Whether we believe that mankind hailed from the cauldrons of mighty mountains, the alluring depths of the oceans, or the conjuring folds of the clouds, we are endowed with certain unique attributes that make us the preferred guardians of the other animals and plants, the ones we can see and those we cannot see. One of those attributes is innovation. This singular attribute of mankind has all but ensured our own survival and the survival of many other species we brought with us to the valleys, and those we found in the alcoves along the banks of rivers and streams. It is also responsible for our reverence for social engineers like Cicero and James Madison among many others. We are able to adapt to newer environs and situations no matter how difficult or challenging, and to sustain and nurture this intrinsic attribute, we accommodate our fellows who are, by positive design, different and even strange. The idea is that the variety in our diversity is a significant element in the matrix of our inventiveness and ultimate survival as a species. From our proficiency in fighting disease to our poly-valence in manufacture and process.
A product of our innovation that has helped us to tame our extremes thereby laying the foundation for community with our fellows is the Rule of Law as a governance tool. We manufacture law from our library of standards and measures in our cultures, and it is the reason we are able to form communities of all manner, in all sorts of environments we encounter. In the sweltering humidity of jungles and in the rare and asphyxiating heat of deserts. In the gravity-defying ambiance of space and the cosmos, and in the repulsive folds of crater-lakes and the lowest valleys. In the near-permanence of ice and snow. We are not able to sustain life as we know it for any appreciable length of time in some of these places but live nonetheless, if in momentary bliss. Although law is unique to each of our unique environments and communities, because it is manufactured from standards and measures of culture, the Rule of Law is a prerequisite for the greater health of all communities, for as Cicero would share, in anger or in conflict, we are jettisoned to the unending quest for peace and healthful development. The same can be said of a state of banal indifference and lethargic disinterest.
The conflicts that dawn on us, are mainly of our manufacture, and by the same virtues of our innovation, but they cause us enormous chagrin and many of them are preventable. For solace, they pale in comparison with those elusive conflicts we prevent. We do not however give ourselves enough credit for our capacity to innovate, and so we trundle on from one preventable conflict to the other, sequestering resolution to our religions and to divine intervention. We have already been endowed by God with the comprehensive gift of innovation, in order that we may manufacture resolution to these and those conflicts.
Our capacity for innovation in conflict & its resolution
Our capacity for innovation helps us to nurture that centrifugal force which is necessary to keep our extremes within the region of resolution or remediation. When we come together in community with our fellows and in our profuse diversity, we manufacture law to maintain cohesion (centrifugal force) between us for longer and longer periods. It is true that even with our best cohesive efforts, other equally suasive and decoupling forces threaten to keep us in the region of our extremes. Said differently, the cohesive forces of our fellows, our animal cousins, and plant friends, are simultaneously vying for equilibrium, and left to our own individual and unique designs we will constantly be mired in competitive tussle for proprietary balance. This is the source of our communal conflicts. Those conflicts are not so much of our affirmative manufacture as they are a natural evolution of events in which we seek similar or the same state of being. When neglected, they escalate into more violent conflict as we transition between states of being or consciousness if you like. Law may start out as a scheme by one of us to gain advantage over our fellow in the pursuit of proprietary equilibria, but over time, and when we invest the requisite time and energy in servicing our laws, they will do wonders for us to tame these and those of our extremes and other intractable conflict.
Haruna Darboe