It’s hard sometimes for students of history to remember they’re also living in history. That I’m no exception I find embarrassing. I’m embarrassed because I’m upset about Ukraine and Palestine. But why? National borders change with the alacrity of the weather. And more often than not they change not, like the disintegration of the Soviet Union, without a shot being fired, but with sword-flailing hordes on horseback, or armoured tanks crushing every kids’ bicycle or baby tram in their path. Nature red in tooth and claw makes no exception for humans. So why am I in high dudgeon about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or my co-religionists committing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank?
Because in the face of injustice it’s hard not to take sides. Why specifically then? Because nature having no concept of injustice does make an exception for humans. Then where’s the injustice? Is it any more unjust that Ukrainians should be ruled by Russians than it was that Poles were once ruled by Ukrainians? Is it any more unjust that Palestinians should be displaced yet again than it was that Jews were displaced by the Romans, and then by the Spaniards, and then by the Russians, and then by the Germans …? Or that the Britons were conquered by the Romans, and then by the Saxons, and then by the Danes, and then by the Normans? Are Ukraine and Palestine different because they happen to be happening now? But it was happening now – was it not?- to those to whom it was happening then.
On the one hand this kind of ‘view from nowhere’, as Thomas Nagel called it, be-stills our high dudgeon. But on the other hand it puts a damper on our souls. Without the blood of outrage cursing through our veins we might as well be the living dead. Music celebrates our insistence on it. Peter Paul and Mary’s The Great Mandella. Bob Dylan’s Gotta Serve Somebody. Poetry lionises it. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses.
As an atheist I often mock the radical contingency of others’ religious commitments. But at least the kindergarten Christian has a commitment. As does the social justice warrior, notwithstanding she couldn’t articulate a theory of justice without it dying the death of a thousand qualifications. That’s why it’s culpably churlish to demand she define what she means by justice.
And yet not to demand it is to kowtow to whatever violence she would commit in its name. So sometimes there’s simply no choice. To say what’s wrong is to say what’s right. And to say what’s right is to invoke a concept of justice which is, admittedly, contingent, but of course less radically so. Because, well, because my moral intuitions come from a better place than theirs. Or, in all likelihood, yours. How could it be otherwise?
Categories: Angst, Critical Thinking, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
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