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Justice
My aunt died this week. She was the most soulful person you could meet. Engaging, beautiful, compassionate and funny; the world seems quieter without her. Her cancer came quickly and robbed everyone who knew her of somebody who made them feel vigorously loved. That someone so young as her should be taken at such a young age is unjust. All feelings of injustice derive from a sense of loss – of no longer having someone who reminds us of the importance of connecting to other people. Someone who tells us that there is always something we can do to help people who have lost something.
My aunt died this week. She was the most soulful person you could meet. Engaging, beautiful, compassionate and funny; the world seems quieter without her. Her cancer came quickly and robbed everyone who knew her of somebody who made them feel vigorously loved. That someone so young as her should be taken at such a young age is unjust. All feelings of injustice derive from a sense of loss – of no longer having someone who reminds us of the importance of connecting to other people. Someone who tells us that there is always something we can do to help people who have lost something.
Last Palm Sunday Pope Francis tweeted: ‘We must not believe the Evil One when he tells us that there is
nothing we can do in the face of violence, injustice and sin’. Since then a clearer picture of what he means
by ‘injustice’, and who he means as ‘perpetrators’ has emerged. He has been increasingly outspoken in his
comments against the ‘tyranny’ of the world of international finance who would
have us believe that we all have to take the poisonous medicine of Austerity
that has devastated families, ruined wellbeing and even led to the resurgence
of far-right xenophobic groups. The
appeal that this latter group wield is doubtlessly grounded in the way that
they appeal to a sense of justice that has been denied to working people by
mainstream democratic parties. We are
all in a dangerous place because of a perceived lack of justice.
In The Denial of Death,
Ernest Becker wrote that all human beings sooner or later have to engage with
the most difficult fact of their existence: the fact that they will die. People do this by becoming involved in an
‘immortality project’ which is a way of reminding ourselves that our existence
is significant. The social construction
of these projects leads to conflicts between these systems over time. Herein is the difficulty with harmful social
and political movements: the people who run them ultimately believe that they
are doing the right thing for themselves, their community, and even the
world. At the core of the injustice that
they inflict on other people, they believe that they are being just.
A Muslim friend of mine speaks of his faith in terms of
justice. He believes in afterlife where
everything will be set right; where the people he loves who have suffered will
be allowed to live the fullest possible life, and the indignities and illnesses
they have endured will be forgotten.
Even the most atheistic amongst us want the same thing. Marx recognised this desire to be one that
religions could accommodate. Religion is
‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the
soul of soulless conditions’. His language is apt, because he speaks of a
world without a heart and soul.
Our desire for justice is based on the need for recognising that people
are not consumers, market segments or human capital. We are not whatever economists imagine us to
be; we are contributors to long emergent cultural processes.
Becker proposed
that people became mentally ill and depressed because they are denied access to
resources which could enable them to complete their immortality project. Boring work, poverty, evidence of a lack of
compassion make people believe that the concept of a soul – our sense of self
which is rooted in the various groups we are members of – has ceased to
exist. Without souls we are only
intelligent animals who do not owe each other anything and only have a duty to
satisfying our own self-interest. Like
the demon in The Exorcist who tries to convince the priests that humans
are animals who are not worthy of God’s love, the concept of behaving justly is
integral to the idea of living a life that is soulful. Whereas markets have a strong utility in
helping people develop their skills in a meritocratic way, innovating and
satisfying needs, when they become an overall orthodox ideology on whose terms
solely is society governed, then we have found a rationale for treat people as
if they had no souls - a rationale for treating them unjustly.
The easy thing to
do is to find someone to blame for our losses – extremism always fills the gap
of hurt easily. But there is something
more productive we can do when we feel like a victim of injustice. The cultural psychologist Rick Shweder has
demonstrated that depressed states are associated with the concept of ‘soul
loss’ in many societies. In Thinking
Through Cultures (1991) he writes: ‘To feel depressed one must have had
experience with the soul’(p.255). In
short, experiencing intense pain is the first step that we take to find more
soulful ways of living. Facing the pain
of injustice and the reality of loss in a mature way leads us to new ways of
creating justice for others.
In Memory of Nuala Joyce.
