Justice – Week 1
In 2025, I will explore the four cardinal virtues from the Aristotelian, Stoic and Catholic tradition – wisdom, moderation, justice, courage – in thirteen cycles of four weeks, and share my learnings in the form of a reflective meditation.
The practice of each virtue comes with its own emotional modality. Wisdom was calm. Moderation turned out to be joyful. Courage might come with fear, anger, or surprise. As for justice, it brought up all sorts of unpleasant emotions. Through the week, I struggled with grief, anguish, and disgust.
One of the tasks I set myself to do was ‘connect with source’. Every day, at least once, I would notice all the materials things around me, and mentally trace their origin. Who made this fork? Where did the metal in it stem from? What land hosted the mine? Who bore the effort of digging it up? Who was expropriated for it to operate? It wasn’t very long before I started spiralling. Even my semolina pudding took on sinister overtones. The form is German, the materials Australian. Milk is pain inflicted on cows, cold metal pressing into the tender flesh of an udder. Durum wheat is eroded soil, fertilizer leaking into streams, water diverted from river basins. Connecting to the source of everything around me was a fast track to disgust, shame at how much exploitation I condone, simply through what I own and consume. A week with justice left me with diffuse nausea, and a nagging stomach pain.
It’s not that I have a romantic dislike for machines and technology per se, not even the visceral rejection of mining that I often witness among ecologically minded folks. My father comes from salt-making country, my grand-father drove trains, my great-grandfather worked iron to forge keys and locks. Metal runs in the family, so to speak, together with salt, and the broader use of non-organic matter for human purposes. In my teenage years, when I heard people praise ‘natural’ products over chemicals, I would – ridiculously – prompt them to try hemlock. I have mellowed since, but continue to believe in a mature relationship with the non-organic – collecting it and transforming it to better service human goals.
I do believe, however, that it can and should be done in a way that enriches the surrounding ecosystems, and benefits the people living on the land where minerals come from. This may be where my romantic delusions manifest: I like to believe that ‘my culture’ knows to find this balance. The salt-marshes of Aigues-Mortes, which were the background of my childhood holidays, are not just a landscape-sized device for sea-salt extraction. They double as a giant feeding pool for migratory birds, and foraging grounds for the locals who gather clams, mussels, and whitebait. Yet if I close my eyes, review those scenes of my childhood, and connect to source, I can see threads of colonial exploitation running through the fabric: petrol for the cars driving us to private beaches on company land, metal in the rusted machinery next to the salt mountains, and the premium of a location in prosperous Europe. The city walls of Aigues-Mortes were built by the French monarchy to protect a military seaport where the French army set off for the crusades. The glorious architecture I saw through the windows of my grandparents' house closely ties to the gloomy prequel of more recent violence in Palestine.
Returning to the white goods in my house, I doubt that the minerals in them were collected in ways that produce positive environmental externalities, or respect traditional owners. I just don’t know to what extent. In a fantasy world, I could track exactly where everything comes from, and assess how much suffering and destruction underpins my desire for purified air, various cooking utensils, or central European sweets. Then at least, I would get a moral reward for restraining my appetites.
As things stand, I certainly don’t have firm ground to stand on when it comes to justice. I know that my lifestyle imposes suffering and destruction somewhere out of sight, just not how much and where exactly. Experimenting with justice brought to mind this old parable, where the devils puts gold in your pocket, trading it for the lives and souls of people on the other side of the planet, with your blessing. And as the debt piles up, the need to consume increases, to keep the guilt at bay.
In short, experimenting with justice brought up a sense of vertigo, somewhat like engaging seriously with quantum physics. I could feel the ground lose its firmness, everything oscillating, certainties vanishing. The result was erratic behaviour. I stayed away from a beef burger at Stomping Ground brewery – I wanted it, but couldn’t bear myself to order meat. Most of the week, I stuck to a vegetarian diet, no eggs, even dairy causing unease. At the same time, I resumed eating too much, too fast. That was partly whiplash from all the slow-chewing of moderation week, but also the need to blunt my senses, and drown moral discomfort in food. I randomly gave twenty dollars to a homeless person who asked for help buying a toastie in the alleyway below me, but also cheated on the tram. The ticket machines next to the door were ‘loading’ and wouldn’t let me touch on. Further down the carriage, others were working. I thought I could get away with it, and did – guiltily holding my Myki tram card for a few stations until I reached the free zone in the city centre. With so much injustice going on all over the world, what did it matter that I broke the rules? Who cares about tram fares, when bombs are dropped on children and the planet is burning?
**
I was socialised to cheat the system. I have this early memory, which may or may not be truthful. I’m in a large supermarket, passing by the lolly aisle. My mother grabs a pack, opens it, and hands it over to me. “If you eat it in the store, we won’t have to pay for it.” I was trained to value strength and cunning over obedience. Get away with it if you can.
Justice is an acquired taste I developed later in life, outside of home. I long used to feel a slight sense of shame when I compared myself with friends and acquaintances – kids in my class and fellow students – who would voice clear-cut moral judgements. Money management, government abuse, human rights, transparency: many people seem to know right from wrong – and experience outrage – far more than I do. I learned over time however that this fierce inner compass usually comes with serious blinders.
Beside connecting to source, this first justice week was about decolonizing my brain. Deliberately work on mental frameworks that perpetuate oppression. I have inherited many. My step-father spent some of his youth in West Africa. He ‘knew’ that black people are just not as smart. Also the smell, because the food. My step-mother’s mother was born in Morrocco. She ‘knew’ to be cautious about those people, ‘it’s in their culture’. My father ‘knows’ that Arab men are more likely to abuse their wives. School, books, education, all got me to question the layers of prejudice I was socialised with. Which also means, embracing justice is a form of betrayal towards my family.
I pick up a few books from the library: an African history of Africa, an account of the Singapore model, Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectics of sex. I’m working on a cool project with my FOGA partners, exploring alternative visions of what a good world might look like, as a way to rekindle political imagination. Which involves exploring different proposals for what a better society would be, and alternative conceptions of justice – what criteria we should apply when assessing what is right or wrong, what should be punished or celebrated.
Riding past the council towers on Wellington Street, I notice a white woman with pink hair, rough voice, talking on the phone. Probably a resident. The rest of the people around are all various shades of brown. I question the right of this woman to be there. Why does this drug addict have a spot in council housing? (I have no data to call her a drug addict, I just do). Refugees could get that spot! She’s just riding her privilege. Couldn’t she do more with it? So much harsh judgement, and disparaging words, all in my head: druggie, white trash. I look around at the brown people, for whom I feel unmitigated warm feelings. No doubt others would have similarly violent thoughts directed at them. African gangs, go back to your country, parasites. I ride on, loaded with guilt at my spontaneous harsh thoughts against this pink-haired woman, grief at our fragmented moral landscape that pits the rights of one group over those of another, and yet more vertigo.
**
On LinkedIn, I come across a post sharing a fundraiser link to pay for the legal fees of Roger Hallam, founder of Extinction Rebellion, sentenced to five years in prison. My blood boils. Climate warriors are the heroes of our time. How dare they! Yet I don’t give anything to the fundraiser, somewhat confused as I click my way through various links – isn’t Hallam controversial? Does he deserve help? I go back to the link later as I write this post, but all I can find is a set of six-month-old news articles announcing the sentence. Was that an hallucination on my part, now causing a vague sense of injustice anchored in something unclear? Or was it one of those older pieces that somehow find an afterlife on social media platforms, and that I read too fast? I let it drop in the vast pool of things I vaguely cared about for a moment.
What seemed unjust in that case, as I reflect back, was not so much that Extinction Rebellion activists should be punished for breaking laws and blocking traffic. It’s the disproportion between the sentence against them, and the lack of accountability faced by oil executives who misled the public about climate change – or more generally, the comparatively mild level of punishment for white collar crimes affecting the collective. This is not a new tale: justice is in the service of power.
On a call with my friend and virtue buddy, we discuss the case of Carlos Ghosn, interviewed by Bloomberg about the recent merger between Nissan and Honda. In the 2010, Ghosn escaped Japanese justice, who prosecuted him for financial misconduct. Mercenaries hid him in a box and flew him to Lebanon, where he would not have to face extradition. Voices rose back then to defend him – raising a cloud of diffuse racism at the prospect that a Western corporate leader might be accountable to a bunch of Asian judges.
My friend was indignant that a journalist should give Ghosn a platform when he chose to evade justice. Refusing court demonstrates strength of cunning, which have a power of their own. It is collective duty to maintain justice, by silencing and excluding those who refused to face the consequences of their actions. It’s tempting to think of the judicial power as a collective device to punish and protect. But it’s also where we build and maintain a world of shared meaning, by integrating deviant behaviour back into a shared framework.
To rest from a tiring week, on Sunday, I indulged in feel-good favourite movies. In Legally Blonde, Elle Woods stands up to the sleazy legal partner who tries to feel her up in exchange for a career step up – and triumphs in court, demonstrating innocence. In the sequel, she loses her job pitching animal rights to the partners of her law firm. Undeterred, she heads off to Washington, to serve as the voice of those who cannot speak. The courts are bound by the text of the law. They must guide their decisions on precedent, and decisions from the legislating body, which is where Elle is aiming her action. She faces grief, anguish and disgust as she faces the legislative machine. But she carries on and, through strength and cunning, she succeeds at changing the law, meanwhile inspiring legislators and their staff that maybe – just maybe – their work might have to do with justice after all.
Thank you for joining me on this journey. Please leave comments or reach out if any of this resonates with you – and don’t hesitate to share this with your friends and networks.