Justice

Our ideas of Justice have done some evolving. Themis, a daughter of Uranus and Gaia, was the first goddess of greater or cosmic Justice, of divine law, and divine justice as the consequence of breaking that law, but not of rewards for obedience. Dike, her daughter by Zeus and also named Justice, is the goddess in this card and of the human moral order and forces of correction. A number of commentators will still identify her as divine or cosmic Justice, but this is not correct. She is also sometimes confused with Astraea, the goddess of purity. Dike is here to help humans get along with each other, whether their law was born of divine mandate, natural order, social contract, or a practical utility. The blindfold, sometimes seen in her form, is supposed to symbolize objectivity, her being without bias or prejudice, and perhaps a fair hearing as well, but it is also an unnecessary handicap to fair witnessing. Stereopsis or retinal disparity requires that the pictures from two eyes or points of view be combined in order to construct perceptual depth. It is not a question of which view is correct, but one of what the differences between the two views can tell us. It’s not a good idea to lose such a useful metaphor behind a blindfold. Here is an appeal to higher level of comprehension. The early human justice that arose with urbanization and politics nearly always used the supernatural as the force that justified local enforcement. Appeals to cosmic justice used the power of superstition to bring subjects into line. The order seen in nature was interpreted as the kind of law that human rulers decreed, but writ a little bit larger. Good consequences were called rewards, and bad ones, punishments. Kings and Pharaohs were just the bailiffs here, divinely appointed but not the first or final word. This point of view will take an idea like karma and conflate it with retributive justice, and possibly go even one step further and see all misfortune as earned, although perhaps in previous lifetimes. We are now moving slowly towards a combination of laws derived from natural order and our own social contracts. This starts to hold the derivation of law itself up to scrutiny, and calls into question the excessive and unjust laws that pervade our systems of justice in proportion to our corruption. Accountability is the core of Justice. Grievances are heard and redressed. The civil law covers the nuisances, torts and properties, and criminal law, force, fraud and theft. Between them we hold ourselves up to standards of ethical action and the meanings of the words that we speak when making contracts with others. Justice is also the question of getting to objectivity, when given at least two different sides of a story. Our modern systems are dismal failures at this. We get two excessively expensive adversarial champions, each presenting an exaggerated half-truth as the whole of the picture, threading their arguments through legal loopholes and around the rules of evidence and court procedure, either to a group of peers who are not allowed to question, or else to some old guy in a silly wig talking in outdated language. This sort of justice only encourages crime and encroachment. The rule of law becomes the rule of lawyers. If we want this card to mean real justice, rightness, fairness, impartiality, some retribution for the guilty, and some restoration for the injured, then it’s about time to start looking for something closer to mediation or binding arbitration, where positions can be more simply and honestly explained and intelligent outcomes more fairly appraised, where the spirit or the intent of the law and the mitigating factors can be taken into account. Fairness and one-size-fits-all approaches have failed to prove themselves to be the same thing. Justice is supposed to begin where aggression is arrested and cooler heads prevail. True justice is like the part of the brain that combines the two views from the eyes and sees more deeply into the matter at hand. With equal respect and attention, we structure our relationships according to the ways we evolved to get by with each other in groups, and to the contracts, spoken and not, that we’ve adopted to take ourselves further than troops of primates can go. The larger the group, the more we tend to specialize in our roles, the more we need clearer boundaries defined, the more we need to read the fine print. This is organ-ization, specialization, and specification of function. It fails to function properly when clarity cannot be maintained, or respect for what we have given up is forgotten. Rights and duties are not opposites, but reciprocal functions. Our duties are the upholding of the other’s rights, including rights of creatures not human, and even those of unborn generations. This is fairness. It’s the right to redress when rights are stepped on, and the duty to submit to corrective measures when found to be stepping on others. We do unto others as we would be done by, and then we add an ‘or else.’ The Yijing counter- part is Gua 37, Family Members, picturing groups of people living behind the same door, trying to live together while maintaining their rights to be different and special, all while settling their differences. We acknowledge the other with respect, and re-spect means to look again, to examine more clearly and closely, to look in more depth for the truths, with multiple points of view.