Magna Carta Messed Up the World, Here’s How to Fix It (2015)

I suspect the only group on a truly downward trajectory at the moment are monied elites who used to be able to guarantee their male progeny success via licensure and the female heirs success through marriage.

I suspect it was documents such as Magna Carta that set us off on the path of progress. We aren't there yet, but the world is getting better on almost every metric.

"Misleading" is how I would characterize Chomsky. Every passage of his that I encounter seems to include at least one sucker punch.

In a way, I admire him, as sort of a rhetorical chess master. Makes one think. Would there were less poison included.

No man from henceforth shall lose either life or member for the killing of our deer; but if any man be taken and convited for the taking of our venison, he shall make a grievous fie, if he has anything whereof; and if he has nothing to lose, he shall be imprisoned a year and a day; and after the year and day expired, if he can find sufficient sureties, he shall be delivered; and if not, he shall abjure the realm of England.

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/magn...

If we could make the Right go eco-trad and aspire to regrow the Shire,

and if we could make the Left embrace its chill Tibetan-prayer-flag-hippy aspect,

with everybody living in cobb houses connected by footpaths and such,

then we'd have a sustainable utopia that everyone could live with.

Ok, I know, there is no utopia. But surely we can do better than what we have now, where the Right willfully destroys the planet, and the Left turns into a self-devouring ball of tantrums.

'To be sure, the reach of the charter was limited. Nevertheless, as Eric Kasper observes in a scholarly review, “What began as a relatively small check on the arbitrary power of King John eventually led to succeeding generations finding ever more rights in Magna Carta and Article 39. In this sense, Magna Carta is a key point in a long development of the protection of rights against arbitrary executive power.”

Crossing the Atlantic, the Great Charter was enshrined in the US Constitution as the promise that “no person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” and that “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.”

The wording seems expansive, but that is misleading. Excluded were “unpeople” (to borrow Orwell’s useful concept), among them Native Americans, slaves and women, who under the British common law adopted by the founders were the property of their fathers, handed over to husbands. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1975 that women gained the right to serve on juries in all fifty states.'

>As explained by Peter Linebaugh in his richly documented and stimulating history of Magna Carta, the Charter of the Forest called for protection of the commons from external power. The commons were the source of sustenance for the general population: food, fuel, construction materials, a form of welfare, whatever was essential for life.

>In thirteenth-century England, the forest was no primitive wilderness. It had been carefully nurtured by its users over generations, its riches available to all. The great British social historian R. H. Tawney wrote that the commons were used by country people who lacked arable land.

>By the eighteenth century, the charter had fallen victim to the rise of the commodity economy and capitalist practice and moral culture. As Linebaugh puts it, “The Forest Charter was forgotten or consigned to the gothic past.”

Contrast:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Merton (1235)

>It is considered to be the first English statute, and is printed as the first statute in The Statutes of the Realm. Containing 11 chapters, the terms of the statute were agreed at Merton between Henry[1] and the barons of England in 1235. [...] Amongst its provisions, the statute allowed a Lord of the Manor to enclose common land provided that sufficient pasture remained for his tenants, and set out when and how manorial lords could assert rights over waste land, woods, and pastures against their tenants.

England engaged in a long and openly political struggle between common and private property from the thirteenth to eighteenth century. The idea that anything was "forgotten" is simply impossible. There were riots, there were Acts of Parliament for and against enclosure, there were rebellions in 1381, 1450, 1549 and 1604, not to mention the Civil War.

But it's convenient for Chomsky's narrative to say "oh, England forgot".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_Forest

>For many years it was regarded as a development of great significance in England's constitutional history, with the great seventeenth-century jurist Sir Edward Coke referring to it along with Magna Carta as the Charters of England's Liberties,[5] and Sir William Blackstone remarking in the eighteenth century that:

>"There is no transaction in the antient part of our English history more interesting and important, than … the charters of liberties, emphatically stiled THE GREAT CHARTER and CHARTER OF THE FOREST …"[12]

It was so 'forgotten' in the eighteenth century that it featured highly in the discussions of several prominent English jurists.

He goes on to link this to the practice of fuel extraction for its impact on climate change -- presumably this is occurring because Russia, the Arab states, Mexico, Venezuela and Angola dwell in mistaken admiration for the English legal principles of the thirteenth century.

It is, in a word, nonsense. I no longer see Chomsky as a hardcore partisan, but more like a slightly higher-brow Malcolm Gladwell with a twinge of anti-imperialist flair. He manages to blame the British for an incredible number of things, I have to give him that.

But was the Magna Carta really the first time anyone conceived of "the presumption of innocence", as Chomsky would have us believe?

http://defensewiki.ibj.org/index.php/Rights_of_the_Accused_u...

>In fact, in an early hadith (recorded sayings of the Prophet by his companions), the Prophet stated: “Had men been believed only according to their allegations, some persons would have claimed the blood and properties belonging to others, but the accuser is bound to present positive proof.”

So! I see that Muhammad caused climate change with his fiendish presumption of innocence... if you buy Chomsky's argument, that is.

It’s this very noble class (that’s actually the sum total of the left and right) that is responsible for all the injustices noted in the article.

The people never wanted a ruling class in the image of the Roman Republic, they wanted a direct democracy.

It is a solution staring everyone right in the face. If it’s good enough for the people to receive a jury of peers when their liberty is at stake against Government charges, just like the original democracy the law makes/enforcers should also be from a jury of the citizens at random with limited office…but the truth is overwhelmingly people want rulers, and so we can’t even get limited terms on lawmakers.