.jpg)
Part 1.
By Dr Fereydun Rafiq Hilmi:
1 . Traditional and legendary values
Most nations have constitutions used to establish the groundwork for that nation’s social, legal and ambitious future. It establishes the basic relationships between the citizens of the realm and between them and their rulers. It defines rules for good and bad practices, laying down laws against taboos while preaching certain other practices as essential. This generally is the means of identifying the nation’s values or value system. It is assumed that a nation’s value system is sacred and could extend beyond that nation’s boundaries. All nations are supposed to be proud of their value systems, just as a person is proud of his or her upbringing and character and would try to impress that behaviour and beliefs on others.
The basic values are traditional and historic, reflecting aspects of the experience that each nation went through since its inception as a national unity. The greatest part, however, used to be – and, in some cases, still are – extracted from the main religious teachings of the nation.
The Second World War created large sets of new rules and principles, some of which were enshrined in treaties and conventions, and institutions were created specifically to uphold them. National parliaments were also encouraged to pass laws reflecting these new principles, rules and values. It was the victorious nations that carried out these steps and, for a while, they were more or less adhered to. But soon the nature of the beast got the better of them and they started backtracking on most of them, which is why we witness so many wars, conflicts and violence all over the world.
The victors decided that fairness and justice did not allow them to bring in wealth: for that they needed the power to act anywhere in the world to grab what they were unable to get easily. The fall of the Soviet representative democracy meant they no longer faced a counterweight to impede their actions and so they started discarding the principles one by one.
2. Constitutions and all value systems represent averages
In fact a value system is based on averaging the total human experiences and producing a compromised version for all to follow. Religion is often present at the heart of a human value system. Those who believe in God and a specific religion would prefer their ‘holy’ constitutions to ‘human’ ones and, if they accepted the latter, they would do so with the proviso that they are allowed to practice their own religions at the same time. This creates an immediate conflict because those who push for a constitution often do so precisely because they reject the imposition of religion and call themselves secular.
In Britain we have no written constitution which technically means we do not have one. However, over the past years of my life in this country, I have noticed an adherence of to a sort of value system inferred from government behaviour and the behaviour of the courts and official authorities. British monarchies have in the main been Protestants since the break with Rome to satisfy Henry VIII’s desire to marry, divorce and debauch as he pleased without adherence to the country’s religion. Thus the monarchs who ruled in the name of God became rebels against their own religion and created a more subservient religious ideology, rid of certain restrictions, which they called appropriately Protestantism. Nevertheless, and despite many differences, they still called the religion Christianity.
The way was therefore wide open for anyone who disagreed with any part of Christianity to create a sect, and wars and conflicts between the old and new versions took place, ending up with millions dying as a result. Some would say that the First and Second World Wars were also contributed to by the religious divide among the sides fighting for economic and political control of world resources and commercial trade.
Constitutions require consensus amongst the representatives of the nation but sometimes they are presented to the nation in referenda. However, you generally get a single complicated legalistically-written version, beyond the analytical abilities of the common person, and an enormous amount of propaganda is churned out by its proponents to get a positive vote – and, of course, once that has been obtained the constitution will be put to bed for a long time, failing an uprising or revolution or invasion by a foreign power.
3. Should a value system be dynamic and variable?
The value system of a nation can change when new laws and rules covering previously unrecognised or recorded principles or ideologies are passed, despite these laws being kept outside the constitution. This has led to politicians emphasising the value system rather than the constitution in a move to discard those elements of the constitution which present an inconvenience in the face of their desire to impose their ideas on the unsuspecting nation. Thus the move away from Christianity during the realm of the Eighth Henry of England is repeating itself and politicians are deceiving us by an unclearly defined value system, which when examined would not conform with the constitution and protocol agreed upon between people and rulers. During the past century, politicians have breached nearly all the basic elements of their nations’ constitutions with impunity, getting away with mass murder and war crimes as well as misdemeanors and extreme corruption, aided and abetted by equally corrupt institutions of which parliament has been prime.
The tendency therefore has been to insert into the value system that which could not be explicitly stated in a constitution. This gives those in charge of a nation the flexibility to use parts of it, while discarding other parts in different situations. All state authorities with rigid ideologies or ad-hoc and irrational behaviour have used some form of value system in this opportunistic way.
4. Democracy and moral principles
In the west, where we are told a democratic transparent and free society exists, the judiciary as well as the enormously powerful media has been used to help maintain a value system to the taste of the elite groups that have been in charge for centuries. The legal system is heavily biased towards the rich and powerful. Judges are not only appointed by this elite, but they come solely from the upper echelons of the upper class. In the UK they are selected for their affiliations and social background rather than their brilliance or efficiency. They are given huge remunerations and placed on a pedestal, close to that of deity as far as the ordinary citizen is concerned. Many are stuffy and hold extreme ‘anti-common person’ ideas, and yet they try and pass judgment in cases way beyond their expertise. The use of ‘precedence’ is common, which in fact compounds any error of judgment committed by a previous judge, thus propagating what could be great injustices ad infinitum, unless a plaintiff is rich or lucky enough and gets a professional expert who is willing to go against the value system (including trends) and support the case.
To be continued.
