4.3.5 Cultural/Social and Legal/Justice

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.

Anthropologists propose that in order to become attuned to a particular culture we need to be socialised into that culture by constant exposure to its norms and values as we grow.

(This, of course, is evident from the phenomenon of upward and downward causation that I described in the Chapter on Systems Theory).

It follows from this proposition that behaviour is far more influenced by our culture than by our genes.  This has been a contentious issue for educators, behaviourists, sociologists, social scientists and even religious zealots for many decades if not centuries – even before people knew what genes were.

It is called the nature vs. nurture debate; and it is not intended to offer a definitive answer to the question here.  It must be said that neuroscience posits the influence of cultural factors as being very important, so perhaps the pendulum is swinging a little that way. Though – as is the case with most contentious debates – the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle.

From our point of view it is enough to say that there is overwhelming evidence to show that culture influences behaviour in humans.  Practitioners in the field of helping people in distress need to be very aware of this.

Consider the social/cultural norms and values at play in a family.  The first humans that a baby comes into contact with are invariably in his/her own family of origin.  (With adopted babies the family of origin are the adoptive parents, depending of course on the age of adoption.  For those babies who remain in orphanages or other care settings, the first contact humans will be the care workers in the institution).

Whatever setting a baby is born into, the humans s/he comes into contact with will have been socialised by both the family (and/or setting) into which they were born and the community in which they were raised.  (This is where, from our point of view, it gets interesting, i.e. the Atlantic Ocean-type waves of feelings that I described near the bottom of this post).

Many families affected by imprisonment are resident in particular geographic communities and are immersed in, and get their emotional needs met from a smaller community within a community that have particular social/cultural norms and values that can often be quite different to the social/cultural norms and values of the wider community in which they live and indeed society at large.

I propose that educational/social/health interventions designed by (and for) the wider, mainstream community (mostly by the Pillars) have limited relevance for the community within a community, i.e. the Focus Group.

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.