The legal/justice hierarchical structure is so embedded in our society that it is difficult to imagine what our lives would be like without it. How the Pillars configure themselves and go about their daily business in every country in the world is based on it.
Prior to the establishment and development of a legal/justice hierarchy, the method of settling disputes was utilising here-and-now responses driven by raw emotions such as anger or fear with little or no arbitration by a neutral, impartial authority.
I propose that this was matched by social/cultural beliefs about what people considered to be their spiritual world which was also very much in the here-and-now. In this, the spiritual world found meaning, or was manifest in the rustling of a leaf, or the smell of a wild animal, or the majesty of a mountain. (I explore the phenomenon of immanence in this post).
The spirit world was a felt phenomenon, not an entity that thought things through, and made decisions. It had immediacy and nearness, just like the resolution of the dispute.
In hunter-gatherer societies, the eventual advent of (and recognition of the need for) elders and/or other persons who were looked up to as leaders and were perceived to have wisdom and authority was a major step in our evolution.
It signalled the beginning of arbitration on behalf of those who felt themselves to be wronged by another, and the movement of resolution of conflict from the here-and-now to a more measured and neutral, (and even perhaps restorative), response.
At some point along our evolutionary timeline we began, gradually, to stop believing in deities perceived to reside in, or be of natural, felt or observed phenomena mentioned above and instead began believing in deities that had specific purposes (e.g. God of War, God of Love, God of Fire etc.) and eventually, in many major world religions, one supreme God.
I often wondered did this shift in our belief parallel the belief that wise and experienced, respected elders could arbitrate between two people who were in dispute with one another – i.e. that we could put some sort of framework on settling disputes. The reason that I wonder about this is that it signalled a change from lack-of-structure to structure in both believing-in-deities and settling-disputes.
Perhaps there is no connection, but what leads me to wonder is that God has always been invoked as the ultimate arbitrator (in our Western World legal/justice framework anyway) manifest in our practice of taking an oath before God to speak the truth.
Eventually the wise elders were guided by rules that were written down so that everyone sang from the same hymn-sheet so to speak, and the wise elders had to become wise-educated-elders! This was the beginning of the all-powerful highly educated top-down legal-justice hierarchy that is, ideally at any rate, independent of politics/royalty etc. and that we are accustomed to in our modern world.
The upside of all this, for ordinary citizens, was that settling of disputes in the here-and-now (which would, obviously, have led to the dominance of the strongest, and, I suppose, the smartest with little concern for the weaker party) was replaced by a fairer system where everyone’s voice was heard.
In theory anyway!
Curiously though, there are many people who would argue that over many thousands of years the evolution of a sophisticated and complex legal/justice hierarchy has not made much of a difference to the more vulnerable sections of society. (Here is a song I wrote that was, I suppose, inspired by such arguments).
Even more relevant in respect of this website is the fact that, by and large, persons involved in serious crime (for example young men in criminal gangs) distrust and/or ignore the legal/justice hierarchy in the resolution of conflict and many disputes are solved in the here-and-now without recourse to the legal/justice system at all.
As with social/cultural norms and values, legal/justice norms and values are determined by the ones that are dominant in families of origin who, (as stated already) may in turn be set by generations of immersion in the values of families within the Focus Group.