What Can You Do?

I was playing Scrabble the other night with my wife. I never have been entirely comfortable with a game wherein she might score a tidy sum by adding an "s" to an existing word or by the strategic placement of the word "zit", whilst I might play the word "ytterbium" and score less.

Against all bobcat logic, one cannot rest upon Polish when in possession of too many consonants. Instead, one must suffer several turns masking the ignominy of a condition I have dubbed, "consonantipation." Nor can one utilize Hawaiian words when holding a majority of vowels and in dire need of a vowel movement. All of this angst, in what should be PLAY because of... THE RULES!

Three months out of Egypt, Moses brought his people the Ten Commandments.

Hammurabi had given 282 Laws to his subjects at an earlier date. Preceding both of these was the Code of Ur-Nammu. That Code was written in cuneiform during the Sumerian Renaissance over four thousand years ago. It had a mere 57 Rules.

Urukagina was codifying Reforms to the existing Rules in the town of Lagash at an even earlier date. He used the opportunity to take strong measures against usury, hunger, theft and murder after taking the throne from Lugalanda, the son of a High Priest who was very unpopular.

After the dust settled, polyandry had been made illegal. Widows and orphans were exempted from paying tax. The city of Lagash now paid for the beer at all funerals! Urukagina’s next initiative was to increase the population of the Royal Household of Elite Women from fifty to fifteen hundred. He gifted the Reformed Household with some real estate that he had confiscated from the former Priest's son. He changed the sign over the door from, "Royal Household of Women" to "Household of The Goddess Bau" and put the institution under the careful supervision of Shasha, his wife.

Many of his laws dealt with the interaction between slaves and elite people and between men and women. Rules. They are always for your own good and always dictated by someone with the power to crush you like a bug. Historically, most givers of rules have claimed to be merely the messengers of deities or to have been appointed by one such being.

In the aftermath of each of these historical law-bringing episodes, working folks were often heard to say variations of The Three Most Ancient Phrases.

To Whit: The Akkadian Toast, (often spoken while quaffing free ales at Lagash funerals) “Now, Where can you get that?”

The Babylonian all-purpose chestnut, “Who knew?”

During Ur-Nammu's reign, the good people of Nippur and the friends of Lugalanda transformed the question, “What can you do?” into a philosophical affirmation.

Rules have been written by the finger of God upon stone, quickly destroyed and subsequently rewritten by men. They have been dictated by the messengers of deities and recorded by men. Rules have been channelled by entities through self-proclaimed mediums and recorded by men.

Over time, many sets of Rules and Codes of law have been accumulated by homo sapiens. Far too many to ever count comfortably. All written by mortal, mammalian men and women and imposed upon other mortal, mammalian men and women, who often need to be reminded of that fact. To complicate matters, Priests, Princes and Barons also demand Fair Play; while those who grow the food, haul the water and chop the wood, still utter the Three Most Ancient Phrases mentioned above.

The Rules may variously be called a Code, a Codex, a Charter, a Manifesto, the Commandments, a Proclamation, the Regulations, the Statutes or the Law. They may be inscribed on clay tablets, etched on metal plates, chiselled in stone, written on sheepskin or paper.

Between the authoring, administering, enforcing, codifying, reforming, interpreting, announcing and amending of The Rules, administrations become unusually large and unwieldy, generating a need more peons. If any unwitting strata of society just below the current elite become disgruntled, they can always be tricked into accepting a worse set of rules by paid actors sent among them to lead them to their “own” conclusions. This perpetuates a strata of arm’s-length-slave-owning debt-slaves.

All games have Rules. We are led to understand from game theories that it is the very constraints placed upon us that call forth our creative spirits in our endeavour to survive and thrive. The popular, top-down argument is that limits placed upon our actions, call forth greater ingenuity and give rise to more noble works. When we look back over time and see the actions of individuals who had no restraints placed upon them and, quite predictably, behaved rather badly, we must tend to agree.

This observation begs the logical question, "Why it is that The Rules are made by such unrestrained, infantile individuals and then imposed upon those who are noble by necessity?

When I was a child, I abandoned basketball within moments of learning the counter-intuitive rules. Much later, I stood in Tikal, Guatemala in an ancient Mayan ball court. There were stone rings set vertically on stone walls. A smallish hard rubber ball had once been sent through those goals, over a thousand years prior. Strict rules governed which parts of the player's bodies could contact the ball, much like today's soccer.

Another visitor at that archaeological site told me that the Rules in the time of the Mayan Civilization dictated that the entire losing team was to be executed as human sacrifices. Hard Rules. Rules that I am convinced the players had no say in amending at their ball practices. They were, however, given the Mayan Calendar, with which to keep track of the Ball Season. Most likely, the swapping of jerseys was frowned upon.

What can you do?

fin