3.24. THE IDEA OF JUSTICE.
One word has so far played a very little part in this book, and that is
the word Justice.
Those who have read the opening book on Metaphysics will perhaps see
that this is a necessary corollary of the system of thought developed
therein. In my philosophy, with its insistence upon uniqueness and
marginal differences and the provisional nature of numbers and classes,
there is little scope for that blind-folded lady with the balances,
seeking always exact equivalents. Nowhere in my system of thought is
there work for the idea of Rights and the conception of conscientious
litigious-spirited people exactly observing nicely defined
relationships.
You will note, for example, that I base my Socialism on the idea of a
collective development and not on the "right" of every man to his own
labour, or his "right" to work, or his "right" to subsistence. All these
ideas of "rights" and of a social "contract" however implicit are merely
conventional ways of looking at things, conventions that have arisen in
the mercantile phase of human development.
Laws and rights, like common terms in speech, are provisional things,
conveniences for taking hold of a number of cases that would otherwise
be unmanageable. The appeal to Justice is a necessarily inadequate
attempt to de-individualize a case, to eliminate the self's biassed
attitude. I have declared that it is my wilful belief that everything
that exists is significant and necessary. The idea of Justice seems to
me a defective, quantitative application of the spirit of that belief to
men and women. In every case you try and discover and act upon a
plausible equity that must necessarily be based on arbitrary
assumptions.
There is no equity in the universe, in the various spectacle outside our
minds, and the most terrible nightmare the human imagination has ever
engendered is a Just God, measuring, with himself as the Standard,
against finite men. Ultimately there is no adequacy, we are all weighed
in the balance and found wanting.
So, as the recognition of this has grown, Justice has been tempered with
Mercy, which indeed is no more than an attempt to equalize things by
making the factors of the very defect that is condemned, its
condonation. The modern mind fluctuates uncertainly somewhere between
these extremes, now harsh and now ineffectual.
To me there seems no validity in these quasi-absolute standards.
A man seeks and obeys standards of equity simply to economize his moral
effort, not because there is anything true or sublime about justice, but
because he knows he is too egoistic and weak-minded and obsessed to do
any perfect thing at all, because he cannot trust himself with his own
transitory emotions unless he trains himself beforehand to observe a
predetermined rule. There is scarcely an eventuality in life that
without the help of these generalizations would not exceed the average
man's intellectual power and moral energy, just as there is scarcely an
idea or an emotion that can be conveyed without the use of faulty and
defective common names. Justice and Mercy are indeed not ultimately
different in their nature from such other conventions as the rules of a
game, the rules of etiquette, forms of address, cab tariffs and
standards of all sorts. They are mere organizations of relationship
either to economize thought or else to facilitate mutual understanding
and codify common action. Modesty and self-submission, love and service
are, in the right system of my beliefs, far more fundamental rightnesses
and duties.
We are not mercantile and litigious units such as making Justice our
social basis would imply, we are not select responsible persons mixed
with and tending weak irresponsible wrong persons such as the notion of
Mercy suggests, we are parts of one being and body, each unique yet
sharing a common nature and a variety of imperfections and working
together (albeit more or less darkly and ignorantly) for a common end.
We are strong and weak together and in one brotherhood. The weak have no
essential rights against the strong, nor the strong against the weak.
The world does not exist for our weaknesses but our strength. And the
real justification of democracy lies in the fact that none of us are
altogether strong nor altogether weak; for everyone there is an aspect
wherein he is seen to be weak; for everyone there is a strength though
it may be only a little peculiar strength or an undeveloped
potentiality. The unconverted man uses his strength egotistically,
emphasizes himself harshly against the man who is weak where he is
strong, and hates and conceals his own weakness. The Believer, in the
measure of his belief, respects and seeks to understand the different
strength of others and to use his own distinctive power with and not
against his fellow men, in the common service of that synthesis to which
each one of them is ultimately as necessary as he.
