I have described many characteristics of hunter-gatherer societies in a previous Sub-Chapter.
In this Sub-Chapter I will consider how social/cultural structures evolved when humans gradually, over a few thousand years, moved from hunting and gathering – that did not really need a top-down system where some people are ranked higher than others – to agriculture (farming) that did. We will call this kind of society a hierarchy.
Parallel to the evolution of this cultural/social structure a legal/justice hierarchy was constructed to uphold the norms and values of the former. Both anthropological branches (social/cultural and legal/justice) can be considered to have a close relationship in human society and have evolved in tandem.
Like class, it is worthwhile, and of interest to anyone who aspires to work in communities where many of the Focus Group live, to spend some time looking at the origin of hierarchy that is so familiar to us nowadays.
Looking again at stress and strain in our human experience, we might say that when the legal/justice system begins to change it might be coming under stress. The extent to which the law changes might be the strain that it is under – and there is no going back.
When social/cultural norms and values change, pressure comes on the legal/justice system to accommodate that change. This generally happens within a relatively short time, but sometimes the strict legal position long outlasts the social/cultural norm and is ignored by both ordinary people and the law enforcers. [1].
Similarly when change comes about in the legal/justice system it influences social/cultural factors.
When segregation ended (through a legal process) in some Southern States of USA in the 1960’s it brought about changes in social/cultural norms as black and white people mixed with each other, tentatively at first and then ever more freely so that norms from each culture influenced the other. This is an example of legislation being a step ahead of social/cultural norms – as the integration process was, and remains, very challenging.
Closer to home we have the example of the Good Friday Agreement where a similar though less dramatic process is taking place.
In modern nation states a constitution usually underpins this legal/justice system. (Here is the Constitution of the Republic of Ireland; Bunreacht na hÉireann).
If pressure comes, from social/cultural changes, to alter the constitution a referendum is held and the constitution is changed (or not changed – depending on the result) to reflect what the majority of the people decide. (The 2017 referendum on blasphemy in the Republic of Ireland is an example of the constitution being changed to reflect the reality that a law in our constitution was being ignored for many decades).
Where the two structures (cultural/social and legal/justice) merge, both physically and psychologically, is of interest to us in our quest for improved design in respect of supporting families in the Focus Group.
I propose that our attitude to God, whose existence has always been hugely significant in how both of the structures manifest in society, is one area where the two may merge.
Superseding the legal/justice structure, in almost every culture in the world, is a supreme, all powerful, arbitrator, God, i.e. a deity. For hundreds of years witnesses in a court room have to swear before God that they will tell the truth. The One True God (in Christianity known as the Trinitarian God) that we are familiar with in the Western World supplanted the multiplicity of Gods that were popular in ancient Greece and Rome, and many other cultures I am sure.
Over the centuries God reached into (and still reaches into), influences and determines cultural/social changes that eventually become norms. The existence of a deity and the deity’s message(s) to us (contained in ancient texts e.g. Bible, Quran etc.) ensures that societies have reference points for morality and good living on which to base their legal/justice hierarchies [2].
In the next post we will look at the social/cultural side of things, and then we will examine legal/justice norms in more detail.
[1]. We have an example of this in recent Irish history when, as a result of changes in social/cultural attitudes to sexual activity (as it became accepted that people engaged in sex for enjoyment rather than, or as well as, procreation), the legal/justice system came under pressure to change, and then changed, so that contraception became legal.
[2]. Up until quite recently most kings, emperors etc. (i.e. the pinnacles of the legal/justice hierarchy, and the setters of cultural/social norms) often set themselves up as deities themselves or else claimed that they had some obligation put upon them by a deity and/or they represented the deity’s interests on Earth. The English monarch is, for example, still described thus: By Grace of God, Defender of the Faith.