2024-11-15
Martin Geddes, writing from Florida, muses on the contradictions inherent when considering matters of the spirit from the viewpoint of legislation, and matters of legislation from the viewpoint of the spirit (I'm steering clear here of the word "law", since many hold that "law" is not the same as "legislation", but is akin to "God's law" or "natural law" - that's a rabbit hole that I'll leave as an exercise for you dear reader, once you have read and digested the rest of this article 😎).
I have argued in these pages that legislation is simply an artificial intelligence, created by imperfect humans and therefore itself doomed to imperfection. The wonders of life and the universe are far beyond man's current knowledge, therefore we cannot legislate for all possible circumstances - the task will for ever lie beyond our capabilities.
"Knowledge" is knowing this, "wisdom" is to understand that the attempt to control all matters through legislation is a fundamentally flawed exercise, not least because the rule-book, being subject to eternal expansion, becomes too vast for anybody to completely master - yet "ignorance of the law is no excuse".
