Justice and the Demagogues

Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2016/01/04/justice-and-the-demagogues/

Not since the turbulent protests of the 1960s has America been confronted with public lawlessness and disorder to the degree it has been seen throughout the last two years. As the new year begins, Americans must reflect upon the nature of our country and the state of its culture.  Are we an ordered, just nation, or a civilization in ruin – a people smashed upon the rocks of avarice, flattery, and self-importance?

To reach beyond the hysterical cries of loud-mouthed demagogues crowding the streets and engaging in self-congratulatory rabble-rousing, the restoration of order will require persons of sober character and mature judgment to confront two pivotal questions: (1) what is justice, and (2) can it exist in an age of democratic sentiment?

While the idea of justice cannot exist in a vacuum, it must nevertheless correspond to eternal and natural laws which give it existential meaning and authority. The Greek philosophers, Aristotle chief among them, recognized a tension between “natural justice” and justice by convention, and further acknowledged the complicated question of how natural justice is to be authoritatively translated into everyday laws. Over the centuries, a general unanimity as to how to interpret natural justice, deciphered through the prism of experience and practical reason, became the core of Western legal theory. Not until the violent radicalism of the French Revolution, fueled by the cries of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” did the traditional natural justice paradigm undergo any substantial shift in character.

Moreover, with the rise of a new absolutism in the form of the sovereign individual, the idea of justice began to transform from a distinctively objective form reflecting the eternal order into a “rights” centered philosophy subject to the whims of individual judgment. In the modern era, justice has mutated into an abstract concept unhinged from tradition, convention, or any higher authority.

In classical philosophy, injustice was conceived as the product of men undertaking roles for which they were unfit, claiming rewards to which they were not deserving, and denying to other men that to which they were otherwise entitled. In similar regard, those who are just and upright, who hold virtue in high esteem, and who seek to elevate their communities by treating others with dignity and respect are entitled to peace, the fruits of their labors, and the admiration of their neighbors.

Conversely, contemporary rights-oriented jurisprudence posits that justice is not predicated upon moral deserts or concerned with rewarding virtue; in this view, justice is achieved when society provides a framework in which individuals are given the latitude to determine absolutes through their own notions of morality. It is a complete rejection of the Platonic idea of justice as giving each person his due.

What, then, is the prospect for peace and order and civility in an age dominated by demands for a conception of justice that is untethered from existential truth? Can the idea of justice withstand the demands of relativism and individual sentiment?

In a time when each person’s opinion is accorded equal weight and absolute authority, the term justice risks disintegrating into a meaningless vehicle for the propagation of the ephemeral whims and private impulse. Justice no longer represents an ethical ideal to which laws and codes of conduct must conform to obtain legitimacy; rather, justice is reduced to a servile concept used to empower individual preferences and manipulate public policy. A mockery of common sense advanced at the expense of civil unrest, the proponents of a denigrated idea of justice, colored by sentimentality and double-standards, do little to advance the cause of a genuine righteousness, and instead, stoke the fires of division and strife.

As witnessed in Ferguson, Missouri, inflammatory, hyper-emotional hysteria can only beget more violence, more death, more hatred, and more unrest. Justice cannot prevail where chaos is supreme. Just look at the shopkeepers whose businesses were looted and burnt, the employees of those shops who lost their jobs, and the local children denied an education because it was too unsafe to travel to and from school. Each of them, members of the Ferguson community, were denied justice in justice’s own name.

In Baltimore, we cannot forget the ominous orange glow and thick smoke rising from the modest dwellings of hard working, inner-city families who had nothing to do with the cause of the protesters’ rage. Where is the justice for those poor souls left shivering in the streets because others needed to make a political point with a Molotov cocktail?

Ours is a society increasingly dominated by political opportunists, ignominious publicists stirring the public’s passions, and community organizers whose only goal is shameless self-promotion at the expense of the very persons they claim to represent. Under the veneer of “justice,” these conjurers of division seek to redefine justice to represent some abstract notion of right that is, under the classical paradigm, fundamentally unjust. These prophets of a destitute ideology fail to see that imprudently stirring widespread disorder and excusing senseless violence in the name of justice itself is antithetical to the common good, insulting to the intelligence of the community, and offensive to the dignity of the human person.

Although it is true that peace cannot exist without justice, unless justice is again linked to transcendent norms of right and wrong — to objective notions of truth, as opposed to the whimsical preferences of riotous thugs — we should be prepared to remain citizens of an antagonist world wrought with discord and confusion.

Glen A. Sproviero is a commercial litigator in New York. Read his previous columns here.