Most of us like to believe we are full and earnest supporters of justice. Yet, justice is a virtue, is it not? Surely it is! Back in 1998, I recall slowing to stop at a red light and the driver behind me rushed up and sounded his horn as if it were a nuisance for the person in front of him to stop at a red light. I was in the right lane, and it was legal to turn right, but only legal after coming to a stop at the red light. I knew that. His horn sounded as I was slowing and not yet even stopped. His brusque impatience was one of countless reminders of American impatience.
Justice is a virtue, yes? And it is said that “patience is virtue.” If we do not witness patience, inasmuch as this is so we do not witness virtue. But justice is virtue and virtue justice, right? If this is so, then justice cannot transgress upon the human person; it can have no such agenda. Justice must aim for the right without attempting to navigate the sordid, misguided waters of oppression.
It is impossible to explain the evil of slavery without reference to oppression. But slavery is not one little sliver of oppression that happened to stray into wrongheadedness; all oppression is wrongheaded. Slavery is transpicuous injustice entirely because of its oppressive quality! We were duped when most world societies finally got rid of the sordid institution of slavery in the nineteenth century. We were duped because we figured everyone was “free” then. But alas, freedom is an infinitely elusive thing, and the mere appellation does not make the reality. Freedom, for those people who had formerly been slaves, was still a long way off – as Martin Luther King, Jr. eloquently pointed out one hundred years and eight months after the Emancipation Proclamation undid the despicable institution.
Article Three of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights actually lists “liberty” as a human right. And it does not attempt to parse the statement in any way – which is good, because it is impossible, and the document would be stultified by the attempt! Around us we see innumerable indignities and sufferings, and these realities are always at odds with freedom and justice.
Are we ever really free? Can the destitute ever claim the blissful satisfaction that is true freedom? And is it really freedom we experience in the absentminded bliss that is being carefree? Or is this sort of “freedom” in absentminded bliss not authentic freedom, but fleeting escape?
The truth is that none of us are genuinely free. All we can do is proactively advocate for greater freedom for all, and greater still.
The elimination of legal institutions of slavery was unarguably an advance for human freedom and human rights. No one doubts that! But its success utterly disguises the fact that our social selves can never be free when we do not have a basic grasp of justice. And we do not have such a grasp. A cursory gander at American cinema reveals that! Cinema reflects the society and its values as surely as does literature and music. As we all know, “justice” in cinema is offered alternately as return of wrong, vengeance, comeuppance, cruelty and punishment.
But justice, as precious as it is estimable, ought not suffer degradation by being alloyed with such as these. Cruelty and justice are rightly placed at opposing ends of an ethical spectrum. And the importance of justice cannot be overstated. Indeed, I recommend an inquiry into justice to determine the most compelling nature of God. And God is not a mix of contrary things. It is the non-contrariness of God that makes God distinct and worshipable. As the seeing writer H.G. Wells asserted, “one cannot run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.”
The problem we have with justice in its purest ideological construction is that it does not allow for our immediate emotional satisfactions. Justice would advise only actions that are sensible and necessary, not those that oblige vengeance or baseness in any way. And when we’re given the choice – as we are in a democracy, of course – to participate in fashioning a social justice and a criminal justice for ourselves, we insist that we have satisfaction in it; no, not satisfaction that civilizational virtues have been exalted with all steadfastness and probity. No, not that! … only satisfaction of our emotional wants. We want a justice that comforts us and tell us reassuringly that we’re safe and defended. That “justice” brings sufferings (on somebody). Hence, ours is a justice that ignores the august counsels of wisdom. Our justice disbelieves what wisdom believes.
Wisdom is not what we want at all. In our disdain for the dissatisfactions of sagacious justice we’ve made a slave of justice, and we’ve put it fully in the service of our want to get back at an aggressor, a threatener, a victimizer, a tormentor, a scoundrel, a miscreant, a dastard, and a nuisance. In our most trying and desperate times, our “justice” is nothing more exalted and pristine than vulgar payback. The “old brain” – that ancient and trusted grey matter that guided our ancestors through treacherous times in the jungles and forests and savannas – disserves us in times that require social integrity and coherence in the laws and their application.
So long as we do not understand justice we’ll be makers of injustice, however unwitting. We’ve allowed ourselves a puerile justice that we’d laugh at if it were offered by a five year-old: tit for tat.
I have often asked fellow religious seekers what we shall call a justice that is goodness by way of goodness, and they, with all their graduate degrees, can offer me no help in this. It seems justice has been a slave so long that no one realizes that it can be taught how to read.
Justice must reside in the highest. It must not suffer debasement in the insensate talons of vengeance and punishment. Justice needs to agree with itself. To do this, it must eschew association with all that is violent and cruelly aversive; justice must not allow the moral taint of any ilk of justice that recommends methods inconsistent with definitive civilization: deliberate aversive treatment.
The clock is ticking. We must fathom self-agreed justice and implement it very soon. And we must do so because our ingenious and unbridled manipulations of the physical world increasingly imperil us, and we slide unbeknownst into a future where a man ambling inconspicuously through the downtown of a major city carries a nuclear weapon within his shirt pocket and shares a crucial value with the unenlightened and luckless without: he too believes badness is good.