Piety, prayer, and the patriarchy—all in one go! I wonder what’s next.
64. Ancestors and Marriage, Sacrifice and Piety
The Illustrated Guide to Law
The comic that teaches what the law is, how it really works, and why.
Piety, prayer, and the patriarchy—all in one go! I wonder what’s next.
In the new reality pane (8th from the bottom), you have “every four four years”.
Good catch! That seems to be the the most common type of typo I commit.
So, did you mean “eight” or did you mean “forty-four”? Or ” four point four”? ;-)
I’m curious – how do modern sociologists know how this all played out? Given all of this happened before written text, would this just be an inference made from what artifacts we could find?
Yes. Citations please. Its ok if your citations are to books that have the citations.
You wanted a suggestion for the missing image? A man of flame receiving the veneration of his descendants before him, while behind him stretches a long chain of his ancestors, also in flame, with their hands on the shoulders of those in front of them.
Woo, that sounds pretty cool!
For suggestion of the fire image; an older man with a nearly burned out and flicking torch lighting a younger man’s torch. The figures lit by the flame in contrast to a black background, perhaps with stars over head. It would be simple, contrast with the preceding and subsequent panels, and make it both intimate, “a mystery”, and timeless.
Very cool. Very cool indeed.
It would make this segment significantly more palatable to have something that delimits how far these thought experiments go; “given the concept of ‘hearth’, American concepts of ‘property’ and ‘ownership’… [blah blah]”. Or, “these narratives originated with Enlightenment thinkers as a way of positing progress, and still repro’d in American high school classes”.
I’ve loved everything on this site, but this segment is loaded with absolutely loaded with “just so” stories. It is NOT easy to tentatively accept the concepts of hearth and lineage (for example) simply for the sake of _understanding the American Mind_. “Agricultural peoples felt ties to the land, to elders and ancestors”? And you include that limit as a small footnote, and in the same breath expect readers to accept you as an expert on “agricultural peoples”?
After reading through the whole site, this entire “six revolutions” part of the book feels like a Yuval Noah Sapiens-style project that just, does not belong on the same site as the books on criminal law and procedure. When I recommend lawcomic.net to people, I have to clearly caveat that people skip this entire pseudo-historical segment.
I get what you’re saying.
It’s true that I avoid citing sources. But as I’ve mentioned before, that is a conscious decision I’ve made in the service of accessibility. This is a comic meant for general audiences, not an academic treatise. I’ve found that cites frequently turn off the very audience I’m trying to reach.
However, I also don’t expect anyone to take what I say on faith, just because I said so. Experts correct me all the time, and I love it when they do! I try to make sure that the concepts I discuss here are well-established, and supported by significant scholarly research. Very rarely will I say something that I know isn’t quite as well-accepted by the experts—but when I do, I try to let the reader know, and it’s only stuff that’s meant to be thought-provoking rather than important to the lesson. There are plenty of keywords in the text for anyone who wants to take a deep dive into the scholarship on any given matter and see for themselves. (Google Scholar is free!) Seriously, nothing here should be all that controversial to experts in their respective fields.
That doesn’t mean nothing I say is going to be controversial. If I’m doing this comic right, almost every page ought to be controversial to one group or another. The driving force has always been puncturing the myths that are too well-accepted, by too many people, so we can see what’s really going on. Some of these myths can be core beliefs—especially when it comes to American government and Constitutional Law. Furthermore, significant myths about law, government, and social history continue to be perpetuated by schools, churches, political organizations, and the press. What astonishes me is not that people take issue with what I’m saying, but that so few do! I must be doing something wrong.
As for how all of this pertains to the American conception of what government is, and how it works, there are two things to keep in mind. One, to understand how the “American Mind” is different from the global norm, we have to first understand what that norm is. That’s the first three revolutions. At the time we’re posting these comments, the comic is mostly finished with that. The next revolution is going to generate an exception to the rule, sparked by a unique set of historical circumstances. It will be followed by another revolution, whereby that first exception responds to a very different reality. The final revolution will be yet another response of these exceptional attitudes in the face of an even more unique reality. All six revolutions are really just people figuring out how best to live as a social species in worlds and realities that were very different from what had gone before. If they’re going to make sense, we have to know what had gone before.
The second thing to keep in mind is that each one of these eras tells us something about how we humans organize and govern ourselves, why we act as we do, and what inner drives shape both the challenges we face and our responses to those challenges. When we get to the American founding era, lessons from each of these revolutions will be important for helping us understand not only what the Framers thought, but also the perspectives of the rest of the world they had to live in—the empires of Britain, France, and Spain, for example; the Native American civilizations; a globalized world of trade, treaties, and treachery.
But that’s not all! All of these lessons will continue to provide a foundation for our discussions of Constitutional Law. Our understanding of different approaches to rights, social obligations, and government, will be invaluable for understanding the competing principles of such matters as free speech, abortion, gun control, equal rights, and the rest. Instead of us all talking past each other, with unspoken and even unrecognized presumptions about the world that are too incompatible for rational discussion, my hope is that we’ll all have a common language—so we can at least explain ourselves and understand where the other sides are coming from, when we argue with each other. So I certainly hope people don’t skip this section.
What I do hope is that readers will argue with my content. I really do want pushback, corrections, and debate. The more, the better. So by all means, challenge my assumptions! Point out my errors! When we get to the bits where I said this would be relevant, if it turns out to actually have no relevance, call me out on it! If I missed something important, show us what it was! My goodness, that would be fantastic.