Yesterday I ended up in front of Copenhagen's District Court when we took part in a peaceful demonstration.
The demonstration was for a free Iran.
For Freedom.
For Man.
But there was something about the building behind us that kept drawing the eye. On the facade, carved in stone in large capitals -
WITH LAW SHALL MAN BUILD THE LAND.
One can walk past that sentence one's entire life without hearing it. Yesterday it stood there and spoke. And it opens the question every people and every civilisation must answer sooner or later, whether they want to or not -
WHICH law?
For the law that builds the land is not a neutral set of rules. It is the expression of something far deeper - an understanding of what Man is, what binds us together, what is right and wrong, where Man has his place in the cosmos.
The law is the VISIBLE surface of an INVISIBLE order we live within. And that order is what is COMMON to a PEOPLE.
In the Western world we have built this order over 2000 years. On the Judaeo-Christian understanding of Man as created in God's image. On Greek thought about Logos and Truth as something to be sought. On Roman law. Athens, Rome and Jerusalem. That is the foundation beneath every single law, every single courtroom, every single building in the world we have inherited.
This is the order you live in and grew up in if you are from here. Most of it you don't even think about. It's just "how things are", because the worldview is imprinted so deeply into your being you don't think that it could be otherwise.
But it can be.
And this is one of the most fundamental differences between civilisations - that they build and live in orders that do not have an inner architecture like Ours.
Another way of thinking Law - of thinking about what Man is, what is right and wrong - is pressing upon us these decades.
It has come through the largest shift in demographics European history has ever seen. Without war. Without referendum. Without anyone really being asked if they wanted it. Quiet enough that one could avoid seeing it, persistent enough that one day one stood in the middle of it.
For people do not only bring their clothes and their language with them when they move. They bring their entire world - their understanding of what is right and wrong, of what is clean and unclean, of what Man is, of which God one bows before, of how a woman and a man should be toward each other. They bring their Order with them. They cannot help it. That is how human beings are.
And when people of one Order gather in sufficient numbers in an area built upon another Order, what happens is not what we imagined would happen. They do not integrate into ours. They bring their own. Quietly, collectively, with growing self-evidence - until it one day asserts itself as just as valid as what already stands in stone.
In our case it concerns the theocratic totalitarian law. Sharia. A religious order that does not distinguish between faith and state, between mosque and courthouse, between the private and the public, because it cannot, because it will not. It claims to have a finished answer to every question in a person's life - the answer is given in a complete and therefore closed book from Allah - and it rises in these years as a parallel building in the very heart of our own society.
Everywhere in Europe - wholly visible to all and with grave consequences for our Order - wherever it takes hold and puts down roots. And it does not bend, move, negotiate or change. Not because it will not. But because it cannot. God's Word and Law is unassailable.
So quietly, gradually, quarter by quarter, institution by institution. Norm by norm. Small shift at a time it demands, with complete calm in its voice, that it should be recognised as just as valid as our own.
And this is where the real problem lies - the one no one really wants to say aloud, because it opens a question we have no answer to.
Yet.
For a people that wishes to be COMMON cannot live in different Orders about the deepest questions. This is not about diversity or disagreeing about dinner.
This is about what Man is, what is clean and unclean, what is honour and what is shame, who owes whom what, when one may and when one may not. Two Orders can perhaps share a street, a district, even a constitution - but they cannot share a world. And without a common world there is no longer ONE people.
There are two.
At the same address.
And let me just dig a spade or two deeper, so I'm certain you understand -
It does not only mean that we disagree about something. It means that we will unavoidably commit "violations" against each other without having meant any harm by it. What I do in good faith is your transgression. What you do in good faith is mine. The greeting that in one Order is common courtesy is in the other a violation. The freedom one takes for granted is the other's sin. The honour that in one world demands protection is in the other an intrusion into another person's life. We do not strike each other because we wish each other ill. We strike each other because we stand on two foundations and call the same actions by two different names.
This is not conflict in the classical sense.
It is involuntary violation as a daily condition - it is the friction you experience where you must take account of something that does not align with the order and the law you live in and by.
And let us just go even deeper.
A PEOPLE is not a "population".
A PEOPLE is the common understanding of the world that makes it possible to make laws that bind, and which do not feel like transgression.
Nowhere is this known better than in the Islamic world. That is why the ENTIRE ARCHITECTURE there is built on immutability - an immutability that creates, and over time FORCES, homogeneity down over a population. There is something true about the need - both in Man and in society. But the way it has been solved can never be harmonised with a Western world where the individual and conscience are free. These are two fundamentally different answers to the same human longing - and one cannot contain the other.
A healthy society's Law stands atop a "we".
Take the "we" away, and the law stands in empty air. It can still COMPEL. But it can no longer GATHER - which in its essence is what we have it for. To lean up against and into.
When it does that, it becomes "police" instead of community. It becomes control instead of order.
And that is what is happening, while we speak. We still say "Denmark", "society", "we" - but the words no longer cover the same thing. One "we" is not the other "we". One Denmark is not the other Denmark. Two worlds with the same postal address, same currency, same constitution above them - but no longer the same ground beneath them.
That fragmentation cannot be repaired with dialogue. It cannot be managed away with integration. For tolerance presupposes a common space to be tolerant within - take the space away, and tolerance becomes one's surrender to the other's demands.
And thus we stand back where we began. In front of the courthouse. In front of the words, carved in stone.
WITH LAW SHALL MAN BUILD THE LAND.
Which law?
The question cannot be answered from above. It is not something Mette, Lars or any of the others can decide or determine. They apparently scarcely grasp that the question exists - and that I shall return to. Including why it escapes them.
Nor can it be answered by choosing between competing Orders.
For beneath WHICH law lies the actual question - the one we have forgotten to ask for nearly a hundred years.
Who are we?
What have we come from?
What shall we build upon?
A people that does not know what it itself is cannot create law that harmonises with Man. A land that does not know what it is built of can no longer be built.
Not even the most beautiful law carved in the hardest stone can raise a land that no longer knows what it is.
The law rests upon Man.
Not the reverse.
❤️🔥🪽
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Coming post -
The West has actually had an answer to this kind of division for 400 years. It is proving in these years to be the West's useless answer as soon as we moved outside the Christian worldview.
