The following is excerpted from Just This! Reweaving a World in Crisis, now on sale.
The current vision of law aligns with the material nature of the rational individual. You know the one I mean: the one with agency and ‘free will.’ Law, like most everything else modern, is a ritual of separability from other actors and from the environment. Separability is foundational to colonialism, patriarchy, neoliberalism and empire.
In a dualistic world, life is ruled by hierarchical value systems that manage relationships of all kinds. Because those relationships are founded on separability (and presumed sovereignty), the effect is denaturing. The parameters of relationality are limited to what can be seen and known, to material exchange. There is no allowance for the unseen, the otherwise, for spiritual concerns or influence. Likewise, the sovereign mindscape defines individual autonomy, responsibility and entitlement to manage all interactions, intra-national, inter-national and even interpersonal, within and beyond defined borders.
National and international law has thus come to favor the state…and the state-defined individual, the propertied over the property-less, the penthouse over the row house, monoculture over permaculture, the manicured garden over the untended wild, the insulated over the vulnerable. Being in cahoots with patriarchy and privatization, law supports (and drives) the atomization of culture. Even environmental law, and even the Rights of Nature movement operate outside fundamental ecological reality. But neither time nor fence, nor wall, nor any imposed division can override the primordial non-dual law of nature or consciousness. Law will not become an authentic pillar of justice without a recognition of fundamental unity and equality.
In this age of deepening irrationality, lawlessness is now the last refuge of a dying order confronting its own demise. We are living with sociopaths whose intent is to corrupt and override the ‘rule of law’ because, despite the obvious failings of its practice, it does still present some constraint on power. What the lawless don’t realize is that they have become the most significant accelerators of a deepening desire for a new justice, the negation of what they most want.
To the arbiters of what now passes for law, communalism that resists atomization and centralized power must be muted and controlled—even with violence if necessary. Even as individuals are assaulted and devalued by lawlessness, hypocrisy and amorality, a new vision of law deconstructs the biological and metaphysical sanctity of the individual and gestures toward what civilization now demands: equality, intrinsic intelligence, common purpose, accountability and the health of the biosphere.
A new jurisprudence envisions law in transition from being foundational to the House of Modernity, to becoming a relational mandate. Law is transformed from being a pillar of power to becoming a flexible eco-social mediator that restores local ecologies, communal relationships, and expands the commons—instead of normalizing the extractive economy. In those conceptions, law becomes a ‘floating bone’ within the planetary paradigm that supports and responds to the tensions of human needs, biospheric balance and relational possibility. The relatively recent emergence of Relational Jurisprudence and Earth System Law (ESL) are part of this shift. At a time of rising risk, rolling catastrophe and disintegration, these innovative legal theories demonstrate that international law based on national sovereignty as well as its sharp turn toward domestic statism are no longer fit for purpose.
Earth System Law moves away from sovereignty and statist doctrine, from objectifying nature, from the theology of extraction, away from the economic engine that counsels investors to avoid diluting their strategy with social or moral concerns. The catechism of the dominant investment strategy says, ‘Don’t look at how your money is made, look at the bottom line!’ Moving away from morality and joining the mass dissociation from planetary process is integral to the convergence of patriarchy, misogyny, racialized colonialism and capital expansion.
The debate between the morality of social investing and the amorality of unimpeded capital expansion may proceed ad nauseum. And since it is demonstrably true that social investing yields lower returns, capital believes it has won the argument. The modern approach to investing is a relative path that denies the absolute realities of biology, physics, and planetary interdependence, absolving itself from accounting for the true costs of production. The morality of social investing is that profit and growth are still possible assuming the true costs of production can be calculated. However, even social investing must contend with incomplete ecosystem recovery, so its profits are still only relative. Since the central legal character of law, the sovereign individual (or corporate) ‘person,’ is the foundation of separability, accountability and responsibility become strictly optional.
Non-duality evokes a moral order intrinsic to the unity of existence, independent of any ‘objective’ code because there is no such thing as an objective observer. Non-duality is the morality of no morality, meaning there is only a single uniform inviolable standard. There is only one source of its precepts: the whole itself. No equivocation, no gray areas. The clarity and radiance of its voice, once heard, is that separation and dissociation (and thus conscience-free extraction) are inconceivable. There is no distinction between a moral or merely a legal investment in any endeavor. Extraction could only be possible within a field of total reciprocity. Law’s only foundation would be the immutable reality of all-encompassing existence, a resonant eco-spiritual field of irrevocable relationship. This is the absolute that transcends both relative morality and the amorality of the market.
The progression of law from alignment with the state in the service of capital to alignment with commercial power to facilitate the global reach of property has turned it into an enabler of intra- and inter-state violence, exclusion, the concentration of wealth and deepening impoverishment in the service of growth. The state has become a rubber stamp of capital designs. In an economy founded on mutual care, the only legitimate role of the state is to be the administrative process by which morality is tended. The chasm between the interests of profit and people would narrow.
The edges between commercial and public interest would be so softened as to radically diminish any difference. Negotiating the competing interests of industry and ecology would no longer occur in the backrooms of politics, in the minutia of legislation or in hair-splitting legal rulings. All would be transparent, publicly adjudicated and would remain under continuous review by Kali’s ‘no bullshit’ gaze.
Relational Jurisprudence challenges the individualism of modern law. It says law must acknowledge human motivations, actions and dependencies in a wider context of relationships of all kinds. Contemporary Relational Jurisprudence expands into becoming a tensional mediator between individuals whose behaviors arise within a field of subjectivities. The autonomous individual is a false, even violent, abstraction. The individual cannot be fixed or freeze-framed; it is an ecology of its own, connected by its permeability and interactivity with the social and biological field.
We already have good reason to question the conventional understanding of what an individual is, or whether there is even such a thing. While Relational Jurisprudence is a welcome and necessary ground-level view, it was never conceived to extend beyond the human relational field to attunement with the more-than-human world. The Rights of Nature movement attempts to draw nature into an expanded field of legal consideration by claiming, for example, that a forest can sue on behalf of its own protection because it helps regulate planetary metabolism; or that a river can claim rights because it holds ancestral wisdom. These claims draw imaginary lines around distinct ecologies, separating them for preservation, without undermining the principle of separation itself. Even so, the legal resistance to granting rights to nature is understandable because protecting any local ecosystem upends the separability and objectification that fuel the industrial growth machine.
Under the full spread of the non-dual umbrella, if the plaintiff and defendant live in pre-existing union with the planetary field, law could not be a static edifice of authority raining down rules, but a dynamic connective tissue modulating tensions impinging on the balance of the whole—even including the intangibles that sustain eco-human parity. Law would adjudicate relative disturbances generated by an array of actors, human, more-than-human, natural and spiritual, a conception entirely inconsistent with the current epistemology because in mediating such an expanded tensional field, equality before the law would have teeth.
The function of Relational Jurisprudence renders the isolated individual obsolete as it lags the emerging intelligence of biology, ecology, physics, aesthetics and metaphysics. We have now landed on five principles of modern law that require revision: inequality, the myth of the sovereign individual, the separation of law from morality, materialism and anthropocentrism.
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