What is legitimate

What is legitimate? What is right? What is morally acceptable? What behavior will we tolerate as a society?

Nobody, of course, would dream of suggesting that a woman who is raped should marry the man who abused her. We would find that repugnant, and yet there are societies that have established that:

“When a man finds a young virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and has sexual relations with her, and they are discovered, then the man who commits this act shall give the young woman’s father a sum of money, and she shall be his wife.”

You’re probably thinking this aberration must be some horrendous Muslim law, or one from some African country sunk in barbarism. Well, it isn’t. This is in the Bible. It’s from the Old Testament, it appears in chapter 22 of Deuteronomy, and the text has been modified, obviously to throw you off a bit.

First, we have to understand that this passage is the product of a time different from ours. Women had little say in a strictly patriarchal society, or perhaps Moses considered a consensual relationship and a rape to be the same thing, as long as the father was compensated in money. Yet in the West of the 21st century, proposing an idea like this would be considered an aberration, to the point that we regard it as unworthy of civilized countries, and we would probably end up calling for intervention in any country that applied a law of this kind (or wouldn’t we? what do the women reading this think?).

Either way, society has changed a lot regarding the definition of what is right. It has taken many revolutions, emancipations, protests and movements to get us to where we are now. And there are still many things that can change, and that will probably take unsuspected turns. On top of the “globalization of the ideas” we consider just.

About two thousand years ago, raping a woman cost an Israelite just 50 pieces of silver (Deut 22:28-29); today that is not possible. But has society improved? Were there more rapes in Moses’s time or now? (it would be interesting to know)

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The truth is that if we study history, and the evolution of societies, we would be surprised at what has been considered legitimate and illegitimate. What’s more, the concept of justice, which seems so natural and basic to us, is something that has mutated over time. There are things that will strike you as unjust, but that were practiced by the noblest men of their time. Slavery is the classic example. The great Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote some of the noblest lines on the equality of men, liberty and the right to pursue happiness, came to own more than 250 slaves, whom he even mortgaged to cover his debts.

I don’t think the laws of Moses, or the acts of Jefferson, should be judged by the criteria of our current morality. They were men of their time and they acted according to what was accepted in that era. Human conscience has evolved over the centuries, and with it the idea of what is legitimate and what is not. Evolution, of course, does not mean progress. I don’t believe Greek morality is superior to Jewish morality, or that the moral vision of the founders of the United States was the highest stage of human emancipation, and that it has all been one long decline since then.

No, evolution is adaptation to change. It’s not that our laws are better or superior. They aren’t more just either. They only reflect, or should reflect, a social contract, which of course changes with time, with circumstances, and with the understanding of realities that are not new, that were simply hidden from most people or ignored by those who hold power.

For centuries women, slaves and children had no power, and the laws did not protect them. There have always been groups that are pushed to the margins of society, or that are flat-out ignored, and so there are no laws that represent or protect them. But that has always been so and will go on being so.

There comes a moment when society recognizes certain things, and astonishingly fast changes take place, so deep that, looking back, people wonder how those “injustices” were ever accepted.

The study of how societies evolve in their ideas, of how large groups of people change their opinion on various things (religion, sexual tolerance, abortion, racism, etc.) is the goal of sociology, or should be. It would be interesting to have a result from this science that let us understand what happens to societies when they go through such huge transformations, for example in the definition of what is legitimate, or when the rights of a group are recognized.

At least I find it interesting to study what is happening with our society, which seems to be on the verge of one or perhaps several revolutions in parallel. Several things I’ve read over these last months have made me reflect on the possibility of studying society scientifically. Especially because today we also have the possibility of using computing as a science that supports the development of sociology. My idea is to share part of those readings with you in the coming posts.

But I leave you with this first reflection, on what is legitimate. It seems to me a good starting point for beginning to understand the evolution of societies.