Education enables humans to create and obey the law

Humanity’s code of conduct is probably the only example of a social life deliberately governed by extra-natural (man-made) laws. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Practically all members of any human collective the whole world over will be conversant with such a code of conduct.
  • For such rules are what may explain why all human societies almost defy the law.
  • They are generally educated on what is nowadays eventually coded as the legal system.

Among the earthly mammal species that we know as human beings – namely, our own selves – to govern is to force all the members of a given geographical expanse or an institution or a family to behave entirely according to a specific and clear community of codes of conduct.

HUMAN COLLECTIVE
Indeed, practically all members of such a human community will usually obey such an imposition, known among every national community as the law. Yet it raises one important question: Why do most members of every human community readily obey the law? The answer is partly because the benefits of obedience to the law are self-evident, abundant and mutual and partly because disobedience usually attracts physically, mentally and socially painful punitive measures from the official custodians of every human collective.
The implication is powerful. It is that every human society is properly and fully well brought up (namely, educated) concerning what the particular society idealises as the proper and socially most beneficial personal or group conduct. This is what develops, as society gets more complex, into the code of conduct that we know as the law. In other words, all the human members will consciously and even vigorously struggle to live according to that clear and relevant code of behaviour, the law. Indeed, for human beings, a species among whom disagreements are sure to occur readily, the law is always a necessary institution if we are to escape the scourge of anarchy.

SOCIALLY INFORMED
To put it that way, however, is to imply that all members of the human society in question have been brought up objectively well. It is to imply that the concerned society is appropriately educated, especially concerning intra-specific conduct and respect.
In that case, indeed, practically all members of any human collective the whole world over will be conversant with such a code of conduct. For such rules are what may explain why all human societies almost defy the law. The implication, indeed, is that, in every country, the vast majority of humans are socially informed, especially concerning the significance of the rules that govern inter-personal and inter-national conduct.
Indeed, one thing looks like a universal assumption. It is that all the members of a human society are practically appropriately brought up. They are generally educated on what is nowadays eventually coded as the legal system. That is among the reasons that, in all human countries, disobedience of the law usually incurs stiff official punishment, such as long jail terms, sometimes even execution.

PERSONAL CONDUCT

To put it another way, through what we call upbringing or education, the people of an ethnicity or nation or bloc of nations or race will be made not only to know but also to consciously strive to live by a certain code of social conduct. Indeed, that is the prime significance of education throughout what we know as the human world’s legal systems. None the least, such a requirement concerning personal conduct can be effective only through a certain important counter-conduct. All social animal species do indeed live by such strict specific counter-laws. Howbeit, as far as we know, only the human species consciously imposes such a category of laws.
Indeed, humanity’s code of conduct is probably the only example of a social life deliberately governed by extra-natural (man-made) laws. For only members of the human species have brains large enough to enable most of them to be powerfully conscious of the importance and other implications of such a code of conduct among any given human group.

PLANETARY HABIT

Surely enough, among our planet’s community of human beings, the social consciousness of the importance of the law is so powerful as to be spread all over the terrestrial world, namely, throughout the existential planetary habitat of all members of our own animal species.