gate? What if I were to unfasten the gate and not pass through it—would that also constitute an offence? Let’s look at it in detail: the offence is impliedly the act of not shutting and fastening the gate after passing through it. Now, as a railway enthusiast, I can tell you that the reason the gate is even there, wherever it was, is that all British railways are under a statutory requirement to be fenced off. Unlike in some other countries, where a railway might be accessible simply by walking onto it, a British railway must be fenced off from public access. But that is a duty incumbent on the railway, not on the potential trespasser. In England and Wales, trespass is a civil suit (it doesn’t exist as even that in Scotland). You cannot prosecute anyone for a civil suit, so the threat of prosecution is an empty one. What the L&YR might have been able to do is pursue anyone who left a gate open (after passing through it) for recovery of such prejudice as it may have itself suffered as a result of it being prosecuted for failure to comply with its fencing obligation. And all of that comes from general knowledge about railways, and not a detailed reading of the Manchester and Leeds Railway Act (No. 3) of 1847. What follows comes from a general knowledge of the law, however.
“The law,” says Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons, “is not a ‘light’ for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. The law is a causeway upon which so long as he keeps to it a citizen may walk safely.” He says it to the jury at his trial, shortly before they find him guilty and he is condemned to death by decapitation. Interpreting what the law is, is therefore a matter of no little delicacy.
If we return briefly to the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, your riposte to my objection as to the obscurity of the source text from which its authority is drawn would likely be something akin to: It’s obvious—shut the ruddy gate! The point of law on which Thomas More’s life depended was likewise fairly straightforward: if he refused to utter a view on the king’s divorce, and thereby remained silent, the best the law could do was to deem his silence to be tantamount to consent (in Latin: qui tacet consentire): “If therefore, you wish to construe what my silence ‘betokened’, you must construe that I consented, not that I denied.” Just as it must be clear to any man whether or not a gate is open or shut, likewise the meaning of silence ought to be an open and shut case. It is a case as simple as the difference between open and shut that cost Sir Thomas his life.
There is yet more to analyse in the L&YR sign: why does it shift from the third person to the second (any person later transposes to an imperative form: look)? But, more to the point, what is a person?
Laws are made of words. It is words that ultimately condemned More:
Roper: There’s to be a new Act through Parliament, sir!
More: Act?
Roper: Yes, sir—about the Marriage!
More: Oh.
Margaret: Father, by this Act, they’re going to administer an oath.
More: An oath! On what compulsion?
Roper: It’s expected to be treason!
More: What is the oath?
Roper: It’s about the Marriage, sir.
More: But what is the wording?
Roper: We don’t need to know the wording—we know what it will mean!
More: It will mean what the words say! An oath is made of words!
No doubt. But—to counter Roper—what meaning is to be attributed to those words relies on the party appointed to interpret the words, not on those who simply hear them.
The recent débâcle surrounding Palestine Action in the United Kingdom made plain this stark truth: define terrorist however you will, he is a terrorist who parliament says is a terrorist. Only after a year of harm, persecution, prosecution, detention, trauma, worry and outrage did a court of law determine that the UK parliament had been wrong to name Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. And the government intends to appeal that decision, so that Palestine Action still remains a proscribed organisation. And what the appeal proceedings will ultimately reveal is (a) whether the law insists that a terrorist must be materially analysed as to whether he fulfils or not the description of terrorism as set down in the prevention of terrorism legislation, or (b) whether it errs to the view that a terrorist is a terrorist if parliament says so.
We live in societies in which we have become accustomed to laws that make common sense. We don’t like paying taxes, but we acquiesce in paying them because we know that, on the whole, they do good. Each time that we learn (such as when we find out about the spending propensities of the former prince Andrew) that taxpayers’ money has not been properly expended, our reliance on the probity of the taxation system diminishes. The common consent element of taxation reduces to regarding it as an instrument of duress. The cohesion of our society starts to crumble. We challenge the wisdom of having a royal family at all. Or the wisdom of a major rail project that seems to be going nowhere fast (the HS2, if it’s not plain what I mean). And the doubt we cast onto expenditure that is common to us all starts to impinge on our judgment of expenditure on things to which we have personal objections, such as a nation’s refugee policy.
One notion that is becoming embedded, which in fact ostensibly flies in the face of the two laws by which the Christian is enjoined to abide, is that society is made up of layers. Under the Christian’s laws, there are two layers: God and the individual. The treatment of God by the individual is regulated in the first four of the Ten Commandments:
The remaining six Commandments regulate matters between individuals. So, to use the old corporate terminology in the UK, the first four Commandments are like the Memorandum of Association, regulating the external relations of the company; the further six are the Articles of Association, regulating the internal workings of the company.
Jesus simplified both the Memorandum and the Articles, by restating them as one clause each:
Love God (the Memorandum)
Love each other (the Articles)
What is missing from this is a standard. A question that Mankind has been asking himself ever since Jesus’ time: what is love?
It is perhaps ironic that I Want To Know What Love Is was the number that spelled the end of Lou Grammatico’s involvement with Foreigner (for a while, at least). He and Mick Jones collaborated on many numbers and would exchange notes as to how they felt the collaboration had been shared (and hence the copyright royalties). For that song, the note that Lou Gramm gave to Mick Jones read “You 55 per cent, me 45 per cent.” Mick’s note read “Me 95 per cent, you 5 per cent.” With all that chart success, they still didn’t know what love was.
Jesus knew that this kind of argument was inevitable when you tell folk to love each other. To avoid recriminations and arguments and bad feelings, He gave us a standard: ourselves. Love others as you would want to be loved yourself. It sounds simple, but it’s a very high standard. We are very demanding when it comes to the amount of love that we reckon other people owe to us (allied to the amount of forgiveness we are likewise due); it is often not commensurate with the amount of love and forgiveness we are prepared to offer in return.
But, how would you transpose Jesus’ injunction to the case of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway? If the sign were absent, what would constitute the greater expression of love: leaving the gate open, to reduce the inconvenience to the next person passing by of having to open it; or closing it, so that people don’t inadvertently wander onto the line? And should Henry VIII have loved Thomas More by not chopping his head off, or should More rather have loved the king by swearing his oath? Somewhere we need to understand that any person (as indicated on the L&YR sign) doesn’t mean just any person. For a start, there is the company itself. It’s their railway, and they make the rules on their railway. Yes, they’re subject to rules imposed by parliament, but persons crossing the line need to be put in their place. As for Thomas More … well, here we have a clear example of who was who:
Henry: Touching this matter of my divorce, Thomas; have you thought of it since we last talked?
More: Of little else.
Henry: Then you see your way clear to me?
More: That you should put away Queen Catherine, sire? Oh, alas, as I think of it I see so clearly that I can not come with Your Grace that my endeavour is not to think of it at all.
Henry: Then you have not thought enough!
The conclusion of the scene containing this exchange is that the king hastens back to town with his entourage, leaving Sir Thomas forlorn and Lady Alice with a large banquet uneaten. That banquet would have been eaten—every last morsel—if Thomas had simply said I see my way clear to you. And Henry left because he could not understand why Thomas was being so unreasonable. Both men saw their positions as utterly reasonable, utterly lawful, utterly right. But only one of them had the power in law to determine which of them was right, for the purpose of the law, that is.
You need to appreciate that for what follows. I have laboriously led you through two legal examples of a contrariety that can hardly be paralleled: one a prohibition against crossing a railway line without closing the gate; the other a refusal to swear an oath, as a result of which a man’s head was chopped off his shoulders. And I hope to have thereby made clear that, wherever the law falls to be applied—which is everywhere—its constructs will always be based on a structure that, whatever one’s understanding of the law might be, can always differ from that common understanding in ways that can end up being shocking.
This is already long enough so I shall wind up with two further points.
The Epstein saga has made plain, if indeed it needs to be made plain, that the rules that bind ordinary folk do not apply to others. Epstein’s sweetheart deal that saw him locked up at night in a county jail for 13 months and free to roam during the day time is not a sentence that you or I can expect for soliciting a minor for prostitution. Thomas More was at a lower level of influence than King Henry. And people who cross the line are at a lower level than the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway.
The Jewish race is supreme. It reigns supreme. That’s not me who says that, but many Jewish commentators are saying it as well. Here’s one:
But, more than that, the Jewish race is not only supreme, but it has established a pecking order that, like the intricacies of the Manchester and Leeds Railway Act (No. 3), sounds perfectly normal to some, and surprising to others, depending on which side of the divide you stand on (think Henry and Thomas). The pecking order is:
Jews
Other living humans
Animals
Inanimate objects
If that sounds unlikely, then Gaza at least sheds some insight into that way of thinking. The 7 October attack in 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,195 Israeli civilians and security forces, as well as 1,609 attackers. That second figure is less commonly quoted, but is a figure given by Israel itself. How many people died as a result of application of the Hannibal directive (the idea that it’s better to kill one’s own people than to allow them to be taken hostage) is disputed. But the figures of 1,195 and 1,609 would, on the face of it, indicate that Israel had more than proportionately defended itself against the attack on the day of the attack itself.
The words of the Israeli leadership concerning 7 October, coupled to widespread messages disseminated on multiple Israeli and worldwide media channels thereafter, refer to the Palestinians as rodents, vermin, low-lifes, scum, and similar derogatory terms. Whilst it is common for a military force to describe the victims of a genocide thus (see my description of the Russian genocide of the Circassians in 1864), what for three years has puzzled outsiders is the glee, joy, delight of Israel in exacting disproportionate revenge over the Gazan people. The sheer cruelty is incomprehensible, except when one comes to consider the above pecking order.
The “mowing the grass” operations previously carried out by Israel in Gaza (Cast Lead—or the First Gaza War; Protective Edge—or the Second Gaza War; Pillar of Defence, and so on) resulted in a death toll that exceeded the 1,195 civilians and security forces killed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. If one wants to talk about proportionality, 7 October was about evening the score; until you start to look at the pecking order. Because, when there is a pecking order, it doesn’t matter how many of those lower down the pecking order are eliminated. The rule that applies is that those lower down may not so much as breathe on those higher up. A pecking order is inviolable. And, once you have understood that, much of what is currently going on in the world—in the quest against antisemitism, the definition of terrorism, the corporate capture of politics, the war in Iran and Lebanon and goodness knows where else next—starts to make sense, even if it is a sense that has no sense. Like being prosecuted for leaving a railway line’s gate open, or being executed for not agreeing that the king can get divorced.
Now, to finish off, there are ancient Commandments that are an established part of Jewish scripture but whose application had long since been thought to be contained within religious practice, dogma and theology. A moral code not of practical application. Morals are not practical. Here’s Thomas More again, after removing his chain of office as chancellor to the king:
More: I’m no street acrobat to make gestures! I’m practical!
Roper: You belittle yourself, sir, this was not practical; this was moral!
More: Oh now I understand you, Will. Morality’s not practical. Morality’s a gesture. A complicated gesture learned from books.
They’re a moral code of rules that the curious might wish to look into and consider, because their practicality is now starting to be put to the test. They are common sense (although one or two are strange common sense). While it is often said that there is nothing so uncommon as common sense, one still needs to exercise caution when something, instead of being understood as common sense, gets presented as common sense. Here are the seven common sense rules known as the Noahide laws:
Not to worship idols
Not to curse God
Not to commit murder
Not to commit adultery or sexual immorality
Not to steal
To establish courts of justice
They look surprisingly similar to the Ten Commandments, with the sixth forming some kind of outlier: do not eat the flesh of a living animal. It’s not actually something that it would occur to me personally to do, but it’s duly noted. I wonder what it means.
I actually wonder what a lot of it means. What is an idol? Is Taylor Swift an idol? Do Swifties worship Ms Swift? If the State of Louisiana can execute prisoners, what then is murder? Does murder depend on who you kill and in what circumstances? If killing someone on the order of an authority, like a court of law, is not murder, then which authorities get to decide what murder is? What is stealing? Is tax stealing? What about confiscation of the proceeds of crime? Compulsory purchase? And what is a court of justice? Is that the same as a court of law? And what is law? Is it that which is written or is it what someone says is written and, if so, who? And is that who a matter to be determined in accordance with the pecking order referred to above?
The answers to all these common sense questions all seemed at one time to be common sense, just like the existence of witches and ghosts. Whether or not witches and ghosts exist is a matter for your personal belief; that is, until such time as your personal belief starts to have very material consequences.
Above all else, make sure that today’s Sunday roast is from an animal that is rightly and properly dead, and one that has its rightful place in that pecking order.
If you’re interested to hear more about this sort of thing before you feel you are being confronted by it, you may wish to take a look here:
Some questions are better left unanswered.