Dancing Back Into Elfland

Imagine a forest. Make it a good forest. Actually imagine a forest you can’t really imagine because the real world is always surprising you; the real world is a source of wonder and of encountering that which is beyond our own selves. It contains danger, and pain, and beauty, and grandeur. So imagine a forest you can’t quite imagine — a forest haunted by wonder.

Now imagine that you are traveling through that forest. How do you want to do it? What is, in your mind, the best possible way to be traveling in a forest? Do you want a man-made highway running through it? Do you want a car to drive on that road? Maybe a hiking path? Or do you even really want to get out of the forest? Maybe you are happy with a trail? Or how about just a guide — someone who really knows this forest and who can make your time here worth while.

Now imagine a life. Make it a good life. Actually imagine a life you can’t really imagine because real life is always a surprise; real life is a source of wonder and of encountering that which is beyond our own selves. It contains danger, and pain, and beauty, and grandeur. So imagine a life you can’t quite imagine — a life haunted by wonder.

Now imagine that you are living that life. How do you want to do it? What is, in your mind, the best possible way of living through a life? Do you want man-made structures cutting though it to make it easier to navigate? Do you want a way to insulate yourself from the extremes of the life? Maybe some rules for how get through it? Or do you even really want to get out of the life? Maybe you are happy with some general guidelines for living it? Or how about just a guide — someone intimately acquainted with suffering and joy, with living itself and can make your time in the life worthwhile.

This comparison begins to get at what I think my favorite poem in the DaoDeJing is getting at. Poem 38 reads in part as follows:

A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,And is therefore good.A foolish man tries to be good,And is therefore not good.… Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.When goodness is lost, there is kindness.When kindness is lost, there is justice.When justice is lost, there is ritual.Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of the Tao.It is the beginning of folly.

This echoes one of the best quotes from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity:

…though Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.

And the same sentiment appears in the Mystic Muslim Poet Rumi:

Beyond good and bad, there is a field, I’ll meet you there.

Aristotle made similar points when he talked about morality, calling it not at act, but a habit. Of course each of these thinkers had different ideas about how to achieve this state of goodness, but the thing they all seem to agree on — to have discovered — is that the good life, the right life, is an un-reflective sort of thing. That is, they saw that living well is not about a technique. It is wandering in a forest, not getting through the forest. Specifically, for each of these folks, any ethical system is a degradation from the whole point of things. Ethical systems are, at best, a concession to our brokenness.

I find that DaoDeJing breaks it down most clearly, starting with the the first step down from right-being (the Tao/Dao). The poem presents, in roughly narrative form, a brief taxonomy of ethical systems, all of which have had their own moments in history.

Non-Ethics and Flourishing

The Tao

As a Christian, I would characterize being with the Tao/Dao as being with Christ. It is following the suffering King, the Prince of Peace, and Lord of Joy in the dance of life. To follow Jesus is to give up on the notion of where we are going and to focus instead in who we are with. It is a matter of being rather than a matter of getting somewhere. This is existence characterized by relationship and love, it is being in the forest; nobody knows what it leads to, we only know that it is right it is flourishing.

Virtue Ethics

Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.

The loss of un-reflective, flourishing existence, is goodness. A preoccupation with becoming like the sort of person who just is un-reflectively good. This is the ethics enunciated by Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, it is a system built, not out of an intimate knowledge of the Tao, but of a careful observation of those who do. To characterize this shift in Biblical terms, it is the fall, an attempt to systematize and know what is beyond knowledge. It is a diminution because it is an attempt to squeeze the infinitude of possibilities of being into our finite minds. It is the centipede’s dilemma: we stop dancing in order to work out how we were doing it and find that we cannot start again. So we begin to study other dancers and awkwardly ape their movements.

Kantian Ethics

When goodness is lost, there is kindness.

When that proves unsustainable, when we discover that we do not have the mental or moral fortitude to make ourselves into good persons, we resort and therefore diminish to kindness. Kindness — treating people correctly, as people — is also characteristic of un-reflectively good people but it is not a rule it is something they simply are. This is the ethics of people who know what flourishing looks like and are trying to discipline themselves towards it. Imagine someone who is trying to behave in a kind way, not because kindness is a natural reaction for them but because they know that they ought to be, it feels a little uncomfortable doesn’t it?

Divine Command Theory — the Rules

When kindness is lost, there is justice.

When people trying to be kind to one another fails to hold society together we resort of laws (what Laozi characterizes as justice though I don’t particularly like that definition of the word). We make rules prohibiting harmful behavior and then we institutionalize ways in which to harm the people who break those rules. At this level we get the many ethical systems which insist on rigid set of rules (or the principles from which those rules ought to be derived). This is also the level on which our whole system of human rights operates — it is the level below which we have tried to guarantee we will not go. This is where most religions live and operate in discomfort together with other less religious secular systems and the classically liberal understanding of human rights.

Utilitarianism, Objectivism

When justice is lost, there is ritual.

If we take the concept of ritual out of a classical Chinese context and put it in a contemporary Western one we get something like social norms or manners. When basic allegiance to human rights and laws fails to guarantee social coherence or human flourishing, we resort to being polite to one another. The whole idea here is that we need to just not hurt anybody. Think about the number of calls there have been recently for a return to civility or decorum. The yearning for norms which are enforced by social acceptance rather than institutional violence seems to be the last gasp of a society trying to hold together as a benefit to its own members. When it fails, there isn’t much left; all of our barriers to evil have been broken. We are no longer un-reflectively good, we are not trying to emulate goodness, virtue holds insufficient attraction for us, our laws have become brutal and unjust, and social acceptance has become tyrannical and stifling.

The Narrative

It is worth pointing out that this downward progression can also be characterized as forward movement. Each system is built, in some ways, on a recognition of the failures of the types of system above it. Virtue ethics begins with the recognition that there is flourishing and that we aren’t doing it. Justice ethics recognizes that those who try and fail to be virtuous without structural and institutional constraints tend to end up making things worse for everyone (think about the misogyny of the Roman empire’s ultimate conflation of virtue with masculinity) so, giving up on making people better, we bring in rules backed by the threat of violence in order to establish a sort of lowest common denominator in our relationships with one another (and sometimes, but far to rarely, the rest of the world). But those power structures and systems always seem to end up disenfranchising and ultimately marginalizing and oppressing people so we dismantle them, we deconstruct them, and we narrow the scope of our concern to harm and fairness. At this point we are probably having some trouble enunciating any justification for those to concerns (instead the easy thing to do is to become appalled with anyone who would dare to question them) but we are clinging to them with intense focus. This is also a movement forward, the concerns at each stage were real and serious concerns; with the failure of each previous stage the scope of our moral universe narrowed but also intensified, it is a process of “Maybe we can’t do all of it but we will at least manage this area of greatest concern”. But the thing is doomed, it must eventually fall to pieces as the debates about negative and positive rights emerge, as harm is accepted for the sake of preventing more or different harm to those more worthy of protection.

And then we are back where we started, or at a Looking Glass Land image of where we started. The systems have failed, the destination has evaporated or proved impossibly distant. There is only a lost wandering in the woods. We did not know good and evil, then we learned it, and now we have lost it again. It was always beyond us, the question is what comes next. We were, then we thought we knew but did not know, now we begin to know that we do not know.

Now if only we could stop trying to get somewhere and just be, we might begin to dance again

The Justice of Horton

Do you think that there is a way that things are supposed to be?  I don't mean a belief in the "best of all possible worlds" that Voltaire liked to make fun of, I mean a sort of basic sense that some things are just right and that sometimes a situation is just wrong?

This is an elephant on a tree

One of my favorite children's books is Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss (one of my favorite children's authors). In Horton our hero, Horton the Elephant, agrees to "egg sit" for a lazy bird (Mayzie) who promptly takes off and vacations on the beach for several months leaving Horton on her nest. We see him suffer through increasingly unpleasant trials beginning with bad weather and going on to abandonment by his friends, abduction (along with the egg, nest, and tree) by hunters and finally abject humiliation. Throughout it all Horton says to himself "I meant what I said and I said what I meant; an elephant's faithful one hundred percent" and sticks to his commitment. Then, (spoiler alert) at the climax, Mayzie stumbles upon him and the egg hatches. Seeing that it is hatching, Mayzie tries to re-claim her egg but when it breaks open, out flies... you guessed it... an elephant-bird! And Horton get to go home with a child while Mayzie pouts in a corner and everyone exclaims that "It should be, it should be, it SHOULD be like that!" - A sentiment with which I heartily concur. It should be like that.

Hard work should be rewarded, bad people should get their comeuppance, children should outlive their parents, the good should thrive. And all of that and so much more; all of the should be like is what I mean by the word "justice".

I think that the idea of justice has been misunderstood for a while now, especially in American culture. It is not so much that we have gotten it completely wrong as that we have narrowed it too much. Most people I talk to want to use "justice" as a synonym for "fairness" or, if they see a distinction, they will treat justice as a more powerful or deeper version of fairness. Thus someone might say "It wasn't only fair, it was just". But while fairness is often a part of justice, it is by no means the whole of it. To be fair is merely to treat everyone equally, to be just is to treat each person and every thing the way that person or thing should be treated. And that treatment will only be fair (though technically "fair" has experienced its own unfortunate devolution over the last several hundred years) if it treats them all equally.

Totally didn't see this coming

Here is where the practical problem comes into play: it is only possible to be just if you have some idea of how thing ought to be. To be just is to say "this should be like that" and to then go about trying to make it so. Neither a determinist (who thinks that all things already are as they have to be), a modernist/non-supernaturalist (who has no grounds for claiming that there is any such thing as should be only what, in fact, is) nor a post-modernist (who doesn't think anyone has a right to talk about what should be for anyone else and besides how sure are they that there really is a this or a that  anyway) can be just.

Now please don't misunderstand me, I am not saying that those folks can't be virtuous, kind, fair or egalitarian. They are often all of those things. In fact, they are often very just - I would point especially to the social gospel of the liberal Christian, modernist movement of the last century and the "social justice" movement so popular among contemporary post-moderns as wonderful and encouraging examples of people loving justice. What I am saying is that those worldviews give them no grounds for believing in or even really understanding justice. To the extent that they have it, they have it by tradition, by uncritical conscience or by divine Grace.
  But it takes a pre-modern (eastern or western) to get justice.

Socrates

A little history: the basic concept of justice in the west seems to have originated with Socrates. Plato's most famous book The Republic is entirely concerned with the question "what is justice" (the Greek word was dikaiosune). After quickly demolishing arguments that justice is "the will of the strong over the weak" (a view that stayed pretty well dead until Nietzsche came along) and the slightly stronger claim that it is "doing right by friends and harm to enemies", Socrates spends most of the book defending the idea that to be just is to act and become in accordance with the way things are, or put another way, to love the good and conform to it. (He then has a lot of ideas about how that can be accomplished and a really unfortunate extended-analogy about the soul and the city-state which has given rise to some misconceptions about his political views; but I won't get into all that right now). But from then, right up until the enlightenment, the idea that justice was conforming to the way things should be was the dominant understanding of the west.

Over in the east, Lao Tzu seems to have independently come up with the same basic idea. He was able to speak much more simply about "life in conformity with the Tao". Confucius then watered it down a bit by trying to get really practical by providing elaborate descriptions of what different 'tao-conforming' lives would look like. In both cases, eastern and western pre-modernism seems to have independently agreed that justice requires first an understanding of how things should be and then an attempt to conform oneself to that understanding.

Lao Tzu

Finally, in the contemporary world, justice is most clearly talked about by natural law and virtue ethicist (who are mostly going back to the pre-modern thinkers). Most notable would be CS Lewis who showed, rather convincingly, in The Abolition of Man that belief in the natural law, the Tao, is necessary for humanity to remain human. The love of that Tao and the attempt to conform to it is justice.

But why is justice so important? Well, a sense of justice implies a vision of how things should be, and without that, I can't help but think that there will be a great deal of drifting about without any real direction. Quite practically, it is justice that tells me that I cannot do just anything to accomplish a good goal, for a world in which one problem is fixed and I have been corrupted by a terrible act (even in the service of a good goal) is not the way things should be. It is justice that tells me things can be better and it is justice that urges me to make them better. It is by justice that I recognize injustice. Justice is the eye of the conscience; what I do blindly by conscience is illuminated by justice.

Justice is  Badass