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.
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