More on the abstraction of breaking the law

I'll continue my thoughts about breaking the law. This time I'll concentrate on the concept of law and what it translates into when we write speculative fiction. Remember that I include unwritten rules of society in the concept of law. By this definition you break a law when you refuse to accept a handshake in today's western world.

First of all, the law isn't what you and I think it is, and it's just what we think it is. How do we combine these two contrary statements? I'll try by giving a couple of examples.

Beating a small child to death. That violates the law. Even in cultures where small children have been left to die of exposure the active action of killing the child seems to have been abhorrent. In the cases where a formal law has allowed for such an action literature still presents the deed as a violation of a greater law. In other words the formal law becomes unlawful. Most of us would agree on that the act is unlawful no matter what culture we belong to.

Eating food of a certain type. Here we enter the realm of cultural differences. Here I chose to lump together culture and religion for the sake of simplicity. We're usually aware of the existence of those rules, and quite a few of us adhere to one or more of these. The age at which an individual can safely be introduced to the two most basic aspects of life is another such example. Procreation and death.

Having a specific haircut or clothes of a certain color. Sleeping with your feet to the east. Reading books after sunset. Immersing yourself in water on Saturdays. Some of these examples have been clear violations of existing laws and others I simply made up.

We could call the first group, of which I gave only one example, is the universal law. A generic human law that is shared by all cultures. The second group are laws we can understand. We have them but they do not, or vice versa. The third is the collection that simply seem strange and outlandish.

It's important to understand that the second and third group are really the same. What seems peculiar to us is natural or at least understandable for those familiar with it. The opposite also applies.

That opposite is what we tend to handle when we write speculative fiction. Equality between the sexes or ethnic origins, democracy, freedom of speech and somewhat equal laws for all people are all perfect examples of outrageous and dangerous concepts. Thus they are all a clear breach of the law. Or at least could be. "God told me so in my dreams," gets you behind bars today in the western world, but would have been a perfectly sensible reason for a massacre in another setting.

Perfectly sensible means that the character breaking the law can't expect much understanding from the society where that law has been violated. Perfectly sensible also means that the perpetrator should normally feels a sense of wrong unless that person already is at odds with that aspect of society. Perfectly sensible means perfectly sensible now, where now is the time when the law was broken.

Laws aren't written in stone. In fact a surprising number of laws change in the course of a single generation. As humans are humans there's no reason all laws should stay the same for thousands of years.

Well, I think I'll leave the topic for now. There will be reasons to return to it again.