New blog and three words you will encounter frequently

I love writing. I always have. I love words. They were created to try to fit in the vastness of human thoughts. Each word specifically crafted to express a specific idea. When words are not enough, we create new ones. Indeed sometimes we do pause in silence. But a pause carries great meaning, and perhaps it isn’t far fetched to say that a pause is a word of its own, enhancing its neighbouring words where its placed. It is the subtleties of the way we communicate both through actively saying and passively waiting. It is the way we commune.

A few months ago Todd Lowell discussed with me the idea of a personal blog. It could be used to consolidate some of my writings and like all things personal, enable me to better express a facet of my identity. It would allow him too to express a facet of his identity through the fingerprints of his design. The marvellous genius Todd Lowell got to work and a few months later, the Come.Commune blog was designed. In this article, I want to mention three words that will occur frequently throughout my writings and the importance of such occurrence. I also hope this article will act as an introductory piece to all future writings I endeavour upon.

Law

Of course, that is this writer’s discipline. But rest assured that this is not solely a law blog. It is a community blog that focuses on the paradigm of rules underlying the operation of the community. Law, in the sense of the statutes and judicial decisions, are merely one of those underlying paradigms.

This blog will consider laws written outside the statute book and case reports. It will focus on “familial” laws (note: different from the legal discipline of family laws) such as who should wash the dishes at night or how often we should visit our grandparents. It will focus on “cultural” laws such as what does it mean to celebrate Chinese New Year or whether one should act as the proverbial Romans do in Rome. It will look at “verbal” laws such as the basis of colloquialism and the cultural/ geographical “attachment” of meaning to certain phrases. It will consider laws of the classroom, laws of friendship and laws “written in our hearts” (a beautiful paraphrase of St Paul in his letter to the Romans). Lastly and most importantly, it will consider the laws of laws i.e. taking a philosophical step back and considering whether those are or should be laws in the first place.

Therefore, I hope readers do not see this as an orthodox law blog, but as a reflective mirror into the laws that were not put into law.

Assumption/ Presumption

While technically these are two words, I consider them together so their meanings will come out to be more clear through contrast. Based on the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “assume” is defined as to make a guess based on little to know evidence, while in contrast, “presume” is a guess made based on reasonable evidence or with confidence. These words in italics need elaboration of themselves admittedly; but for now take them at their ordinary definition. Challenging assumptions will be the bread and butter of come.commune, as we question both the clear and obscure rights and responsibilities that bind our commune together. We take no fact of reality for granted. Thus, we need to look behind our assumptions and see the absence or scarcity of evidence that we have rested our belief on. Assumptions are necessary sometimes to delimit the scope of the article, but they cannot go unquestioned.

We would be a bit kinder to presumptions, since they rest on some evidence. No statement is made as to the quality of that evidence; it will vary. Our mission then is to test the quality of that evidence. Using a video game analogy, knocking down presumptions will be a “higher level boss” and we have to defeat its ‘strong’ army of evidence. But let this analogy not only confine assumptions and presumptions to the role of the enemy. It may turn out that those assumptions and presumptions are true. If that is the case, we want to establish that firmly in our belief. We want to be convicted by it. And the values that it has should permeate through our skin and beam through our eyes and we go passionately about life, knowing those truths.

Convict

Here we face a legal/non-legal dichotomy in understanding the definition of this word. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines it in the legal sense as “the fact of officially being found to be guilty of a particular crime” on the one hand and “a strong opinion or belief” on the other. Notice that I italicized the word “fact”. A fact is true. Being convicted in the legal sense means a fact is ascribed to you, whether or not you regard it as true. It would not be an overstatement to say many convicts insist that they are not guilty. Applying this as an analogy to our commune, it shows that people hold you to certain rules, regardless of whether you believe in them or not. It may come to a surprise then that the second definition seems shockingly opposite. An “opinion” or “belief” is commonly understood to be something personal. How then can we reconcile both definitions, through a paradigm that allows for both an “other-oriented” view of laws i.e. rules that exist to benefit another person yet a “self-anchoring” view of laws i.e. laws that one beliefs in firmly with willing acceptance that they are there to benefit another. One way this can be achieved is through relationships, that are more often than not COMMUNAL. See where I am getting at?

I hope these three words act as your “targets”, in the sense that if you were an archer, you would be eyeing these to find the bullseye. The bullseye that opens when a realisation, like an arrow from a fully draw bow, pierces through it. This freeing revelation, the tension from the strings loosed with the arrow, and the target seen and hit with utmost clarity, is my dream for this blog. With that, come along with me for the journey. Let us challenge paradigms and re-evaluate rules together.

To find out more about come.commune and myself, see the About Page.