On Justice

What bridges the mundane and trivial activities of the temporal sphere to the elevated and higher concepts and ideals of the spiritual realm, as Frithjof Schuon argued, is the Abrahamic concept or notion of “Baraka.” Without “Baraka,” nothing would be able to transcend the mundane and trivial. Another concept or ideal which transcends the mundane and trivial and is perhaps more important than all other concepts and ideals is “justice.”

In a sense, justice is a balancing or balance between various actions and deeds. What overarches the balancing act of justice, arguably, is the balance between righteousness and waywardness. It follows that injustices can for the most part be corrected with the right methods and with the right set of actions, deeds, and words.

There is balance and thus a notion of justice in virtually everything that exists, both in the natural world and in the social world. Justice takes a virtually automatic course in the natural world, whereas in the social world, justice has to be engineered and fostered through political and social action. 

Femininity, for instance, also has within itself an inherent balance. Music also requires some sort of balance, and as Schuon argued, music is analogous to femininity in the sense that both music and femininity can either boost and inflate the ego of the opposite sex, or the two can uncover and enable the internalization of the essence of being and existence. Hence, eroticism, melancholy, passion, and joy are all qualities which are manifest in both femininity and music, among other qualities. 

It follows that the “word-representations” of the female subconscious are entirely erotic and emotional, given the analogy between femininity and music. Also, given that the feminine is also the key to salvation and in turn salvation occurs primarily through the establishment of justice, it follows that in a sense, the feminine is also a conduit for justice, hence the idea of “Lady Justice” and so forth. Injustice is corrected through “God’s wrath” in some instances, and as D.H. Lawrence wrote in a poem titled “It’s No Good!”:

It’s no good, the women are in eruption

and those that have been good so far

now begin to steam ominously,

and if they’re over forty-five, hurl great stones into the air

which are very likely to hit you on the head as you sit

on the very slopes of the matrimonial mountain

where you’ve sat peacefully all these years.

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,

but the women are my favourite vessels of wrath.

Arguably, social justice in this day and age has a core economic, political, and social aim, namely, to create a fair and just international community and society after the demise of neoliberalism as a credible and legitimate ideology for the international community and international society. Moreover, the collective and individual aim for people on multiple levels is the acquisition of dignity and respect, which arguably are basic rights that all people are entitled to but are nonetheless basic rights which the neoliberal establishment were and still are incapable of giving to large swaths of people. Thus, neoliberalism, rather than merely amounting to the accruement and accumulation of freedom and power, amounted to their abuse and exploitation.

But due to the fact that the correction of injustice requires the right methods and actions, the correction of an injustice takes quite some time and cannot be carried out overnight. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Moreover, the axiom or notion of “no justice, no peace” is evinced and obviated in Europe today. As one journalist argued, the war between Russia and Ukraine could well in fact spill over into a regional war between Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. This regional ‘Slavic’ war would then draw the rest of Europe into itself by virtue of Poland’s involvement. “Inevitable” and “perpetual” conflict in Europe then becomes the established rule or norm, due to the sheer carelessness and negligence towards the obligation and responsibility of upholding global order, peace, and stability on both a collective level and on an individual level over the course of a number of decades. As one scholar suggested: “Everybody is now against everybody; we don’t even know who against whom.”