Political Justice Read online

  By denying the child the chance to learn the arts such as music, fine art, language and literature, we deny our own civilisation the next generation of artists. Whilst this is primarily an aesthetic question, it is my own firm belief that artists and philosophers have just as much to offer society as scientists and architects. Without the proper tools in education to facilitate artistic thought, we will confine the next generation of children to a horrid life of minimal contemplation, monotony, dullness and abject slavery. To look at the faces of commuters in today’s metropoleis is to look upon the faces of the disappointed: it is necessary for all of us to work, and without education we cannot ever hope to do so, but if all our life is work, within a routine that never stops, within employment which we cannot shake off, then we are either machines or we are slaves. To remove the chance for the young to learn the arts of expression, the knowledge of old and the powerful nature of human interaction outside of the scientific world is to condemn them to live this sort of life. We risk stifling our own civilisation by obsessing about false notions of practicality — it is certainly not a reason why human beings live. We do not live for monotony or slavery; we live for each other.

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  Finally we shall consider the role of political institutions. Political institutions are structured and indeed effective forms of national government. Godwin praises, for the most part, the efficacy of political institutions. Political institutions are those things which create and enforce our laws: Parliament, the judiciary, the police. Institutions govern the behaviour of individuals, and as Godwin states, they ‘keep men pliant’. On the one hand, we may consider this to be a restriction on our freedom, and Godwin certainly would be no stranger to defending the endless powers of free human reason. Nevertheless, if a political institution is inherently, by nature of the men who run it, or by nature of the laws it enforces, virtuous, then surely political institutions can be nothing but a force of virtue, and thus, moral improvement?

  It should be natural for a political institution to operate within a communitarian system. Our parliaments represent the people at the level of national community, individual police forces serve local communities, and the courts are divided up to hold jurisdiction in different parts of the country. Thus, it can be said that political institutions serve local agendas, which look ever upwards towards the national community as a whole. Political institutions, by their very nature, hold communities together and maintain the rule of law within them. Without communities there would surely be nothing but a faceless society, where individuals alone define their own actions not by any care or attention given to those they know, or those who might be trying to make similar decisions around them, but purely by selfish ends, driven by nothing but an interest in the self. Self-love is a sure path to vice, as it throws true virtue out of the window and replaces it with vice as a means to further self-love. Political institutions, then, not only permit us to live in safety, by protecting our right not to be harmed by those who indulge in self-love, but also reduce self-love in general by those means.

  If political institutions are secularised, in the sense at least, in Godwin’s terms, that they are not plagued by ‘superstition’, then provided that they are imbued (usually by cultivating these same virtues in those who run the institutions) with the political virtues of liberty, justice and security, they may actually further the cause of reason among the people whom the institution serves. A judge should not be swayed to pass a judgement by superstition and fear of supernatural reprimand but by the interests of virtue itself. Political institutions ensure that the judge will condemn the thief, not because he will be struck dead by God if he does not but because the thief is an affront to God by the very nature of his misdeed. In short, the thief has harmed his fellow members of the community by taking what is not his — it is virtuous, therefore, for the judge to protect his community by using his institutional power to condemn the thief. As such, the moral quality of the whole community is improved by the punishment of the thief.

  There is of course great risk associated with political institutions: that they may present and reinforce by their actions incorrect or irrational moral values. Godwin considers the Catholic belief in transubstantiation — that those taking the Eucharist in church are not eating bread but the physical body of Christ, not drinking wine but the literal blood of Jesus. It does not take much power of reason to dismiss such notions, but the belief in this as an article of faith was reinforced by centuries of institutionalised practice. With the separation of Church and State becoming more common, if not officially, then at least unofficially such as in Britain, compliance with such beliefs is no longer enforced. It is certainly true that in any sort of moral or factual quandary, political institutions can harm reason and virtue as much as promote them. But take away political institutions and we take away the means to change such virtues. The replacement of the Church with an independent civil judiciary with a firm belief in liberty and justice is enough to remove more troublesome religious prescriptions and begin the path to a morality based on community, mutual security and cooperation within the nation, to which religion may be a mutual friend but not the sole governor. Whether or not the individual derives his morality from God, the nation (rather than human souls) as a whole is more easily and effectively improved when independent political institutions strive for virtue. Political institutions may occasionally encounter individuals who propagate false virtue, but the medium is there to work within an institution to change it, rather than tear it down and be left with nothing.

  Godwin’s suggestion that political institutions ‘give permanence to our errors’ is itself erroneous. Political institutions have changed greatly over time, since as Godwin himself claims, error draws attention to its own erroneousness. Vicious conduct demands its own destruction. For instance, the election of members of Parliament used to be limited to only about 300,000 people at the time of the Great Reform Act 1832, in a country of 24 million;3 that is 1.25% of the population. Today, after years of reform and recognition of what was perceived to be an error, we have universal suffrage for both men and women. We never used to have a police force, and county sheriffs struggled to prevent organised criminals such as highwaymen who plagued British roads. The introduction of local ‘runners’ and then the police force did much to curb organised crime, and crime today is much lower than in the past because of it. Political institutions do change, then, and usually for the better after long and considered periods of time when reform can be taken seriously. Political institutions are therefore not dens of either virtue or vice but instead show a fluid development between both. They remain to this day one of the most effective instruments in the promotion of moral virtue and a politically just society on account of their defence of many of our most treasured rights.

  Chapter V

  The Influence of Institutions Refuted

  It is the opinion of many on the left that political institutions serve little but to defend the interests of those few into whose hands is concentrated the vast majority of wealth and property. In Godwin’s time, as is becoming more and more true today, the disparity of wealth between those at the bottom and those at the top of our societies was profound. Whilst those at the top are no longer the aristocracy of despotic monarchies of Europe, we have created for ourselves a new aristocracy who continue to hold the majority of the world’s wealth. Celebrity, politician and similar exalted social concepts are all guilty of this. Of course, there are also many differences now to Godwin’s time: we have a much more generous social welfare system, the standard of living of those in poverty is much more hygienic and tolerable than it was in the late 18th century, and government is much more representative than it was, considering the expansion of the voting franchise to all. But Godwin’s criticism of the inequality of property is not necessarily fair on political institutions.

  It would not be fair to criticise political institutions for protecting the wealthy from the crimes of others. Whilst many o
f the poor of Godwin’s time were driven to crime in order to survive, that is indicative of wider social problems with poverty and the failure of governance rather than the failure of political institution itself. The court cannot be blamed for upholding the law. As we have discovered in the previous chapter, it is perfectly reasonable for the rule of law to be enforced, and the thief, no matter what his motives, does not excuse his crime purely because he suffers from poverty. Given the differences in the poverty of Godwin’s day and today’s relative poverty, we may also make the argument for economic inequality in general. It has generally been proved that the free market (in its truest sense of being generally free) has benefitted the citizens of the world most effectively when all have the freedom to participate in such markets and when trade in those markets is conducted in a virtuous way. The latter statement is crucial: a market cannot, in fact, be free if those conducting trade within it are not virtuous. It is therefore disappointing to look upon many modern markets and see the outward unfair trading that goes on. But within any truly free market, a degree of economic inequality is required for there to be any incentive to trade in the first place. The very concept of economy relies on certain people having something that others want; otherwise, there would be no reason for the ones wanting to strive to obtain what they want. To quote the famous actor Morgan Freeman in a recent interview in response to the assertion that certain people could not bring themselves out of poverty because of the place and situation in which they were brought up: ‘Man, the bus runs every day.’4

  Godwin goes on to describe what he considers to be the ‘tyranny’ of the rich, enforced by their creation and administration of the law. He claims that the rich are ‘directly or indirectly the legislators of the state’. He is correct in the sense that the wealthy have a great deal of influence on legislation, and they always have. However, we can contend that what Godwin is describing is not a free society. The wealthy may be able to pressure and influence political institutions in order to corrupt them and swing them towards their influence, but many constitutions explicitly stipulate a separation of powers in order to prevent much of this corruption, and it is the right of every citizen today to lobby their government or their representatives. It is only when the wealthy begin to exclude the rest of the population from lobbying or legal and political representation that Godwin’s criticism becomes pertinent. This sort of society is not a free society, but the political institutions under which Godwin lived certainly operated relatively freely in Britain. So whilst the assertion that political institutions only serve the interests of the rich is false, it is also true that we should take some heed of Godwin’s assertion and consider it a warning for the future. The abolition of institutions such as legal aid by modern government should be opposed seriously and considerately, since this is certainly a sign that we are on the path which leads the rich to exclude poorer citizens from using the institutions created to serve the interests and security of all.

  Many of the laws which Godwin cites as favouring the rich over the poor, such as the game laws forbidding a farmer from shooting an animal from a rich man’s estate which is preying on livestock from his farm, have since been abolished and replaced in favour of the farmer, and rightly so. Such is the nature of men’s realisation of political justice. Nevertheless, there is one further point worth considering: that regarding opinion and wealth. It is as much the case today as it was in the age of Godwin that there is a certain extant snobbery which considers the opinions of those without certain items of property or without wealth in general to be less relevant than the opinions of those who are wealthy and therefore might be considered by some to be better educated in political matters. The prevalence of this worldview has been seen very recently in the general elections of 2015 and 2017 as well as the European Union membership referendum of 2016. It is unfortunate that a sizeable number of people, as seen most obviously in the ‘anti-Brexit marches’ in London following the referendum result, were of the opinion that those who disagreed with them were ‘exploited’ and ‘misinformed’. In political discourse, no matter what the opinions of the individual are, such snobbery is an active danger to a democratic system. Soon enough, might not the time come when such individuals consider silencing those whom they consider to be the source of such ‘misinformation’? As we have already affirmed, to ban the literature or opinions of those who hold differing opinions can only serve the hindrance of progress in political justice.

  Monopolies held on political opinion and economic control can never allow for a clear path to a free and just society, and in this respect, Godwin is correct. More often than not, it is those who are wealthier who are quicker to jump on opportunities to silence and control those beneath them who express dissent. However, the solution is not the destruction of our political institutions and the creation of new ones from square one, or none at all in their place. We cannot blame political institutions for upholding and representing the law as they were set up to do; it is merely the actions within or upon those institutions which can do damage to our quest for political justice. So it is the duty of citizens seeking such justice to operate against such forces within the framework of political institutions. Such institutions, as we have said before, have been inherited by us from our ancestors in order to serve the interests of all in the nation. Let us then make use of those institutions created to serve us, and work to achieve more political justice from whatever (however little) has been left to us, rather than destroy them and be left with no justice whatsoever.

  Chapter VI

  Perpetual Human Improvement

  We have touched before on the nature of humanity as a race that perpetually seeks to improve itself and build upon the innovations of its past generations. If history can teach us anything, then it is this inherent nature of improvement. Let us follow the example of Godwin, then, and continue by examining humanity’s ability for perpetual improvement.

  No matter how much we may criticise what we now perceive to be the moral deficiencies of history, no matter how much we are dissatisfied with certain customs and actions of our ancestors, none can deny the leaps and bounds that mankind has made in its progress throughout history. The journey from caveman to skyscraper-dweller has not been a smooth one, nor has it been especially quick, but it is no less remarkable because of this. Whilst other animals act on instinct and learn by repetition and the black-and-white nature of pain versus reward, our capacity for reason and logic places us on a higher plane when compared to most other living creatures. Whilst it does not eliminate our slavery to instinct completely, and it is by no means a universal tool in overcoming earthly obstacles, it does give us a certain thirst for understanding, or as many philosophers have called it, ‘truth’. Human history has progressed on a generally positive incline since the first appearance of the race, both in terms of the structure of its civilisation and in terms of its adaptation to its environments. Once again, we need only observe the differences between the caveman and the Persian farmer, the medieval farmer and the 18th-century Enlightenment gentleman, or the Victorian prude and the modern human to see these positive changes throughout time. Sure enough, this progression has been by no means a purely straight line. There have been plenty of bumps along the way; the Dark Ages following the fall of the Roman Empire, when much classical knowledge was lost, attest to this. It was not truly until the destruction of Constantinople and the discovery of lost books that the thinkers of Europe began to exploit these new ideas and technologies to the full. But even in the medieval period, great writers like Dante, Petrarch and Chaucer still came and went, and have made significant contributions to literature and philosophy. The very fact that the Dark Ages set mankind back by some ways in terms of its progression did not stop great men from continuing to strive for greater things. Thus, no matter what setbacks humankind faces, it still desires to seek yet more knowledge and wisdom for itself.

  We may easily counter Godwinian assertions that institutions harm the further progression
of humankind by pointing out that almost all of the progress made by humanity across known history has taken place within the institutions which it created for itself, even if they might be flawed, and even if they might have faced certain setbacks. Reason can only extend as far as the human can think and understand the knowledge that has already been presented to him. It is necessary to discover new sources of knowledge if our powers of reason are to begin finding new wisdoms to apply to that knowledge. Anything that we might assert to be true before we have knowledge of its nature is nothing other than pure abstraction. It is abstraction that we shall consider next — for it has been a pet hate of conservatives, and love of radicals, for at least the past three hundred years.

  Abstraction can be defined as an idea which has not yet been proved or created in practice and exists solely as a concept within the mind. For example, I might claim that it is possible to breed a flying pig, but this is purely an abstract idea, and is extremely difficult if not impossible to prove in practice. Equally, I might claim that it is possible to obtain political justice by abolishing political institutions, but this is difficult to prove to be pragmatic, since civilised society has always operated according to political institutions. Even supposedly ‘barbarian’ nations of antiquity had governmental and judicial structures of some primitive kind. The only time when political institutions did not exist was before civilisation existed, and our ancestors were first experimenting with the ideas for institutions by trial and error in order to find the right system. Here is the crux of the matter: there is simply no need for abstraction. All of the work trying and testing ideas for institutions and governments has been done by those who came before, and we would do well to appreciate the work they have done. New and innovative ideas can only be given practical assurances if they build upon or work within pre-existing institutions, seeking to improve them in some way in light of comprehensive evidence which can be supported either with fact or with convincing logic. This is how human civilisation has improved upon its pre-existing institutions for thousands of years.