Ping-Pong 5; Nowhere in Particular
In the last Rant, two rather different accounts of justice were considered. On the one hand, Justice was comprehended as an eternal verity which could be applied to even apparently lawless activities such as war. On the other, justice was merely the right of the strong to behave as they will, a right which is necessary to justice both in itself, but also because of the ‘trickle down effect’, whereby subjects (or consumers) are helped when princes (or corporations) help themselves. Both systems of thought however, essentially hit the buffers at pretty much the same point, - that they are some how nested within the future tense, and yet will only be applicable in the past. That is, the claims as to whether a war was just or not, appear on the face of it, to be about deciding what to do in some present, to ensure a certain future. And yet, the criterion is not only hopeless in deciding whether or not an action is just (that is whether or not that future has a right to be or not), but also it distort one’s understanding of how one can escape the consequences of one’s own (rather unjust) actions.
War is probably never just (as it is never simple enough to be just or not, not even the Second World War). What is (or is not just) are the end games of that conflict. Justice is then what allows one to define how one can or cannot leave a state of war (Hitler changed during WWII, away from a war of limited conquest in Europe, towards a much darker image of absolute and complete war…). Likewise to say the strongest, that is the princely, should govern, is fine when those strongest are in power and governing in the long run according to the realities of that power. And yet it tells one nothing of the squalid process by which the ‘fittest’ - that is the princes, assume that power. Moreover it is these processes, the struggle for control (or for life), which will form the norm of everyday living. Political life is then caught up in a paradox that also enfolds biology (survival of the fittest), and economics (the free market). In the long term, each ‘schemata’ are simply bound to allow the strongest or best to win out, as those strongest are themselves defined as those who win out in these processes. Moreover once that strongest has won out, the schema says that the net result will be the best for all concerned, and yet the schema is utterly unable to define in advance, who or what that best is. The result is that everyday life remains a shifting anarchy where new (potential) bests struggle with one another, through whatever way they choose, and by whatever processes, and without any regard to the future and the definitions of the ‘best’ (the perfect economy is then never reached, everything is always better in the long run, where as Keynes says we are all dead…).
Both arguments will therefore make an argument as if it were in relation to a future, but which really relates to a past process which is taken as if it were destined to yield a certain future. Where they differ is in how proactive they are about that past. The concept of Just in a just war acts to allow one to place a series of events (a war) in the past. It defines then the end game that allows a war to pass. The struggles of ‘The Prince’ define the process of that past which led to the present, and from which there can be no escape. Each argument is however rooted in the same deeply logically move, that there must be something apriori in the past which leads to the future, a thing which can be defined and thought. The role of law, be it the laws of the strongest or the laws of God or Man, or even the engravings of destiny are what allow this move to be understood. It is then law that allows humans to predict the future from the past (or at least claim to do so). Law is then the maze in which we attempt to trap the future in the conflicts of the present. It is then no doubt a measure of a society’s (or a government’s) anxiety about the future, how many laws are passed. New Labour’s problem is that, impelled as they are by media scare stories, they try constantly to govern for the future (as measured in targets or sudden scares), rather than the present. The result is then a large raft of pointless (and unworkable) laws, which must constantly be added to, as the future changes.
It is at this point, that the great Humanist Thomas Moore starts his book ‘Utopia’ (which means no place). The problem with the jump to a legalistic point of view is that it changes where one understands what is important about humans. Humanity becomes an abstract, who is defined by laws, and even more by ownership, and not by their living everyday actions. That is, Moore suggests, (in the first book of ‘Utopia’) a system of government based on laws, leads to a defence not of life so such as of private property. This is because it is property which clearly forms the image in the reality of law. Law ordains what the future will be in the present. Property is the embodying of that ordination. To have property is therefore to have a right to act, that is to have the right to a future. Government which rests on laws revolves around not what is human, but rather on what humans own (or have a right to own). The problem with this move, is that in defining this right of owning, society moves from being about what is truly social (that is humanity taken in the context of their community), instead to a system of personal rights, where each individual has the right to that property (and so that ability to own also elements of the future) which they can (legally) acquire in the present. Moreover Moore is utterly aware of the paradox in this move. In making society turn around property, humanity (meaning practical everyday actions) are replaced by an abstract logical entity ‘MAN’, who is everywhere and yet nowhere (be that logical entity understood as a rational consumer, or that which evolution is good for). This universal element, (‘Man’) who is naturally separated by a curtain of unknowing from any one fate, then goes on to justify the entire system. Inequalities might exist, and be real and tangible, and yet those inequalities are somehow all justified because at the most abstract level, all humanity is the same. A similarity which can then be interpreted rather simplistically and in terms of everyone having the same rights and the some opportunities (‘the American dream’); or more complexly, in terms of an overall benefit of a country or a race, irrespective of local unfairnesses or injustices (the European nightmare).
This system, Moore then contrasts with the Utopians who know nothing of ‘true philosophy and abstract law’. Their system is based on quiet and careful distinctions, and not the blood and thunder of JUSTICE. That is the Utopians, unaware of abstract MAN assume that humans are a little different from one another, and yet this does not mean that one needs to deprive others of justice or suppress their differences (or force them to accord within pre-established schemata of property or law). On the contrary, they believe that one must allow those differences to emerge, carefully fostering those that appear constructive to others (who are of course different in their own way), while attempting to mitigate those that are less constructive. The utopians are therefore very much like the careful gardener, who gradually prunes and trains their trees, rather than the prophet of abstraction. Government is therefore not a matter of managing one’s estate as some (abstract) property amongst others; but is rather caught up in the day to day actions of maximising what each estate itself, can in itself do.
Moreover Moore is here playing games with the reader. Utopia, meaning no place, in its practical engagement with everyday life, is not simply on the other side of the world (which is where Moore sets it) but is rather already, albeit in fragmentary form, in our day to day actions on this side of the world. As we relate to friends or as we prune trees, or bring up children carefully and respondingly (rather than responsively), we are already citizens of No-Place. Because while we are in acting in such a way, we act against the norms of abstract MAN, and so fall out of the framework of citizenship (as it is habitually understood on ‘our side’ of the political planet). The challenge of being a Utopian is then the challenge to allow the kinds of feelings and thoughts which are caught up in these actions of No-place, to develop into a wider system of provenance (a challenge is which as true in Utopia as it is for us).
The abstract container MAN (by contrast) is filled out, and ‘personalised’ (that is distinguished and bound up in destiny) through what they own. Human feelings are then poured into this container, and made to jangle according to the desires and greeds of owning. This fact then, Moore suggests, has four complex effects, each of which will be caught up in creating that very element that they would otherwise appear to be delimiting.
Firstly running the state revolves around the rights and powers of government, rather than the people. Government thereby becomes an element for and in itself. Each government is caught up in a competition with other governments, which ‘it’ aspires to deal with as either equals (and so rivals) or inferiors (and so clients or enemies). The irony is that in the name of justice, every principle of actual individual justice becomes then sacrificed (or at least potentially sacrificable). One can ditch human rights, if it is a matter of statehood (and just in implication in the wider interests or for an abstract ‘CITIZEN’).
It is this deep prejudice of government which recently has haunted us all. Governments on this side of the world like to wage war with other governments. They cannot comprehend in terms of anything other than terror, the kind of war which Utopians wage, which is aimed never against a land but rather a certain group of people (eg. those who are particularly responsible for the conflict) who inhabit that land. A war that then very deliberately (as it is a war) ignores all the conventional rules or etiquettes of fighting (which carefully limit who can be thought of as the enemy) in the interests of complete victory. This is not to say that modern ‘terrorism’ is in any sense ‘utopian’ in its actually practice. The utopians would disagree that one can wage war on an entire population in the interests of a land claim (even a religiously inspired one). But what they would recognise is the commitment to a war which by definition broke all rules, and norms. Our problem is then that our governments, finding such a war very difficult to grasp, feel the need to invent norms for that war. Norms which in effect allow the government to be waging a constant low level war against its own citizens, a process which becomes all the more true as terror laws become used for distinctly domestic purposes. Government creates therefore, other governments to compete with, and will do so even when those governments needs be ‘shadow’ organisations (be it Al Qaeda or ‘Spectre’).
Secondly, war itself breeds its own people; people whose very existence make war all the more likely. In Moore’s day these warriors were either the sons of noblemen or else beggars. Individuals whose very existence was framed in war created beggars, and defined the career path of younger sons of nobility. Such people were a burden in peace time, as they remained very much in their state of endemic war, and so treated their fellow citizens as conquered peoples. So much so that the temptation for any ruler was to remain in (or return to as often as possible) a state of war, and so keep such soldiers occupied. A temptation that was of course increased as the government felt its own fate caught up with the fate of its warriors. The result was then that war (declared or undeclared) became the norm, and peace the exception. The modern parallels are here obvious (if complex). One of the elements in Al Qaeda is of course the fact that these fighters are the army which we used to undermine Russia in Afghanistan, an army that has refused to simply disarm and go away (the same is true in Iraq). At the other end of the spectrum, there is a complex process clearly at work, binding together the virtual warriors of computer games, through the video footage of real bombs, to the actual and all of them to real death. This connection is no doubt utterly complex (as the connection between highway robbery and war was in Moore’s day), and so cannot be simplistically abstracted into the formula (video games = WAR), and yet nonetheless they are there and real. We are creating our own species of armchair virtual warriors, the worry is that we might (and indeed are) finding wars for them to fight (that is in which they can use their talents).
Thirdly Moore is very clear that a justice system that acts to defend property will actively create more crime. Punish a man by hanging for stealing (or in our day by long imprisonment) and one impoverishes his entire family, forcing them in turn, towards criminality. Likewise punish a criminal by meting out a heavy fine, and you only confirm his criminality. Dynasties of criminals are thereby created, as are career paths for individual delinquents (careers which always end up in the noose). Additionally in such societies, as there is a tendency to breed ever new laws (as new properties rights are defined, new senses of owning) so there will be a drift to criminalize new elements of the population. Everyone becomes (to a degree) caught up in a web of criminality, and therefore can be held to account by the propertied (or governing) classes.
Fourthly, and paradoxically, abstraction cannot be held to be supreme without creating the demand that everyone recognises the truth of that particular abstraction. The abstract becomes then horribly practical, and violent. Its rights are universal, and so the wars which it inspires (or the persecutions) total. The abstract therefore loses sight of what it actually claims to preach. That is the universal nature of MAN itself. In doing so it moreover opens itself up for other abstractions to emerge, abstractions which attempt to re-cover this universal (or do so until they to becomes the abstraction in power…). Eg. in Moore’s day the position of Catholicism and Protestantism, or in ours, Capitalism and Socialism.
Moore’ s message is therefore rather a complex one. Our trouble he thinks is clear. We have lost sight of what really mattered in the initial definition of justice. Namely that justice involved not the abstract nor yet the political, but the integrally human (so long as that humanity was not confused with the abstract MAN). Without this move to the human (or rather to certain elements, certain feelings within humanity), one risks not only dissolving oneself in the acid of abstraction, but also risks becoming caught up in the very process one is attempting to regulate. That is, abstraction carried with it, the risk that the systems it creates are self-perpetuating ones, where the apparent cure is already a part of the cause. Abstraction’s danger is then not that it is false, but rather that it is true. Its truth lies in that in creating systems beyond humanity (understood as the Utopians understand humanity), it creates processes which are unmasterable by that humanity. This is because, the very actions to master the processes, are themselves the very engine that drives those processes forward. His alternative is that one needs as a society to rummage around in one’s mind to find other means of government.
The problem is then posed (as does Moore who is writing about no-place) - how does one as a society achieve this rummage? The Utopians achieved it in the past through war and a wise ruler, and in the present by acquiescing to a perpetual surveillance, and regulation. A lack of liberty that did not appeal even in Moore’s day to his side of the world (in someplace), and still less to us. Utopia therefore comes a place implicit in our minds, a place we know could be, and yet which one cannot easily see how to get to. A place that certain individuals (such as the narrator of the second book of Utopia, Raphael) might slip off to in secret, and yet which is not realizable to the wider level. A problem which Moore deliberately does not resolve. A problem which haunts us still.
