Justice – Week 7 Round-up
Where I reflect on moral default settings, power and the beige beauty of justice.
Halfway through this project, I decided to look back and read through my first six posts: what I did, what I learned, and what new insights emerged about justice.
The practice brought up all sorts of unpleasant emotions: grief, anguish, disgust. No wonder: it cast a harsh light on my own moral fabric. I was socialised to cheat the system. To this day, I have an inner tendency to value strength and cunning over righteous obedience. I rarely default to moral outrage, and suspect anyone who does of stupidity. I also tend to respect whoever chooses to work in the entrails of the system over those who adopt a morally comfortable position. All of which is pure bias, of course, with an extra layer of inherited prejudice. My family ‘knows’ about Arabs, women, Africans, and shared that ‘knowledge’ over dinner throughout my early years. Stories were implanted in me young, ingraining a certain worldview. So much so that efforts at decolonizing or depatriarchalizing my brain – the pre-condition of justice – feel like a betrayal of my own tradition.
Six weeks exploring the virtue also cast a harsh light on the present world, where justice is in the service of power. Unlike Athenian democracy, which punished its corrupt generals even after a victory, we live in a system that largely dissolves responsibility for those in privileged positions. Environmental activists face harsher punishment than white collar criminals. If all the money lost to tax evasion in tax havens was shared among the 700 million people who live on less than $US 2.15 a day, it would about double their income. Our financial system is certainly not guided by principles of justice.
Or is it, from one angle? Judicial power is where we build and maintain a model of shared meaning, by integrating deviant behaviour into a shared framework. Justice demands that we find common measure between categories, so they can be weighed in the same balance. We’re hardly succeeding, of course. Our moral landscape pits the rights of one group against those of another. For a week, I tried an exercise I called ‘connecting with source’: every day, I would notice all the material things around me and mentally trace their origins. I rapidly started spiralling when I took in the levels of exploitation that my comfort depends on. Yet when I shifted perspective, extending gratitude to the people who make my life comfortable, I felt an instant shift – an urge to defend tax breaks for tradies and let the poor fend for themselves. Social justice acts in favour of the downtrodden, but it’s easy to neglect them in favour of an imagined set of hard-working people – who smell better, and are easier to love.
In short, reflecting on justice got me back to power as a default setting. There is the drive of revenge, the drama triangle, and the urge to find a perpetrator wherever we see a victim. There is our own inflexibility, doubling down on whatever position we took. Changing course requires acknowledging our own past shortcomings. In turn, we have to mourn the loss of our self-image, and accept our flaws: how uncomfortable! Then there is our incapacity to sit still, and a sense of self that demands constant business. So that we find ourselves praising those who drain our planet’s resources, for fear of having to sit in a room with nothing to do.
What can we do, then, to cultivate justice? A lot of it comes down to discernment. It’s testing that we do know the facts indeed, and have a sound model of causality. It’s testing that we have a correct model of reality, and describe how things work accurately – all so that the right people can be rewarded or punished. It’s trying to keep categories distinct, so we’re not utterly confused. In particular, it’s not mixing up money with everything else.
More fundamentally, it’s about developing a sense for what I came to call the beige beauty of justice. On the one hand, the virtue is approximate and fudges things. As the glue that binds our shared reality together, it aims for viscosity. Not every decision should be made on the basis of success and efficiency. Judges are a deliberate inhibitor holding executive power in check. None of that is very glamorous. On the other hand, justice is design excellence that keep society together. The just action is well proportioned and pleasant to behold. It comes with complete creative freedom. Unlike agonistic attorneys, the just are not in it to win, but make a thing of beauty that, for a moment at least, will temper our aspiration to drama.