CDXXVI – Citizenship, Immigration, and Culture

More Adventures in Scootland

I discussed Citizenship previously with the aim of thinking about how lay-folk participate in government, and to what extent. Now, I want to think about Citizenship in the context of culture.

Citizens have an obligation–one they can’t help but fulfill–to immerse themselves in their nations culture. One of the challenges of America is that there is no ubiquitous culture, but there is a coalition of lots of little cultures all trying to make peace in a shared legal framework. It occasionally flares up but is mostly peaceful in most parts of the country due to the social forces of politeness.

In Scootland, it is imperative that Citizens appreciate their native culture, and that there is some mechanism for educating citizens about that culture. You can’t love something you don’t know, so it would be important for there to be celebrations for cultural features of state that are distinct from religious feasts which are celebrated for religious reasons.

A cultural tradition is something that you come to love because you’ve done it, your parents have done it, your grandparents have done it–it gives continuity between your present and your past, all under the loving umbrella of your people. It creates also bonds of fellowship between fellow citizens. In the Philippines, there are neighborhood and City celebrations for the “feast day” of that neighborhood or city. These are a distinctly religious feast–if your neighborhood was founded on the feast of St. John the Baptist, then the celebration would center around some devotion to St. John the Baptist–but the whole neighborhood or city comes out for the celebration. It is an excuse to party, but also to thank God and ask for the intercession of the patron saint.

Immigration

Because Scootland is a Catholic Monarchy under the Pope, it is of utmost importance that all citizens are Catholic as well. This should be compulsory, but not without catechesis. The Church is, after all, responsible for education in Scootland, so there is no way you could get away with avoiding the influence of the Church. Immigrants would have to be Catholic or willing to become Catholic before naturalization. The common faith helps bind the common culture of Scootland. Naturalization would take place in the context of a Mass, and perhaps once the Mass is complete would involve an oath of fidelity, service, and obedience to the Monarch, but also a reciprocal promise of fidelity, service, and custodial care from the Monarch. It would be cool if naturalization services take place once per year and are attended by the King for this purpose.

There are many reasons why one may need to issue Visas for temporary visitors. Visitors would need to affirm that none of their actions during their stay undermined the King or his subjects; visitors would need to stay for some specific purpose and then leave.

Emmigration would be an equally serious thing. It would require renouncing ones oath of fidelity to the King of Scootland, which is required to be removed from tax rolls and draft-eligibility records. Essentially, if you move to another country and fail to close the loop on your oath of fidelity to the Sovereign of Scootland, you are still technically considered a lapsed citizen. Renouncing the oath must be done in person before a Judge or other magistrate, so there’s a bit of a humiliation factor there as well. I want to make it painful to formally leave Scootland. Then you are relieved of your oath and must depart with all haste. If you want to return, I am sure there is some way to rub your nose in it a little more, without outright rejecting you. Perhaps there’s an “oath breakers tax” that can be paid so that former citizens can return and “reconcile” with the King.

This is a lot of minutiae but I think it illustrates that citizenship is a sign of both a duty to the King and a sign of having received the care and protection of the King. These are not things lightly put away, nor lightly taken up. Treating citizenship seriously also helps instill a sense of importance about the culture one is entering, and hopefully creates a desire to immerse oneself in that culture and internalize it as ones own.

AMDG

CDXXV – Revisiting Scootland

In my previous article, I mention briefly an idea which I realize solves a major challenge with my own fictional kingdom of Scootland (The first article of the series is HERE). In that series, I take great pains to talk about different factions and ways to control their power. One of the things I was least satisfied with was controls for an unjust King.

What I said in the previous article was this: “So a King could not be tried for a crime unless it was in an ecclesial court for a moral evil.”

This helps in many ways. Scootland, you will remember, has a mechanism for the people to represent their concerns to the King, but does not have a control that gives them means of redress if the King goes off the rails. Suggesting ecclesial courts is an interesting idea and I want to explore it for a moment.

First, we need to revisit my article where I explore the controls for Ecclesiastical power. In that article, I suggested that the dangers from the Church are that they would seek more power and influence and award themselves exemptions from laws; or the Church in Scootland would accumulate money (by way of corruption or exemption) and use it’s economic power to influence the King or the other operations of the State. The Church and the State must be mutually obedient and cooperative with each other, so conflict here threatens to tear Scootland apart.

Giving Ecclesial courts the ability to try a King comes with some extreme risks. We can control abuses in this way by preventing frivolous suits against the King in the Ecclesial system.

• Petitioners would have to establish that the King committed a public, moral evil.
  • Private evils are between the King and his confessor, so ideally the King is already doing some private penance for his inevitable sins. Public evils are both visible to the public and negatively affect the public. Murdering someone is an obvious public evil.
  • Moral evils require the offense to be against God and not necessarily against man. One could not bring a case to the Ecclesial courts for taxes being too high, or the King not being charitable enough. The best rule of thumb is that the King has taken upon himself some authority which is not given to him–such as governance over life and death.
• Only the King could be tried in Ecclesial courts. The domestic system of justice is perfectly adequate for civil and criminal law, so the Ecclesial courts are only necessary when the King is involved.
• The Ecclesial courts cannot depose the King nor sentence him to death, but they can impose severe penances. Wrongfully murdering a subject could receive the penalty of providing for their necessities as long as they live, prostrating at the murdered persons grave, begging forgiveness on his knees from the family.
  • Steeper penalties, perhaps, if the King refuses to comply. Consistent refusal could include everything up to and including excommunication. The King must subject himself to the Church already, so it is no different here.
• Petitioners who make severe accusations which are baseless receive the penalty the King would have gotten if he were to be found guilty. Perhaps the probable punishment is decided before proceedings begin so as to ensure fairness and justice and to prevent excessive penalties.
  • So if Johnny accuses the King of murdering his son, and the son appears in court to watch the trial, Johnny must offer the King some stipend, must prostrate himself before the King, and must beg the King’s forgiveness on his knees.
  • Refusal to comply would likewise receive the same steeper penalties, up to and including Excommunication.
  • The Church could investigate the claims with an Inquisition (!) before deciding to accept the case. When the case is accepted, the penalties would be decided, and then the parties would come before the court to speak in their own defense, hear witnesses, examine the evidence, and present their own.

The Church is prevented from using trials as a power grab because the things that are eligible for trial are extremely limited, the penalties are limited. The people are prevented from frivolously trying to shame the King in court by virtue of the fact that they will receive the same sentence he will if it turns out their accusation is false. The risks of a frivolous case are extremely costly, but if you are assured of your case you need not fear because you aren’t going before a representative of the King, but before the Church to which the King is equally and also subject.

This control is essential because it provides some means of redress should a King begin to have bad public morals. It is a mechanism by which the People can go directly to the Church.

I can’t help but think this would work–but again, I am aware of the potential for blindness to my own faults. Please–tear this idea apart! Have at it!

AMDG

CDXXIV – The Snake Of Liberalism In The Monarchist Garden

NLR in a comment recently told me about a couple of new blogs relating to Monarchy. As–to my own surprise, I assure you–a monarchist myself, I investigated the blogs and found them to be interesting and as I explore I may get more fodder out of them.

One of the blogs–“Mad Monarchist”–was about historical and traditional monarchies throughout the world. The other–“Kingdom of Edan”–is a micro-cyber-nation that exists entirely online and is the creation of the King there. It’s a really interesting and thorough thought experiment. Regular readers might remember my recent fictional foray into a fictional kingdom I called “Scootland,” so this is clearly a topic I enjoy and am interested in.

NLR specifically called out the constitution of Edan. You can examine the constitution for yourself here, and I hope you do. My first thought was–“Hey, that is really useful, I wonder if they cover some of the same ideas I have covered”. But then I realized–“wait, isn’t a constitution inherently liberal?”

You can see traces of this in the constitution itself. While it certainly uses all the proper monarchist language–all authority and all operations of Government are delegated from and by the King–the act of making a constitution itself makes this entity a liberal one.

Here are some excerpts from the Edanian constitution, my emphasis in bold:

Article 2 Nature of the Kingdom of Edan – (1) The Kingdom of Edan is a sovereign, Catholic, constitutional monarchy. – (2) This Constitution, as ratified by the King as an instrument of his sovereignty and authority, is the ultimate law of the Kingdom.

Article 7 Organizational Principles – (1) The powers and rights of the Edanian government are expressions of the King’s sovereignty. Executive and legislative powers cannot be separated in the person of the King or in the institution of the Kingdom. Judicial powers are considered part of executive powers. This constitution establishes checks and limits to the King’s powers to ensure just and moral government in the interests of the Edanian people.

Article 2-(2) establishes the constitution as a separate and distinct entity from the Sovereign and must be ratified by the King (implying supremacy over the King) and alone is the ultimate law of the Kingdom–not the King.

Article 7-(1) establishes that the King’s powers must be limited in the interests of the people. Limited by whom? By a legislature? By the people themselves?

I suppose this makes me an absolute monarchist. The King’s authority must be limited by considerations of morality alone. God’s law. If the people are given any leverage whatsoever over the King, they will use it to tear him down. There’s a great video exploring this problem indirectly, here. The video is centered around this question: Can monarchs commit crimes? The “authority is from God” model suggests that no, they cannot, since they are the source and summit of all law. All law is either a spelling out or a delegation of the sovereign authority. The “authority is from the people” model suggests that yes, they can, because a violation against the people ought to be punishable in a legally binding sense.

So creating a constitution that is distinct from the sovereign and to which the sovereign is subject makes the Constitution Sovereign and the King a mere figurehead. The existence of a constitution in and of itself begs the question in favor of liberalism and not in favor of monarchy.

This is reinforced by the following graf I listed, Article 7-(1). If the King’s powers are going to be limited, then the power that limits those of the King are supreme. That entity is sovereign, and not the King. I said in a previous article that the true sovereign is the person who is answerable to no one. It has to be the King, otherwise the King is operating within a massive bureaucracy and trying to understand what rules to follow.

So while I have critiqued this constitution as begging Liberalism, we still have some open problems:

• How do we control for a bad King?
• What legal codifications are appropriate?

I’ve discussed controlling for a bad King here, and especially in the comments with Tenetur. It’s a notoriously tricky thing to do. There are some cultural ways to do it, some traditional ways to do it. But the fear is, what if a King ignores all that and goes off the rails and starts abusing his subjects?

There shouldn’t be any need to codify the ten commandments or to restate the rules of the Catholic Church into legalese, but perhaps having some document explicitly noting that the King is subject to God and to God’s law and as such justice rests with God for his crimes. Furthermore, absent God’s justice, here is a list of some principles based on the ten commandments that should guide the conduct of a good and virtuous King who takes seriously his duty of custodial care for his people.

So codifying the 10 commandments and the kneeling of the King to God is allowed. I think furthermore it would be good if a King issued some kind of list of commitments to his people, so that the people know what to expect. “Read my lips–no new taxes” would be a fine promise to hear from a King, and then if the King issues a new tax then the people could appropriately riot and tell the King he’s not keeping his own word.

Common Law also came to mind. Britain does not have a constitution, but every act of legislation ever passed by parliament is part of a compendium of laws by which every citizen is bound. Furthermore the collective rulings of court cases and the like creates an informal source of law and precedent that aids in governing society.

So a King could not be tried for a crime unless it was in an ecclesial court for a moral evil. Instead of taxes as the example above, I almost said the King would promise not to arbitrarily kill people–but life and death is something in God’s domain so the King doesn’t even have unlimited authority there. Arbitrary murder would be cause for a formal censure from the Church and the Church could order restitution.

In fact, using the Church as a formal check against the King has some benefits, though it also comes with risks. It establishes the Church as a superior body to the Sovereign, which is not altogether inappropriate. The King ought to be subject to the Pope and not a rival to him.

All this to say: When we’re building ideal, fictional monarchies, we have to be really careful not to let any liberalism sneak in before the door closes. It will poison the whole process and the problem–liberalism itself–will not be tamed. The King must always have supreme authority over his domain, and the people must accept that authority and obey it. Mutual love between sovereign and subject is the best check or balance in any kingdom.

AMDG

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Post Script: Article 6 of that constitution outlines the eligibility to vote and other matters. I hadn’t read that previously, but it seals the deal–this is a liberal monarchy, which means it is a democracy that carry’s some poor soul on a golden chair, but all the people have swords and the guy on the chair has just a crown.