Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Some thoughts on teaching my son about justice

So in keeping with my previously-expressed desire to use this space in part to record some of the wisdom (?) I hope to one day share with my son, when he’s old enough for more than sobbing, eating, and spitting up, I wanted to share a few words on the abstract subject of justice. I am a great lover of justice, but I find that in an unjust world it is often more important to love justice than it is to believe in it.

Here’s what I mean by that. Many of us, most of us even – and despite everything I DO lump myself in here, too – tend to have an unspoken and even a not-consciously considered believe and faith in the concept of justice as it should exist in our world. This can be necessary for the preservation of our own sanity, because the alternative is so much worse. The idea that we live in a fundamentally unjust society, world, or even universe – one not simply uncaring for justice but utterly and unknowingly unaware of it – is horrifying. Just as we have a need to believe in our own virtue – as well as that of our loved ones, as it reflects poorly on us if we care for the unvirtuous – we also need to believe that this virtue will be rewarded.

Of course, this is not true. The undeserving prosper, the innocent suffer, and we the witnesses in between attempt to make sense of it all. This, ultimately, is the great flaw in the belief in justice. Simply believing in virtue’s reward for oneself is admirable, even in its naivety, and often leads us to try and be our best possible selves. The problem comes when we project this necessary, sanity-preserving faith onto society, the world, and the universe at large.

When one cannot accept this void of justice, one makes excuses for injustice. This is one origin of victim blaming. When we witness (for example) the rape of a woman, we find ourselves able to “justify” this in our own minds by blaming not the rapist but the woman’s dress, behavior, location, or state of sobriety or lack thereof. While this can be a misogynistic train of thought and usually is, it does not always stem from misogyny itself but rather the need to calm our troubled minds by lying to ourselves that bad things do not happen to good people, and therefor when bad things do happen, those to whom they befall must somehow be deserving.

Therefore, for justice to exist, we must let go of the idea that justice does exist. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a passage from the Tao Te Ching (I’ve misplaced my Kindle so I’m using the Dr. John C. H. Wu translation instead now; I’m not sure which I prefer or really whether I’m qualified to have a preference that means anything), specifically chapter 18: “When the Great Tao was abandoned, there appeared humanity and justice.”


Order does exist, but at such a vastly macroscopic level that it is impossible for us to see, and it does not correspond with the ideals of law or morality to which we ascribe it. Rather, it is the natural order of cause and effect, that one thing flows from many others and many others from it flow, both certain and cosmically calculable, stretching on into the infinity of inevitability.

No joke today! I just want to publish this instead of putting it off any longer.