Ping Pong 4: Whither Now, Oh Justice?
The last Rant developed the idea that justice could be understood in two very distinct ways. On the one hand, one sort of Justice involved a great order of being which fixed one’s duties in this world and the next. To act justly was therefore to act in a way in accord with where one was, in this great hierarchy. On the other hand, one could argue that the fountainhead of justice was removed from all direct embodiment in this world. In the world we are in therefore, our duties were to make do with what we had at hand; and yet as we did this, we should also believe in a true justice removed from the world (and quite unrealizable), which will communicate to us through our tender consciences. To act justly is therefore not about realizing the best of all states. It is rather a very personal choice which sees one turning away from the world as it is, and looking to a way to make the world other (and more in accord with that higher justice); albeit all these actions only occur on the level of friends and family.
Now what is key in both these models, as they were developed in the previous Rant, was the fact that in each there existed an element for the unpredicted and unpredictable. In the former model, it is not simply the case that the higher points in the hierarchy could directly interfere with lower points. On the contrary each element only had influence over the elements immediately below it, and moreover that influence was never exacting. And indeed the very act of being exercised seemed to produce elements which defied (or ran counter) to that initial influence. The Plotinian Soul was then cursed, as governments are today, with acting upon a medium whose very nature, as a mass, tends to undermine legislation. That is, the problem with most (if not all) legislation, is that while it (almost) always looks so good on the statute book, it is all too often impossible to enforce when it is imposed on the entire public, where the very numbers involved add extra ‘chaotic’ dimensions, and render the best laid plans askew. Likewise the best designed baggage retrieval schemes are always prone to the anarchy of actual use. This problem becomes all the more intense when one considers the position of elements within the hierarchy. These elements have no clear series of rules for understanding where they are. They know that they are bound up within a process which would, if only it was allowed to act directly upon the world, produce a perfect hierarchy. The problem is telling these actions apart from the hubbub of extra anarchic elements which necessarily surround these actions, and seem critical to its implementation (could one have a U.N. without having a world of favours, and the tax-free inflated salaries ? And can one have a charity which is able at every turn to forecast the real needs of its clients - and not merely act at times, in its own interests as an organization, an N.G.O.?). The problem of hierarchy therefore becomes caught up with the problem of trying to tell how to follow a path of order in a world where that order always appears surrounded by chaos.
Moreover this problem is made all the more intense, when one comes to consider under what conditions one might be able to form a local chaos, in the interests of a wider order. That is to say, the thorny problem of how and when one might feel one could wage war in the interests of Justice. What would such a war look like? How can one justify it? Or better, how can one keep such a war from the extra elements of anarchy which necessarily will threaten to engulf it? That is how can one act in such a way that increases injustice, in the name of a known injustice, and do so without being jolted into the second path outlined above, which would see the just emerge indirectly from this chaos. Can one indeed stop this slide? This was the problem for not just St. Aquinas, but also Tony Blair. While the second element here is firmly a problem for us all. I mean how does one react to a politician claiming credit when a justice they had not thought of indirectly emerges from the chaos which they did actually create? A problem which is surely a deep one for democracy, where it is almost inevitable that the actions of politicians lead to local chaos and unintended good (think ‘Thatcherism’ here).
Likewise if one follows the other path, and looks, as a good revolutionary will, to actions which will usher in a world beyond the one which currently lives within it, it is never at all clear when and how that world will emerge. On the contrary the good Marxist revolutionary is a person of faith – looking to a world that their master was far too wise to forecast. This leads then in a world dominated by a certain kind of hope (that is the desire to know where one is going), to the temptation to create for oneself an image of what this kingdom yet to be realized will be; that is what a utopia beyond the platitudes might look like. The problem is then, that not only is any creation a mere fiction, but also its very invention will warp the process of getting there. Socialism will invariably be tempted to take short cuts to breed its land of heroes. These short cuts seem then to have two terminal points in the Gulag and in New Labour. Both these end points represent a turning away from socialism, in the interest of a quick and easy path to utopia. The Gulag therefore represents the attempt to find that utopia in bureaucracy, while New Labour want it to be found in the free market; it is no wonder that each then fail. The problem then for this second model is how one allows for anything more than the personal level, ‘just’ elements to enter into the system. Where and haw can one be just, if the world is quite so corrupt? This problem was one of the deep problems of Machiavelli, but also surely the deepest problem of any would be global peacemaker. Each of these options will then be pursued in some detail in the rest of this Rant.
Aquinas and Blair’s problem was ‘How does one wage war in the interests of peace?’ That is how does one create anarchy in the interests of order? Aquinas suggests a famous three point answer to this problem. Firstly one must ensure that one’s war has a just cause; secondly that the war needs not to be for the personal gain of the individuals involved; and finally the war needs to be waged with the proper authority. It is of course the standard undergraduate essay that the trouble with these definitions is that they allow one, with suitable cunning, to justify almost any war from minor border squabble to major nuclear confrontation. All can be found a reason for and justified. The three criteria are then, less ways to define what is just and more an apologist’s charter for acts of oppression to come.
These reasons therefore offer no way out of the deep problem of chaos. They merely allow reason to enwrap every conflict within a mock justification. And yet perhaps this is almost vital. That is because they allow every war to be justified after the event. One can say in peacemaking that we only fought because of this or that reason, and so be reconciled. Useless as such pretexts are in deciding whether or not to wage a war, they might still be, (in their appeal to reason) necessary to the process of ending one.
It is this last point that Tony Blair understood so very badly. What made the man with a strange cock eyed ‘genius for folly’ decide to fight the mediaevalism of Islamic fundamentalism with the mediaevalism of Aquinas is surely a story in itself, but one that (sadly) cannot be discussed here. But what matters to the current discussion, are the effects of this move. Blair made justice an issue. The process here was no doubt somewhat complicated. Blair was picking up perhaps on a genuine feeling that one’s response to the eleventh of September, needed to somehow involve a ‘just’ dimension. That is, one fought terrorism by also being just. Be that as it may, he ensured that the entire debate about whether the war was or was not just, became caught up in a very Aquinian debate about whether or not the authority of the U.N. was needed (as if states had ever cared about the U.N. anyway); and whether or not having Weapons of Mass Destruction was itself a ‘just’ pretext for a war. We were all caught up in a cod debate about the merits and demerits of the case. This debate then skewed everything. The real reason for the war was so much simpler. America hurt. It wanted to KILL something or someone. Iraq was its most recent enemy (and it seemed likely to be defeatable with relative ease) and so Iraq would do… Is that not the way that states have always just behaved?
Moreover Blair’s tender conscience had three extra unintended consequences of its own. Firstly in the West it created the strangest of alliances. People of the left, the anti-war protestors, were sucked into an alliance with religious extremists, and even with Saddam Hussein. An alliance which of course became all the more complicated as it was vindicated when no weapons were found, and anarchy descended upon Iraq. So that, for the liberal classes, caught up as they were in an unlikely alliance, any overt criticism criticising their new found allies risked being seen as allying by implication with the forces of Blair and Bush). A strange blind spot to Islamic oppression was formed, a blind spot whose consequences are yet to be seen. (China now clearly wants a similar concession, while Holland and Denmark are gripped with a violent reaction against the existence of this blind spot….). Secondly the very putting forward by a western government, of the issue of justice, no doubt reminded the Peoples of the Middle East just how unjust the West has habitually been in their region. A habit which was of course only confirmed when there were no weapons anyway, and the entire oppression slipped into chaos. It became all too easy for fundamentalists to claim to be the just ones after all. Thirdly, Blair undermined the usual order of justification. I mean the usual practice of the West is to go into a country for selfish reasons and then invent a justification as either a pretext for leaving or for staying; and by playing the ‘justification card’ too early these pretexts slipped. We can no longer see either why we are there, or whether or not we should stay. We are just there and that is it. A cynic would of course reply at this point that wars are always like that. - One stays because one is there. Which is of course true. But as mentioned earlier, at least the need to invent a reason to be there is itself a good discipline for defining what it would be to leave. And Blair has with utter unintended genius, undermined our ability to have even this fig leaf, so necessary to our modesty.
The ‘Blair project’, has illustrated that any attempts to found justice on fidelity to a natural hierarchy in the face of the forces of anarchy, is flawed. Jump too early (and find justice where there can be none as yet) and one jumps not to the hidden order, but rather to anarchy itself (or even to allowing the ‘other side’ to claim that they are the true apostles of order). The role of reasons is rather to lead one out of chaos, it will never stop one getting into it!
This was perhaps what led Machiavelli to argue that any attempt to justify conflicts are all equally flawed and hypocritical. It is therefore better to ignore all such justifications, and the false hopes which they offer (and thereby ignore the power of that falsity). What actually matters, Machiavelli suggests, is peace and order within a kingdom, in itself, and not that any and every action which ensures that peace, can be justified. In a very real sense here Machiavelli presents the state’s answer to the Augustinian hypothesis that good originated in a place quite otherwise than the state itself. If that is true, Machiavelli suggests, then the worst of deeds, when carried out in a certain order, and with a certain series of selfish pretexts, might create as an unintended consequence, a domain of order and peace; and he sets out in his book ‘The Prince’ to map out how this order might itself arise within a world of evil.
In making this move Machiavelli effectively reworks the problem of anarchy. Anarchy is not something which can be overcome, but rather must be dealt with. Or better, the anarchy must be confined or restricted to actions in other states, or to certain domains within society, certain ‘anarchic spheres’. To run a society becomes allowing and at every turn ensuring, that the anarchic elements within it remain both bounded but also useful for the overall order of society.
This last move is of course very significant. If one had to define the Western system of economic and political organization in a single maxim, that maxim would be that all anarchy, all chaos, can become useful and productive if it is bounded in the appropriate manner. What else is capitalism or democracy for that matter but the bounding (and ritualizing) of anarchic elements? What else is bringing a greater (if limited) stability to Iraq than this conspiring with certain elements of chaos, who are bought (quite literally) within the system (the warlords), and rendered useful (made to fight Al Qaeda). Machiavelli’s conjecture was that if government was, at each and every turn, the management of chaos, then order would be impossible. Order was not a thing that could be simply imposed from within a system but rather would itself naturally arise when one delimited or otherwise occupied elements that would otherwise promote only chaos and disaster. A conjecture which Iraq has once again demonstrated. And how a politician is assessed always comes down to how they have ridden that chaos in the quest of order. Where Bush and Blair fell down was then that in the pursuit of facetious justice they created utter chaos, and only very very belatedly remembered how to define order.
The two thinkers in this Rant tried essentially opposing and yet strangely complementary strategies to the problem of order and chaos. Aquinas attempted to develop a schemata which defined how one always keeps within the bounds of order, and never slips into anarchy. - An attempt which as a direct move fails badly, and anarchy re-rails the ordering process. And yet this language of order and justification then come into its own as a way of sealing anarchies within a maze of reasons and delimits. Machiavelli deserves the credit by contrast of directly realizing that anarchy was a thing that needs to be managed rather than excluded. And yet then he failed to really develop (in ‘The Prince’ at least) the language of complex reasoning, necessary to bound anarchy in anything other than violence. Both thinkers are united in the way that they have taken up the problems outlined in the previous Rant. Aquinas has very much situated himself within the world of the soul, and is looking from that position towards the world of God (the One); while Machiavelli is in the world of Man and wondering how worldly actions will allow something other, the world of order, to emerge. Both then, take seriously the problem of being within the world that we exist within. That these ruses were theoretical opposites should probably, given their origins, be no surprise. What was (and still is) a shock was that in the worldly sphere, which was after all a large part of their respective concerns, they were in fact rather complementary. A problem which was then taken up and examined by other thinkers, and hence to be continued in the Rant of next week.
