Political Justice Read online

  Godwin considers language to be one of the most powerful tools in human advancement. Indeed, we have already discussed literature at length and the power of the written word. Language has certainly done well in furthering the course of ideas and the development of those ideas into coherent and practical institutions, but to place so much emphasis on language is potentially to miss far more important arguments. He considers the differences between hieroglyphic writing and alphabetic writing and draws the difference in societal progress at this distinction. For instance, he remarks that societies with alphabetic writing systems outperformed those cultures such as ancient Egypt, and these civilisations themselves had evolved from using pictures to represent sound (he considers hieroglyphics a separate language in and of itself, running concurrent with the real sounds of the language) to using an alphabet. He then concedes that China, for instance, still uses a hieroglyphic writing system, but considers this to be a cultural difference, yet observes that Chinese symbols are easily corrupted by the common people in everyday usage into new ones.

  Godwin’s argument is not wholly sound. Hieroglyphics may look alien to the user of the Roman alphabet, but this is purely a cultural distinction. The Roman alphabet itself is derived from a hieroglyphic writing system used by the ancient Phoenicians, in which ‘A’ (aleph) represented an ox, ‘B’ (beth) a house and so on. Letters are really symbols, and however speech is conveyed in written form, it continues to have the same relevance to human knowledge and progression. So what if the letters are arranged left to right, right to left, top to bottom? So what if the image of a snake represents ‘s’, an ox ‘a’? It is first speech that comes to us and then the ability to write. How we write is irrelevant. There have been great works written in Chinese, the Art of War of Sun Tzu, the Analects collected from Confucius; in Egypt, the most beautiful poems have been transcribed, such as those from Deir el-Medina.

  It is always content that has value, and in this vein, Godwin misses the most important mover of human progress, which is the nature of this content: reason and thought itself. If we did not have rational minds, we would not be able to undertake a comprehensive review of political justice; whether we could write it or not in this way or that does not change the fact that our nature allows us the ability to consider political justice at all. It is our minds that allow us to consider the notion of ‘justice’ in the first place rather than simply be driven to seek retribution at our own hands. We may well have to if the institutions of justice are not present, but we ensure that justice is always present in our society by maintaining institutions which uphold and propagate the notion of it. It is too sorry a thing that terms such as ‘justice’ and ‘political freedom’ are bandied around much like playthings in modern political discourse. These are in fact deep-seated philosophical ideas which have been established and discussed over millennia. To simply stand before a crowd and claim to be a pursuer of ‘justice’ is not enough, for we must know what that justice is we seek. This is why we are rational beings, since in order to properly achieve justice in society, we first move ourselves to define it. It may not be an easy task, but it is in this vein that humans have the capacity for perpetual improvement. We may never achieve true justice in its purest form, but by continually striving for it as well as other virtues, humanity has pulled itself out of caves and into skyscrapers. That struggle, to continually strive for improvement, even if it can never be fully achieved, is the most effective form of self-improvement.

  So Godwin is correct in many senses. Humankind has strong powers of improvement, but it would be dangerous to risk those powers on abstractions which would require us to begin from those same first steps our ancestors took when the quest for truth was first begun. It is only right for us to pursue our own betterment, but it is equally right to do so within the context of the betterment that has already been provided for us via the legacy of our ancestors. No one is arguing that there is no room left for future improvement, but if the arguments of thinkers such as Godwin are to be believed, then there is no point for us, in his own words, ‘to look back’, since he would apparently present us with a brand-new set of principles which do not even attempt to build upon the past but rather offer a radical new vision which has not yet been tried.

  Chapter VII

  Perception and Liberty

  The Roman philosopher Lucretius considered that the mind, as well as the eyes, had the capacity to ‘see’, albeit in different ways to the senses. All human understanding is built upon perceptions of some kind, be they physical forms manifested in sight, sound, smell and touch or purely mental perceptions. But these physical sensations can as much affect the mind as they can affect the body — Godwin, for instance, points out that corporal punishment affects the mind morally as it affects the body physically; that is to say that by associating the pain of being beaten with a certain action deemed to be immoral, our minds work in such a way as to prevent us from being beaten again, and avoid the action previously undertaken. Of course, corporal punishment is not used in most modern schools any longer, but similar punishments are exacted on animals, which associate the loud assailing of their ears by shouting or a clip on the snout with a certain ‘bad’ action, which trains them against misbehaving again in the future.

  Of course, this sort of thing is only effected immediately after any sort of misdeed, since retrospective punishment would only be effective on those who constantly make use of their reason, thus associating a past deed with a present punishment. Most of us are not like this, so it is only partly true that physical perception has a relationship to moral perceptions.

  Our ideas are divided into two main categories: our imagination and our sense-derived perception. Imagination can conjure all number of scenarios, be they derived from real people and events or be they the mere creations of the individual’s mind, imagination remains a subjective experience which exists purely within the experience of the one imagining. Our sense-perception, on the other hand, whilst it is also subjective in the sense that we can only ever see the world through our own eyes and no one else’s, is based on the observation of a world which is by nature objective; that is to say, it exists independently, without us. The world is our ‘idea’ inasmuch as our own perception of the events that happen within it guide our own interpretation of what sort of world it actually is. Hence, there are those of optimistic character and those who are pessimistic; we see men and women who cannot find any inherent reason why they would wish to keep living, as far as they view the world, and there are those who think that life is the greatest gift ever given to man. These distinctions seem to me not to be derived through various interpretations of ‘illness’ and ‘health’ of the mind but instead via differing perceptions of events which are subject to change over time and by outside influence once we learn about the perceptions of those around us. This is precisely why the person who sees no inherent meaning in life can be brought around to find some — not because his brain must be suppressed into thinking the ‘right way’ but because he can be shown that there are other ways of viewing the world, or that there are opportunities within it which he could not see in the past.

  In today’s world, we increasingly turn towards a system which dictates a ‘correct’ way of viewing the world. Those who question it or offer alternative ways of interpreting life are victimised for their disagreement. Kierkegaard, for instance, once famously declared, ‘But how long is threescore and ten years? Why not end it all now?’5 If he were to express such sentiment to a doctor today, he would be sectioned and restrained, further adding reason to his legitimate belief that the established view of life was ridiculous. A few years after writing that same tract, Kierkegaard came around to a belief in Jesus Christ: ‘to lose your mind and gain God’, and finally he found some meaning in life. It takes a small amount of critical thinking, or perhaps not even that, perhaps just reading of different worldviews, to change one’s mind. The man despairing over his lack of luck in love need only meet a beautiful woman
who loves him back to have his mind changed on his opinion that no one would ever love him. There are subtle events and thoughts which can influence individuals to make radical changes to their lives, and it is all derived from the way we perceive the world ourselves, and what others tells us about how they see the world. What can we learn from this, more importantly? We can see from this that there is nothing more important than listening to others who hold differing viewpoints to ourselves, since in listening to them we might come to have strength in our own perceptions, or look again at the world and come to a different conclusion to before. Everything is subjective, and thus everything, like the human beings who observe this world, is subject to change. Whether or not the change is subtle or remarkable is irrelevant — change always occurs, it is merely up to us as individuals to decide which one suits us best.

  Perceptions may be incredibly subjective, but equally subjective is the nature of the human body itself. Whilst others can influence our perceptions to a certain extent, and thus the pressure of our peers may influence our own free will, our bodies remain our property, no matter what the mind is influenced by. The human body is as much a part of knowing as it is a part of mundane life, and to overlook it is to neglect ourselves in a literal sense. All knowing begins with the body if all knowing begins with sense: I awake each morning, stretch out my limbs and know that I have awoken and I am to face a new day; I open my eyes and see the world around me that I recognise so well, I reach out to touch the glass of water by my bedside and I know that it is there because I can feel it, and I can raise the water to my lips and feel the cool liquid seep down my throat, providing life to each cell it touches. To know about one’s surroundings is to know one’s body; to know about oneself is to know one’s body; to know anything is to know one’s body! The body is an object, and exists objectively, without the need for experience, and yet it is our bodies that are the instruments of our every experience — without them we would not exist, and yet even if each one of us were born completely numb, we would still exist in a bodily form. The fact that we are able to interpret the world through our own minds, and the sensations that our minds receive thereof, is a blessing for which we cannot help but be grateful to whatever force it was that created us.

  For us to be able to understand the world through our bodies, however, is dependent upon the laws of nature itself. Isaac Newton was the first to record these laws properly, and we know from his theories of gravity and motion that that no body can move without a force acting upon it. Every sensation we feel, and thus everything we come to perceive about the world, is derived from some power we have acted upon, or via the body we are interacting with responding to the force we place on it. Every part of nature is inspired by force — thus, for humans who feel that force in their nerves, everything is sense-based. Everyone learns about Newton in school, as he rightfully should do, but why not learn also what allows us to perceive the very world in which we live? Why not connect what we feel to how we live? The flowers in the bed of my garden move with the wind, and if I were to set up an object against them, they would move over time to bend away from it towards the sunlight that they need for life — they too can perceive the world around them and adapt to it based on what they feel. Humans, who have far greater powers of mind, can surely do much greater things based on the knowledge of the things they feel! We see every subject with our eyes, yet we pay so little respect to our eyes. Our eyes are the source of everything — the things we feel, and therefore know, would have no form without eyes. Our eyes give us so much more than sight.

  We all dream. We close our eyes some nights, and visions appear to us, uncalled for, surreal, sometimes disturbing, sometimes thought-provoking — we all dream, even those who lose their sight. What we have seen gives us the subject of our visions, for everything we see, everything we perceive, sits in our minds and forms the subject of our knowledge. Our knowledge never sleeps, even when our bodies are inert. As greatly intelligent beings, we require great amounts of mental stimulation, and our minds can never fully stop working — hence they work even in a resting state, and objects of perception we have observed and understood during our time awake come back to us in sleep — sometimes to haunt and frighten, other times to educate, still other times to replicate. The fact is that dreams are nothing more than the projection of our perceptions onto our mind’s eye (by which I mean the seat of our imagination, the first category of idea) so that we see, or rather imagine we are seeing, something in our dream, when in reality it is merely an idea wrought into shape by our restless mind. It is easy to understand why the ancients believed that dreams were given to humans by gods, or that spirits of the dead could appear to the living in dreams. All that we try to understand and create visual representations of in our minds on Earth — God, our dead companions and lovers — all these things we perceive. Thus, it is only natural that those perceptions will return to us in dream as their figures form mental pictures for us to look back over. Before we could think seriously about whether or not deities and spirits had a major role to play in our societies, we might well have been disposed to blame dreams on the supernatural, especially if we were of a superstitious mind. But being in the knowledge of the philosophy of sense and perception, and the knowledge derived from it, we can safely say that dreams are nothing more than projections of reality. That does not mean that dreams cannot be inspiring, however.

  Aside from time spent thinking and writing, I enjoy musical composition. I like to think that what I write is enough to express what I personally seek to put across in the music, and whilst I would never consider myself a master, I have devoted considerable study to music in order to learn the techniques which the masters used to put their own artistic visions into practice. A number of years ago, whilst contemplating whether or not it was practical for me to even begin planning the composition of an orchestral symphony, I felt so overshadowed by the works of the master composers that I almost gave up on the idea. However, one evening I saw the figure of Ludwig van Beethoven in a dream, who told me under protest that whilst I didn’t think I could ever match, let alone surpass, works such as his, he thought that ‘That is no reason to stop you. You won’t know until you try.’ Did Beethoven come to me in that dream and tell me to write a symphony? Certainly not! I had been listening to the works of the man and reading about him at the time; he was most certainly deeply impressed on my mind’s eye. The fact of the matter was that I did want to write a symphony, but my own anxieties and fears kept me pinned down — my dream was a manifestation of my own desire; it was merely presented as an image formed out of my recent perceptions and associations between my own desire to be a composer and the respect I had for the great composer.

  A few years after my dream and subsequent composition of the work, the symphony was performed — but not because some other person or spirit told me to ‘get on with it’. I reached that stage purely by my own volition, though I needed a few pushes and shoves along the way from my own subconscious perception. There was something inside me which drove me on despite my predisposition to abandon my own projects. It is that same will that has driven me to write this book. But if our sensations and perceptions (derived from the body) are the root of all knowledge, what is it, if anything, that drives the mind separately from knowledge? It is perfectly possible to not be especially intellectually gifted and still live a life which seems at least to be fulfilled. Perception is important in the forming of our worldviews, but is there something beneath that, which permeates the whole of humanity? I have touched before on the idea that there is something which drives us on, something which causes humanity to further itself, create the causes and effects of its own advancement via the medium of family and self-improvement. There is a will, and where there is a will, there is a way.

  ***

  To use our reason to understand our perceptions is an intensely liberating experience. Many philosophers have considered an understanding of the true na
ture of things to be a source of liberty. We have frequently used the term ‘liberty’ to define a virtue within political societies, but let us now see what liberty is. Liberty is not merely a freedom of action, as it is often defined in political discourse, but it is also a freedom of the mind. Not necessarily free from influence, since the influence of others can never be truly escaped, but a freedom from constant anxiety. Some philosophers consider embracing anxiety and recognising it as part of human nature to be the only method of ceasing to fear it; others have suggested methods of reducing one’s anxiety to the point that it is nothing more than a minor annoyance. In the search for political justice, there is a great deal of anxiety, which presents a somewhat ironic situation when we claim to be seeking out liberty.

  To walk with a free mind as well as a free body within society is to go onto the street and be able to be free from the worry that another person might come to harm us. It is one thing to have the freedom to leave one’s home and go for a walk; it is quite another to believe firmly in the assurance that we will not be harmed while doing so. It is a question frequently asked: where should we draw the line with freedom? The line must be drawn as much within the grounds of mental liberty as it must within those of personal liberty. It is not the sign of a free society that there is a chance that others, in exercising their ‘freedom’, have the opportunity to do unto others howsoever they wish. If another man or woman should come to harm at the hands of a fellow citizen, then that citizen should be considered for punishment. Here we find a possible definition for short-term justice; legal justice surely falls within the grounds of maintenance of that mental liberty. So long as I may walk on the streets without fear of being robbed, assaulted or murdered, then justice is being served rightly. Political justice is a much broader term, and in our search for this, we have yet to consider society itself, government and the mechanisms by which these things operate. To achieve legal justice, our mental and physical liberty as defined above must be protected and maintained by the forces of law already in existence, but to achieve political justice, we must find a system of government which is most effective at creating a state of liberty and keeping it fit to be passed on to future generations.