When I was out in Oklahoma City last week I stopped by the state capitol grounds to do a little library work (for a piece on the lawsuits in the wake of the Tulsa riot) and to take some pictures, of course. I particularly wanted the Jim Thorpe State Office Building and also a couple of the oil derricks. I remember — gosh I guess this is about 20 twenty years ago now — driving by the capitol when I was interviewing for a job at OCU and seeing an oil derrick. That really stuck with me. When I got back to Boston I mentioned it to some colleagues and one of them said he thought among other virtues of working in Oklahoma there was probably some great work on the legal history of that state. Of course he was correct, though his suggestion was on the fictional literature around the Great Depression and things like the Green Corn Rebellion. Maybe one of these days I'll be able to take up those apt suggestions for research.
As I was walking back to my car I saw a fairly small monument in a pretty out-of-the-way place (not near any entrance that's in use). And what do you know? It's a ten commandments monument. There's no date on when it was placed there, which I thought was odd. But now I realize that it was put up real recently. It's also being challenged by the ACLU.
It contains a depiction of the "third eye," which is not in any way of Judaic or Christian provenance! A monument to "the Golden Rule" would be on (figuratively) firmer ground, it being found in both religious and non-religious worldviews and arguably a basic principle of social morality. To be sure, the different formulations: "negative" and "positive," for example, arguably have different implications, and the Golden Rule in the Gospels of the New Testament is found alongside others injunctions, about love, for instance, which some claim makes it stand apart from other versions. Still, I think Hobbes ably demonstrated how the Golden Rule is a basic principle of generic moral reasoning, which may, in turn, help account for its appearance in disparate cultural traditions.
I'm still waiting for a monument to the 15 Commandments…