Liberal Democracy and the Challenge of Justice
The news on any given day, lately, is replete with instances of “wrong doing” at the highest and most visible levels of American society. This “wrong doing” is not an absolute transgression of a moral standard, but a situationally defined phenomenon. In other words, someone engages in an act that people judge as wrong based on their perspective. This perspectivism is at the heart of the discordant narratives creating the current cacophony on the Internet and other media outlets.
Before we dive into perspectives, I want to set the stage for the inquiry. At the foundation is the notion that we are comprehensible to one another. Max Weber notes in his Economy and Society, “…one does not have to be Caesar to understand Caesar.” We are not opaque entities to one another because, if we were, the possibility of communication would not exist. And we know, no matter how loud the wrangling, that we can communicate with each other. So, understanding is at the core of the issue. The potential to understand exists for all of us, the choice to understand is another matter altogether. It seems that, as we dive deeper into the hyperconnected world, the sensory overload of information has created a mental reaction to protect our minds from shorting out. That protective mechanism is confirmation bias. Because we have not developed the ability to process all the information coming at us, we pick and choose based on what causes us the least discomfort, or cognitive dissonance. The first casualty in this battle for our sanity is any notion of what is true. The Pragmatists of the early 20th century may have had the dictum “What works is true.” It seems now, on a basic level, what is true is that which doesn’t hurt me. Truth is individualized, it is no longer a collective fact. Facts cannot speak to that, because their facticity, the nature of something being a fact, is no longer a characteristic of the fact. What makes a fact is whether or not it fits in our notion of how the world is supposed to work; it fits with our sense of rightness, order and mental safety.
As we approach any complex idea, such as justice, we are hamstrung by our own biases, biases we have developed to insulate us from the firestorm of information seemingly waiting to burn out our minds. Our Founders could not have predicted this environment, but I don’t think they would have much sympathy for us. I’m pretty sure Jefferson and Franklin would respond with the late 18th century equivalent of “Get the fuck over it.” We have a responsibility to our country and to one another to get past our prejudices, to understand what we believe and, more importantly, why we believe it. Self-knowledge is the first obligation of citizenship, in this sense. You can’t participate in a collective process and not know who you are.
All of this underlies our notions of Liberal Democracy and our sense of Justice. Liberal Democracy makes an assumption about the nature of humanity, one that has gotten lost in the rush to judgement that is currently in vogue. At the foundation of our Democracy is the idea that, first and foremost, being human means being free. No one grants it, nothing gives it. It is a part of whom we are from the ground up. Indeed, that freedom is the ground of all our possibilities and our potentials. If one were to take human freedom out of the equation, there ceases to be any humanity. It is our sine qua non. Therefore, if our being is our freedom, everything else is an existential qualifier, an add-on to that fundamental being.
This is the singular most vexing problem for Justice, but that depends on what any individual wants to believe Justice is. Retributive notions of justice reject the notion that wrong-doing is a characteristic of a person, but that it is innate to the person him or her self. For example, in retributive notions of justice, criminals are punished. People who commit crimes are criminals innately. That is the nature of their being, a contradiction of the basis of our Liberal Democracy. Restitutive notions of justice, however, are based on the concept of a human held by Liberal Democracy. People make choices based on their inherent freedom. Those choices can be judged as good or bad by the prevailing interpretation of the moral code. Thus the example is, people commit crimes, but they are not existentially criminal, they are mistaken in their behavior, and can and should be corrected.
There is a resonance here with two important sources for ideas of justice and morality: the Christian perspective and the Secular perspective. On the Christian side of the house, let’s start with a simple syllogism:
Man is made in God’s image
A man who commits a crime is a criminal
Therefore, God is a criminal
If we judge all wrong-doing as inherent to the person, it back propagates to the source. But theology has gone through great lengths to tell us this syllogism isn’t true. We are free by God’s design, our free will put us in our fallen state by our choices. But, that same capacity to choose makes us redeemable. Our redemption is a choice to follow Christ and live as he lived, value what he valued. Basically, “Go and sin no more.” But at the heart of this is the notion that a human isn’t inherently bad, St. Augustine aside. A human can make choices that get her/him in hot water, but that same capacity to choose can open a doorway to redemption.
From a Secular perspective, the freedom at the core of humanity makes humanity perfectible by the choices that humanity collectively makes. Freedom, while expressed individually, isn’t a license for social irresponsibility, a sojourn into narcissistic abandon. It is a complex equation where human freedom collectively has to balance with human freedom individualistically. The only mechanism that can balance that equation is responsibility sourced in self-knowledge, a self-knowledge that brings to awareness a person’s situated-ness in the world, their actions and reactions in the social context. One person’s perfectibility is contingent on the perfectibility of the whole. If I work to perfect myself, by whatever definition, at the expense of the perfection of humanity, neither myself nor humanity gets better. In fact, we all get worse because the social bond necessary to our survival becomes weaker, more tenuous.
What does all this speculation have to do with Justice? Quite a bit. Our notions of whom we are inform our sense of what is right and wrong. If God is a criminal and human freedom is speculative whimsy, then people are what they are and retributive justice is the only corrective. Even better, if we can identify the source of “badness,” i.e. a genetic test for thievery, then we can either incarcerate the miscreant infant for life in a forced labor camp or just kill it since it is inherently bad. But that isn’t the way it works. Justice and the moral ideas upon which it is based are fluid. They evolve as our understanding of ourselves evolves. When we turn a blind eye to who we are, when we cease to engage in self-discovery, Justice becomes impossible.
But we enjoy righteous indignation almost as much as we enjoy sex and chocolate. The sense of power conveyed by absolute judgement is a heady drug, particularly when group-think sets in and your righteous condemnation is echoed by a chorus of others. For some, but not all, Conservatives, this is a fine state of affairs. They pass judgement as a matter of course and seek retributive justice for the transgressions of the offenders. For some, but not all, Liberals, depending on the nature of the offense, they act the same, all notions of human perfectibility tossed out the window. Righteous indignation abounds. In the middle, the rest of us just try to make sense of it all and not get steamrolled by these movements.
So, is Trump a racist? Or is he a human who says racist things, maybe even believes them, but never had the opportunity to see the world in a different light. Are all the men accused in the #MeToo movement inherently lecherous scum, or are they men who were socialized to devalue women and see them as useful only for their pleasure and made these choices accordingly? In both cases, the former represents the impossibility of redemption or perfectibility. It represents a static notion of whom we are, condemned with no chance of parol, no chance to make amends. And that is not just for Trump or the #MeToo accused. That is for all of us. For if we deny redemption and perfectibility for any one person, we deny it for all of us. If we are free to make choices that violate the value of our fellow humans, Humanity has an obligation to tell us we are wrong. But, condemnation without a path to restitution violates everything our Democracy was built upon, violates everything that constitutes our Humanity.
We cannot overestimate the importance of the voices in the #MeToo movement. These are voices that have been silenced for far too long. But, if these voices devolve into self-righteous demands for summary justice, they devalue themselves. And for Trump? Yes, some of us resist what he represents, not because he’s an inherently bad person, but because he is acting in ways that we perceive as a danger to us and that damage us as a Nation. We have to recognize, in both cases, the right of people to change. When we rush to judgement and demand immediate punishment, we deny that right. Trump and some of the #MeToo accused may be unrepentant in the face of the social outcry condemning their actions. That is their choice, as important a choice as one to accept the condemnation of their actions and seek to change. But choices have consequences and the choice to remain unrepentant must have clear and severe consequences.
Forgiveness isn’t the issue here because we can’t go back in time and make things not happen and never should we accept what happened as okay. A part of being free is the freedom to fuck up. It is our existential condition, really. Of all the choices humans can make, so many of them are the wrong ones, not in an absolute, judgmental sense, but because they are made without self-awareness, without self-knowledge, and without a critical social awareness of their impact on others. And on top of that, we assume our only choices are the ones presented. If you are presented with a bowl of red and green M&M’s, you have two choices. But there are more colors than that, you just have to crawl out of the bowl you are in to find them. However, where our social beliefs are concerned, our bowl of confirmation bias is our prison. It is a prison with an open door that requires an enormous amount of courage to walk through.
How does Liberal Democracy and Justice survive these conditions? When we can answer that question together, we’ll be in much better shape. For now, the social dialectic in play has to allow all voices to be heard, no matter how discordant and repulsive. The purpose is not to validate them, but to allow them to demonstrate the extent to which they violate or represent our common human values. If we suppress the Neo-Nazi voice or the unrepentant lecherous voice, they scurry back into darkness and wait for the next opportunity, when the social bond is weak, to emerge and wreak havoc. What hides in the darkness of silence can not be upheld or condemned by the light of our collective truth. To that end, our obligation to one another and, through that, to ourselves is to recognize the human value in Socrates’ dictum, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Self-knowledge, not just within, but contextualized by the social world we live in with each other, is critical to the survival of Liberal Democracy and Justice. Who we are individually and who we are collectively is a conversation we desperately need to have, not only as a Nation, but as a World.
(Previously published on a personal site no one reads.)
