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Has justice become sense-making? The many senses of the over-worked concept of justice allow justice to generally sound like a good idea to the atomized American. Even our best politicians repeat the term Justice, as if forgiveness and mercy were the irrational ways and means for religion. (separated from matters of the state) I think Americans in their deep mind control bubble crave sense-making, and they crave agency in what makes sense to them. They are confused, afraid and overworked. Their “education,” their language, their intellectual preoccupation with sex (including gender), are all reductionist. I generally try to approach this problem by looking at the logical positivist project to refine language and how that reduces larger things like houses, feelings, and communities into talk of a smaller, more atomized reality. So I focus on vagueness in my work because people in America badly need a way to synthesize information, houses, feelings, communities, etc. The effect of the English language is felt in everything else.
But vagueness is the linguistic approach; how to move to a political approach? I think people lean on some products of the Social Sciences to conceive the neoliberal “individual” and contrive a linking of hands with others to form a political community, the same way electrons link atoms, and the mind senses a great synthesis of atoms into a house. Even if that same mind doesn’t believe in things anymore, because we are told that everything is actually atoms, or subatomic particles, or quanta, etc. I originally approached the problem linguistically because it seems more fundamental. Justification using pseudo-scientific “experiments” with statistical language dominated the Social Sciences for a long time. The linguistic style of statistics was the persuasive force, though now, qualitative research diminishes that force somewhat. In any case the view that mathematics and therefore statistics are languages incited me to offer vagueness as a recognized form of synthesis.
Vagueness, although a very useful and widespread linguistic device, is not appropriate for politics and the Social Sciences that study politics. Media is the compelling force in politics. And it should be persuading people, not compelling us the way we got used to in our math classes.
The problem isn’t that Americans lack meaning, it’s that they’ve been told which meanings are permitted. Media outlets employ Elite People like Anand Giridharadas, a fixture of elite media commentary who wrote for the New York Times to argue that we shouldn’t listen to just anybody.
[Giridharadas]: “114 percent of Americans now having their own podcast, … Were there a German word for emotion-question (and it turns out there is), that title may be our era’s Gefühlsfrage. As people reel from crisis to crisis, outrage to outrage, this Gefühlsfrage hangs in the air and creates space for writers.”
That desire to regroup atomized communities to the tune of the New York Times was visible then. Not that the New York Times wanted us to really regroup, just enough for us to keep coming to them for their information-framing. Actually, we need space for the common writer, and Mr. Giridharadas attempted to rhetorically close that space, which is unhealthy politically. We need synthesis but not to the tune of the elite who brought us more neoliberal presidential candidates which were, unfortunately, the optimistic outcomes.
For the common human’s politics, instead of academic disciplines, we need another term/concept for synthesis. Justice seems to be the general answer to the Gefühlsfrage, but what is justice? Not a question I am prepared to answer, but I will make a guess that it is what is best for the state, in the same way we have an idea of what is best for ourselves, we extend that to the state, and that is justice. One of the oldest senses of justice was “Eye for an eye” which involves taking action in a symmetrical way to how we have been wronged. To some of us, justice means: if there is a problem, if we have been wronged, the “answer” is an action that hurts the wrong-doer in like kind. This kind of justice is obviously unachievable, there are many wrong doings that have no symmetrical punishment (unless you are completely taken in by capitalism: How much is unjustly getting cancer worth? Being cured of cancer?), but I think this old, violent, barbaric definition of justice resonates with the beleaguered people of America.
Americans feel wronged, and justice is how to act on the world so that it makes sense, a very material sense. Justice is the proposed answer. Just look at the amount of work in a court case to accomplish a minuscule amount of worldly justice. It is plainly not worth it except for the most grievous acts, even so, there are too many severe injustices. Any real-world event is too complex to set “right”, and only the ones that get attention are addressed, so every thought on how we have been wronged is clamoring for a like or a share, etc. What is the goal of Justice? We get one thing right, after great outcry, what next? There are too many things wrong, and that is the way it will always be.
American “education” can be found especially in American movies, where a keen sense of justice is fed with powerful images and stories, drawn from previous cultural mythologies and reframed to raise Justice to the highest political ideal. Once we are educated in this way, there is a terrible, schizophrenic dissonance between the expectation of Justice and the reality of American life. This causes a great deal of pain for the common human. Everyone’s individual fight for “Justice” feeds everyone’s own concept of being wronged, and Justice, even more.
For politics, I would propose another concept that does no cutting out of people’s eyes: the concept is Rhetoric, and in this case, I direct you to Deirdre McCloskey‘s works. Western philosophy tries to block up rhetoric as something for the sophist who isn’t interested in the truth, as if the truth and its persuasiveness could be separated. There is no separating Truth from its natural sweetness (and Deirdre agrees, read her wonderfully brief book on writing!). Here Deirdre writes “they are egg and yolk in a scrambled egg.” or “their differential equations are nonseparable.” Sweet language, such as poetry, expresses the truth best (not mathematical or statistical language). There is still freedom where there is truth. The freedom to be found is in our own creative interpretations. This freedom should not be limited to poetry. The more elastic concept that also allows freedom but is less categorically artistic is Rhetoric.
Related: https://questionsarepower.org/2014/09/08/the-valid-logical-argument/