The Covenant

Prior to law there must be a commitment to reciprocity in the sacredness of persons.

Source: Jan van der Crabben

Dear Reader, I took ill this week, so I have been knocked off my usual publishing schedule. I am cross-posting this piece for your reading pleasure, despite some a couple of esoteric references. Till next week, enjoy. —MB

Before scribes carved the first law into stone, before Hammurabi, the Twelve Tables, or the slow accumulation of common law through centuries of blood and friction, there had been the sacralization of persons. It began with the recognition that others suffer. It deepened into a commitment to refuse to do to others what you find hateful. And it implied reciprocity—not as a contract, but the unspoken syntax of a society.

Before there were codes, there were covenants. And in that reciprocal structure, we found the elements of a covenantal bond.

Some argue that to sacralize others is not a legal contrivance, but an ontological discovery. Rights are real, some insist. Rights are a derivation, others argue. We need not settle that debate. Every tradition that has ever produced wisdom—whether Mosaic, Stoic, Vedic, or Taoist—arrives at the same conclusion: To trespass upon others without cause is not merely a crime, it is a desecration.

Remember the story of monks meditating deep in a forest.

The sages embody the principle of ahimsa—nonviolence—the first of the Yamas, which means the practice of reining in or self-control. For the forest sages, ahimsa was not just an abstract ideal but an active practice. Their peacefulness radiated outward, creating an environment in which even the forest animals coexisted in peace. It is said that the tiger and cow drank side by side from the same stream while in the monks’ presence.

The very foundation of law, in every civilization that has not entirely lost its way, is an elaboration on this. One may not injure the innocent. One may not seize what is not his. One may not constrain a person without justification sufficient to meet the scrutiny of a free people who seek similar protections.

Therefore, the law should never be an instrument of subordination. It must be a covenant. The society built on such a covenant is better than a society built on mere statutes. This is no small thing. Most of human history is a lengthy record of the powerful acting with impunity against the weak. But this covenant, however imperfectly articulated or instantiated, is civilization’s most important achievement.

The Serpent’s Caveat

Every civilization has its serpents. The principle that no one is permitted to harm the innocent has always been subjected to catastrophic caveats by powerful men. Those who write the law do not regard themselves as accountable to it. Those who enforce the law are not held to the covenant.

Aggression’s architects insist their monopoly on violence is a necessary evil. Yet it is evil. And the compliant herds shiver, unable to imagine things working any other way.

Still, the powerful claim they must be the sole providers of security, law, and justice. Such a claim is rarely backed by force of argument—simply by force. Uniformed men with weapons and jails are proxies of the powerful. They make the people an offer they cannot refuse. When authorities confiscate the wealth of a man who has harmed no one, this is harm. When authorities imprison a woman for conduct that injures no one, such is the injury. When state proxies seize property without evidence of wrongdoing and without the victim’s consent, this is the work of brigands wearing costumes.

Suffering follows.

At least the costume is impressive. It has a seal, a flag, and chevrons. But the uniform grants ordinary men a license to commit acts that the covenant forbids ordinary men.

The most radical source of inequality in human societies is the ruler-ruled relationship.
—Vincent Ostrom

Ostrom saw clearly. Civilization’s greatest threat is neither the street criminal nor the rich man, but institutional power asymmetries made by statutes and standing armies that elevate some men above a covenant that ought to bind us all.

Agents of a monopoly on violence, though charged with producing security, soon learn that they can act with impunity. The monopoly produces an auction house in which politicians are the brokers, favor-seekers set the clearing prices, and voters are obliged to pay. The covenant gets consumed by the caveat. The sacred gets sold to the highest bidders. And those who once surrendered to the All now submit to Pharaoh.

We are the Remnant.

We greet the loss not with cynicism but grief. A protection racket wrapped in pageantry is still a protection racket. Those who understand what good the covenant unleashes and what evil it restrains grieve its absence, but this is temporary. When the time of grieving expires, the time for action arrives.

The Law of Consent

What would it mean to return to the covenant?

We take the Initiates’ Pledge and enshrine a simple principle:

All legitimate relationships between persons must be consensual.

This is the Law of Consent.

The wisemen of the past understood it intuitively, though described it variously as a Natural Right or a Divine Imprimatur every human bears. Let us not allow the ongoing conflict between Fidelis and Atheus to keep us from restoring the Covenant as our prime protocol. We need only consider the manner and extent to which we must derive it and apply it as mere humans. It must apply not only to the street, but to the chamber—not only to the criminal, but to the magistrate.

Consent is no procedural nicety. It is a precondition for peace that enables us to form a grand multilateral contract. It requires neither Divine Imprimatur nor Natural Right, but if these are mythic truths, believe them. They can only help us to sacralize one another. The Law of Consent only requires those who seek flourishing to adopt the following, which is rooted in instrumental rationality:

If you seek happiness, harmony, and prosperity, you should abstain from initiating harm against the innocent, join others willing to do the same, and lock arms in solidarity.

Morals by agreement.

Notice this formulation requires neither commitment to abstract essences nor moral laws. One must only investigate the idea that happiness, harmony, and prosperity, the Threefold Braid, flow to those who enter the covenant. We don’t argue about its nature. We pray like monks and persuade like missionaries.

Those who agree, join us. And we get on with it.

All peaceful interactions among persons shall be consensual.

Under the covenant, neither a person’s body nor time nor the fruits of her labor are resources to be allocated by her betters. Under the covenant, a fellow human is neither a milk cow nor an enemy. Under the covenant, persons treat persons as ends in themselves. Under the Law of Consent, we are united.

And this agreement, followed faithfully by all its signatories, reorganizes everything.

Government becomes governance.
Monopoly becomes polycentricity.
Compulsion yields to persuasion.

Outside the covenant, though, predators and parasites await. Whatever our dreams of universal morality, to them, we are prey or hosts. Whether we shake our fists or brandish our Divine Imprimaturs, the only answer to their power is counterpower. Rights confer no magical forcefield against criminals and tyrants. But when courageous people join in solidarity, there is strength in numbers.

There we find asabiyyah.

Under the covenant and Law of Consent, compulsion without evidence of injury is itself an injury, whether carried out by ordinary men in uniforms or plain clothes. It means that property is designated as an extension of personhood, and that violating it without consent is to violate the person. Violation or harm means making another worse off.

Agreements—freely made, clearly understood, and held to by all parties—are the architecture of a just society. And those entrusted with any power must hold it by the consent of those over whom they hold it, and remain accountable to them, replaceable by them, and constrained by the law they are appointed to enforce. Thus, a corollary:

No monopoly may enforce the Law of Consent.

This is no call to build a Utopia. It is a call to recover deep wisdom, form a new covenant, and build a new kind of society on that very covenant. Instead of deriving law from Leviathan, we derive all law from the Law of Consent. And everyone who signs it must abide by it. Otherwise, they subject themselves to enforcement measures.

The Demands

The Law of Consent demands things of us we have grown comfortable avoiding. The Protection Racket evolved into a Security Blanket as constituency groups bid for the legislature’s power or anoint powerful palms.

The Law of Consent demands that those who provide governance services demonstrate their value as providers and thus compete for our loyalties. A provider of governance services who cannot earn our custom is an occupying force. That means the institutions we build must be chosen, not inherited; entered into, not imposed. Institutions shall be sustained by fidelity to purpose, not just by the inertia of tradition.

The Law of Consent demands that punitive measures be justified by provable injury to a person—not by some sovereign taking offense, not by a policy that exists solely to enrich a constituency group or a corporate parasite, nor by the convenience of self-anointed administrators willing to sacrifice justice for compliance. Courts must ask not only what was done but who was harmed. Victims must be made whole. And restitution must come before punishment.

The Law of Consent demands that what we call the social contract be made actual—not hypothetical, not metaphorical, not implied by the accident of birth. The agreements by which we live together must be transparent, legible, signed sanely, and in the ink of circumspection.

The Law of Consent demands that infrastructure, community, and common life be built through negotiation rather than compulsion. Common projects are realized because they offer sufficient value to all whose property and persons they will affect, and impose no costs upon the unwilling. Even if this makes for a slower process, it is more honest, more durable, and less prone to resentments than communities under coercive control.

The Law of Consent demands competition among those who provide that which we associate with governance—security, adjudication, and infrastructure—because competition keeps providers honest. Monopoly, in governance as in other industries, is a midwife to twins: compulsion and corruption.

The Future

Fragments of a covenantal society have existed across many times and places. These include the free cities of the medieval era, the polycentric legal systems of early common law, and the guilds and mutual aid societies that existed before the rise of the administrative state. Lex mercatoria enabled merchants across a continent to conduct transactions independently of political interference. The Frankpledge system connected villages into mutual surety groups, in which each individual was accountable to his community. Ancient Israelite judges held no permanent power and were answerable to the same law they administered.

None was perfect. No human arrangement is. But they were, in their better ages, organized around something recognizable as the covenant: persons protecting persons, agreements enforcing agreements, harm met with restitution rather than mere punishment, and power distributed rather than concentrated.

The Remnant does not advocate for a return to the past. We are not nostalgists. We are something stranger and more demanding: those who believe in the timeless wisdom of reciprocal peace, and that today’s task is to instantiate it again at a higher order of complexity. Now we have better tools, more potential signatories, and a greater understanding of what we are trying to build and why.

The Law of Consent points to a civilization in which persons are genuinely sovereign over their lives, property, and self-organizing associations. Those who have decision-making authority will have earned it. They shall maintain it through value creation, or lose it due to poor performance. The ruler-ruled asymmetry will not be abolished by a violent revolution, as such risks swapping power factions. Power asymmetries dissolve, slowly and structurally, through subversive innovation.

Far from a call for political reform, this is our moral mission. Behind the covenant lies a spiritual imperative. A society organized around the sacredness of persons is one that takes seriously that which the most enduring wisdom traditions have taught.

The Charge

The distance between what is and what the covenant demands is vast and widening, but this is not cause for despair. It is our call to work—by recommitment to tikkun.

The Remnant does not wait for a sudden transformation. We experiment. We make agreements that instantiate consent rather than merely invoking it. We create communities—physical, intellectual, and spiritual—that demonstrate, in miniature, what a covenant-ordered society can be. We point at the convent, not as with a weapon against those who fall short of it, but as a light, something by which to orient in the dark.

Every tradition that treats persons as sacred rather than a means is an element of the society we are set to build. Every agreement, freely entered and faithfully kept, honors the whole of the covenant as hyperstition. Every time we hold the powerful to account for their crimes—judging them by the same standard as the powerless—is either an act of restoration or the work of repair. The law, in its best form, has always been the covenant of persons, protecting persons, from harm by other persons, including those who believe themselves exempt.

We have forgotten more than we remember. But the memory is not lost. It is carried forward, in every age, by those few who protect the flame as a candle in a windstorm.

This piece first appeared at the Grey Robes.