David Misselbrook is a retired academic GP
We seem to be hurtling towards winner-takes-all capitalism. Trapped inside an enormous game of MonopolyTM. The power imbalance between the super-rich and us poor mugs seems to be getting worse, the problem being the new golden rule – “He who has the gold makes the rules.”1
So imagine if the Government decided to reverse this. Perhaps the formal preamble for a new Act relating to justice in marketing and workers’ rights might be something like this?
“A BILL TO reduce the inherent and worsening power imbalance firstly between big business and the consumer, and secondly between big business and employees.
“BE IT ENACTED by the King’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, and by the authority of the same, as follows:—
“The Act requires that if the packaging of retail products is changed then any ‘shrinkflation’ or reduction in the quality of contents must be declared prominently. Advertising and packaging should not be designed to distort the quantity or quality of the product.
“This Act also seeks to correct current power imbalances in contract law. A large corporation or its billionaire owners shall no longer enforce disadvantageous contracts on workers via ‘zero hour’ contracts or by the degradation of workers’ rights or working conditions.”
“Dream on,” you might say.
It is easier to make good laws than to behave well. We humans know the core of what is right but we just keep on not doing it.
But we have been struggling with these issues for a while. Our oldest written legal code is the Code of Ur-Nammu, approx. 2100–2050 BC (three centuries before the better-known code of Hammurabi). Ur-Nammu was a Sumerian king in southern Mesopotamia. Archeologists have dug up cuneiform inscriptions that contain this passage:
“Then did Ur-Nammu the mighty warrior, king of Ur, king of Sumer and Akkad, by the might of Nanna, lord of the city, and in accordance with the true word of Utu, establish justice in the land … He fashioned the bronze sila-measure, standardized the one-mina weight, and standardized the stone weight of a shekel of silver in relation to one mina…
“The orphan was not delivered up to the rich man; the widow was not delivered up to the mighty man; the man of one shekel was not delivered up to the man of one mina.”
Why might we care about an ancient code today? To me it tells us two things.
Firstly, notions of justice, notions of morality itself, are part of what makes us human. We know that there are some fundamental rights and wrongs in the human world. Sure, we can argue about the details around the edges, but the core is clear. That is why the original golden rule –“Do to others what you would have them do to you” – is expressed similarly in Hindu, Confucian, Taoist, Zoroastrian, Jain, Buddhist, Hebrew, Christian and Muslim scriptures.2 A bit snappier than Kant’s “Act only by that maxim by which you can, at the same time, will that it be a universal law”.3 All humans share, to a greater or lesser extent, a common moral awareness. It is part of our hard-wired nature.
But secondly, we have to keep on repeating this stuff. The Ur-Nammu code is remarkably similar in form and content to a modern Act of parliament, just with different cultural encrustations. But neither ancient Ur nor our own society represents a just Utopia with the rich striving to level up the rest.
It is easier to make good laws than to behave well. We humans know the core of what is right but we just keep on not doing it.
So technology makes progress but humans do not. But when the queues at food banks are lengthening, we should heed Kierkegaard’s view that, “…in order to study the ethical, every human being is assigned to himself.”4 What will I do this week to lessen injustice and inequality?
References
1. Hart J, The Wizard of Id, 1964. As quoted in Disney’s Aladdin 1992.
2.Hick J. An Interpretation of Religion. Basingstoke, Macmillan Press, 1989, p195.
3.Kant I, 1785. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Many editions, e.g. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p31.
4.Kierkegaard S. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Trans Hong H & Hong E. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992 p141.
Featured photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash
