The terror of a just society

I’ve been thinking a lot about how dysfunctional our society is, pretty much all my life, it’s been dysfunctional for at least that long (evidence suggests even longer). My thinking on the topic has evolved over time, perhaps in the direction of being less naive, but it’s pretty much always centered around some notion of fairness or justice. But what if the idea that the best society is a just society is just wrong?

Why do I suggest this? Well, it’s not actually a revolutionary idea—if you look at how the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide was handled, although they say justice is a part of it, it’s not really the sort of justice we’re used to, is it? If you look at how justice is handled in e.g. Sweden, it’s a bit different than how we do it here. And it seems to work well. There’s even a movement in the U.S. (and a lot of propaganda against it) to reform our justice system.

One way to think about this is that we just kind of had the wrong idea about justice. But think about another controversial justice topic: reparations. For slavery, for taking the land of native Americans. This is something we hear a lot about, and it creates a lot of fear—enough to activate people to resist it harshly. Why is that? It’s pretty obvious—people think that reparations will mean that they’ll lose what they have. Whether they actually will or won’t is immaterial—the idea of reparations, which they may well recognize as just, frightens them and is resisted by them.

Look at the police abolition movement. The idea is that the police as they presently exist are extremely unjust, which is hard to argue against using reasoning grounded in empirical data. But of course being a police officer is a pretty good job if you can get it, and it’s a job that doesn’t require an extensive education (this is in the U.S., of course, not e.g. in Sweden). So anybody who has that job is going to want to keep it, because if they lose it, they may not be qualified for any other job that pays as well.

I won’t belabor the point, but what I’m suggesting here is that justice has winners and losers, and that the losers are going to resist any application of justice to the situation in which the just solution to the problem would take away anything they have. I think you can see this theme all over the place in the news—it shouldn’t be at all controversial.

Now, one way to look at this is to say “too bad, our society is unjust, we need to fix that.” And this leads a “fight” for justice. Somehow it’s almost always described as a fight. What I’m starting to realize is that this is just the wrong way of thinking about it. Full disclosure: I’m a white dude who “owns” property that used to belong to the Abenaki people. And holy shit were they ever wronged. So I have a lot to lose if the way that justice is enacted for the Abenaki people is that all their former lands are returned to them.

So maybe I just can’t talk about justice because of that. If you don’t think I can, you might as well stop reading. The problem here is that I didn’t take the land from the Abenaki people. I’m the end result of a system that evolved out of the successful taking of land from the Abenaki people and a lot of other people, all of whom are now dead (many of them, perhaps most of them, died in the process of having their land taken). And their descendents, who arguably deserve justice, are also part of that system.

So we can definitely construct an idea of justice that means that “my” land should be taken and given back to the Abenaki people, and I think that might very reasonably be called justice. On the other hand, there are a lot of hungry and homeless people who are also old white dudes, and this idea of justice won’t help them at all.

What if the question we asked, as a society, before developing some new behavior pattern, were “is this kind,” rather than “is this just?” What if the thing we were striving for, as a society, were to minimize the number of people who feel that our society is unkind, rather than unjust?

I suspect that a just society actually would look a lot like ours. It would be chaotic. There would be many, many people who would feel that they had not experienced justice. Why? Because there’s never and end to it. If you take “my” land and give it back to the Abenaki people, you’ve addressed one kind of injustice, but left another unaddressed. There are probably more homeless people than there were. So now you have to address that injustice. And in doing so, you’ll have to do another injustice. And so on and so on. It’s just a dumb way to motivate a society. It’s going to produce pain and suffering, not happiness.

The reason this resonates so strongly for me is that I think it does a great job of explaining why, in our current society, the people who are pro-justice are so ineffective, and the people who are anti-justice are so effective. The pro-justice people have incredible difficulty uniting, because there is no way to deliver justice to everybody. There are too many wrongs to be righted, and the way that any one of those wrongs could be righted is going to conflict with the way some other wrong can be righted.

Meanwhile, the people who are anti-justice pretty much just want things to stay the way they are. So there’s not much to argue about. So just from a purely practical perspective, if we want to live in a more just society, maybe we should be using kindness as a metric, not justice.