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Is Justice a Lower-Class Conceit?
A dialogue on whether Trumpism shows we shouldn’t expect much social justice from history
This is a dialogue I had with Pierz Newton-John about the extent to which we should expect justice to emerge in history. Is history progressive, or is justice rarer than we’d like to think, as the rise of Trumpism may indicate?
Benjamin
The desire for justice didn’t vanish when God died.
When the default assumption for millennia was that an ever-present eye in the sky kept watch over our affairs and punished wrongdoers who happened to escape human judges and enforcers of the law, folks were spared the anxiety of fearing that their preoccupation with justice was arbitrary in the cosmic scheme. However much crime might have seemed to pay in the short term, there was supposedly a supernatural long term in which no one escapes what they’re owed.
The default shifted in what historians call the “modern” period that was shaped by science, liberalism, and the confidence in our potential to progress socially here and now, without the pretense that we’re divinely guided. This progress entailed a tremendous downside, however, a crisis of meaninglessness in which we must compensate for the loss of religious conceits.
