Yesterday I ended up in front of Copenhagen City Court as 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 my gaze. On the facade it says, carved in stone in large capitals -
WITH LAW SHALL THE LAND BE BUILT.
You can walk past that sentence your whole life without hearing it. Yesterday it stood there and spoke. And it opens the question every people and every civilisation must sooner or later answer, whether they want to or not -
WHOSE law?
For the law that builds the land is not a neutral set of rules. It is an 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.
Law is the VISIBLE surface of an INVISIBLE order we live in. And that order is what is COMMON to a PEOPLE.
In the Western world we have built this order over 2000 years. On the Judeo-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.
It is this order you live and grew up in if you are from here. Most of it you don't even think about. It's just "the way it is", because the worldview is stamped so deep into your being you don't think about it being able to be different.
But it can be.
And that 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 in these decades.
It has come through the greatest shift of 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 don't only bring their clothes and their language with them when they move. They bring their whole world - their understanding of what is right and wrong, of what is pure and impure, of what Man is, of which God one bows to, of how a woman and a man should be towards each other. They bring their Order with them. They cannot help it. That is how humans are.
And when people of one Order gather in sufficient numbers in an area that is built on 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 one day it asserts itself as just as valid as what already stands in stone.
In our case it is about theocratic totalitarian law. Sharia. A religious order that does not distinguish between faith and state, between mosque and courtroom, 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 human's life - the answer is given in a finished and therefore closed book from Allah - and it rises in these years as a parallel building right in the heart of our own society.
Everywhere in Europe - completely 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 and change. Not because it will not. But because it cannot. God's Word and Law is unassailable.
So quietly, gradually, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, institution by institution. Norm by norm. Little 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 thing no one really wants to say aloud, because it opens a question we don't have an answer to.
Yet.
For a people that wishes to be COMMON cannot live in different Orders about the deepest questions. It is not about diversity or about disagreeing about dinner.
It is about what Man is, what is pure and impure, 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 neighbourhood, 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 go a spade or two deeper, so I'm sure you understand -
It doesn't just mean we disagree about something. It means we will unavoidably commit "breaches of law" against each other without having meant anything bad by it. What I do in good faith is your violation. What you do in good faith is mine. The greeting that in one Order is common courtesy is in the other a transgression. 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.
It is not conflict in the classical sense.
It is involuntary transgression 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's 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 that do not feel like violations.
Nowhere is this known better than in the Islamic world. That is why the WHOLE 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 the conscience are free. They are two fundamentally different answers to the same human longing - and the one cannot contain the other.
A healthy society's Law stands on top of a "we".
Take the "we" away, and the law stands in empty air. It can still FORCE. 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, as we speak. We still say "Denmark", "society", "we" - but the words no longer cover the same thing. The one "we" is not the other "we". The 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 demand.
And so we stand back where we began. In front of the courthouse. In front of the words, carved in stone.
WITH LAW SHALL THE LAND BE BUILT.
Whose 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 barely grasp that the question exists - and I shall return to that. Including also why it escapes them.
Nor can it be answered by choosing between competing Orders.
For beneath WHOSE 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 from 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.
Law rests on Man.
Not the other way around.
❤️🔥🪽
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Coming posts -
The West has actually had an answer to this kind of division for 400 years. It is showing itself in these years to be the West's useless answer as soon as we moved outside the Christian worldview.