Love and Justice

Can love exist without justice?

(Preface: 1. I’m using the word ‘love’ here not in the sexual or marital sense, but in the disconnected and decayed version of ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ that has been a regular reprise in popular post-modernistic secularism. 2. I should mention that I am using the word ‘feelings’ not in the technical sense, but rather in the more colloquial sense where they are a mixture of sense data about the world and our emotions that engage to summarize, understand, or grapple with those sense data.)

I heard something interesting the other day. A public figure said, ‘my religion is love, love without all the rules.’ And on the face of it, that sounds like a charming sentiment, a dig at the old religions with rules to be sure, but charmingly emotive. It feels reminiscent of Lennon’s ‘All you need is love, love, Love is all you need.’ But is it a tenable stance? Can someone really love without ‘all the rules?’ —much less make a posture for life from it? First though, before we get to that question, it might be important to ask a preliminary one: might this sentiment be one that tells us something about our location in cultural time?

To break this open a bit, let’s start with the first half of the premise, let’s begin with the idea of religion-being-love, love alone. First, it is easy enough to notice that this is the early product of a world tired of the old religions (as love is taking the place of those defined religions). Now what is more surprising is that we still want vestiges of that old world. The surprise does make a certain sense, however, when taking into account how we have begun to talk about ourselves as humans. Perhaps this is a recoiling to that cultural tide we have been in for several generations now. That movement which carries us towards our own fading worth as a species. A movement both depressingly nihilistic while also aridly deterministic. It goes something like this: humans are mere material, nothing more. We are beings in an existence of indifference, only biological entities in a heedless and blind cosmos. We are only our biology, dictated by its terms, for its ends. We have all run into some sentiment like this. And it feels quite the opposite to love, in fact it feels like a landscape of all rules—those given to us by the natural world that governs us—without any real place for love, as though love itself was simply a biological function as well.

“How is it that the higher human achievements become, the lower the human self-image sinks?”

—Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership

“Has not man's self-deprecation, his will to self-deprecation, been unstoppably on the increase since Copernicus? Gone, alas, is his faith in his dignity, uniqueness, irreplaceableness in the rank ordering of beings, he has become animal, literally, unqualifiedly and unreservedly an animal, man who in his earlier faiths was almost God ('child of God', 'man of God') ...since Copernicus, man seems to have been on a downward path, now he seems to be rolling faster and faster away from the centre — where to? into nothingness? into ‘piercing sensation of his nothingness’?”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

“DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”

― Richard Dawkins

Love as religion, and so therefore emotion as religion.

And so perhaps this two-fold reaction of sentiment, of emotion, ‘religion-being-love’ is in reaction to our own despair. We wish to dance, even in the dark. To be and feel what we once did before the world became absurd and we became aware of it—but without relapsing into old religion (écrasez l’infâme!), we want the freedom secularism gives and also an end to our modern malaise. In short—we want full agency, yet, we want hope. And so love as religion: love without all the rules we find intrusive, but love that exceeds the strict materialist reductionism that has made the world chilly and stripped bare.

So love. The obvious opening question is love for who? Love for self, love for kin, for neighbor, for tribe, for nation perhaps? Or love for the world? But what if the world (not to mention the rest) is at odds with itself—as it appears to always be, and to love one is to not be loving of the other—how are we to choose who to love? Perhaps we shall go with our emotions to decide who to love? Emotive-love directing action-love. But which emotions? Like instincts they themselves can be without instruction, or worse, at odds. When we say we love people, it may be that we love some people, or we love some people some of them time, or love those people we find ‘lovable.’ And even then, when we say we will act lovingly according to how we feel, do we mean we will act from the emotion we feel when we are well fed, well rested? The emotion we feel when we are on edge? When we are angry? When we are afraid? When we are excited, zealous, or, perhaps at the end of ourselves? And what is to take us from feeling a loving feeling towards another, and acting upon it—or is just feeling a good, kindly feeling enough?

Even a rodeo has rules, and so without them we might be in for a real ride. We might not be as consistent and even handed with emotions as our noblest musings might suggest. Now for another thing, what happens when the way I feel about the world does not correspond to another person’s way, or even worse, what if it even finds friction with another’s feelings on the matter? I mean what if we are really at odds—a difference that strikes at the very heart of us? Am I to forgo my feelings or are they? What if we are both as adamant, both as resolved? Well, I might become a quietist, but wouldn’t that just be a forsaking of my living-out-my-emotions, and therefore a betraying of self-love on my part as I have conceived of it? Or, what if I am right, as I am apt to think I am, and in my adamancy I cause the other person to forgo acting as they feel; have I not stifled them and therefore am complicit in the limiting of their love while also frustrating my loving-others-without-rules? Does love not need to stand up in the name of love, protect it in all cases, or, just in my cases? But let’s grant that I am in the right for a moment, and the other is in the wrong. It seems completely natural here if this is the case, that my emotional set changes from descriptive (I feel this way about things) to prescriptive (you ought to as well), and, to my surprise, in my passion for love I suddenly find my love creating rules, not just for my internal self-regulation (for when I am hungry or tired), but extending to how I think others should live as well (in disagreement). If I truly believe in my emotions, and what they feel, they begin to become rules, otherwise they are only inert feelings about things and I am not being completely true to them. What I meant by love was just smiling ambivalence.

“I am therefore responsible for myself and for everyone else, and I am fashioning a certain image of man as I choose him to be. In choosing myself, I choose man.”

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Rules from Emotion

So perhaps we cannot live without all rules, either to regulate our own emotions, or instantiate them into the world, yet this is a concession on our opening stance. But, if this is the case, perhaps at least we might fashion organized rules from our feelings about the world. And so from feelings, passions, love, we draw lines out from those emotions and create rules to ratify them: ‘I feel this is the right way to live, and so it would still be true to my emotions to create regulations that are true to what I feel—perhaps even when I don’t always feel like it, and even when others’ ideas of living bump up against them.’ Yet even the use of the word right as in, ‘I feel this is right: is good, or better as a way to operate,’ is still smuggling in a portion of the objective. It would be better to say, ‘I prefer.’ I think the emotivist would agree. But how are we to know which emotions to prefer, to follow, and, which to ignore?—If they are all we have to work with. Our rules can’t help us much, they are coming from our emotions, and so they aren’t over them. Perhaps another higher set of emotive feelings might allow us to arbitrate that lower set, and another still higher to arbitrate that set, and another further still—it is here we encounter an infinite regress akin to that which Lewis pointed out in his book The Abolition of Man.

“But why ought we to obey Instinct? Is there another instinct of a higher order directing us to do so, and a third of a still higher order directing us to obey it?—an infinite regress of instincts? This is presumably impossible, but nothing else will serve. From the statement about psychological fact 'I have an impulse to do so and so' we cannot by any ingenuity derive the practical principle I ought to obey this impulse'. Even if it were true that men had a spontaneous, unreflective impulse to sacrifice their own lives for the preservation of their fellows, it remains a quite separate question whether this is an impulse they should control or one they should indulge. For even the Innovator admits that many impulses (those which conflict with the preservation of the species) have to be controlled. And this admission surely introduces us to a yet more fundamental difficulty. Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey people. People say different things: so do instincts.”

—C.S. Lewis, The Way, The Abolition of Man

So here we still find ourselves in a pickle. How are we to choose those feelings from which to make the rules which will govern our feelings?

It seems there is a difference between is and ought. This problem faces us both internally and externally. There is a difference between ‘I feel these various ways’—but—‘I ought to follow this specific way.’ There is a difference between, ‘this is how I feel about things’—and—‘you ought to as well.’ The internal standard we can fudge without people seeing, but what about the external one, what are we to do there? Let’s look at it again, ‘I have a right to feel this way,’ and, ‘you have a duty to treat me in such and such way.’ And it is here we might say, ‘yes, there it is, a right! A person has a right to feel and live how they wish!’ —But what right? Where did we get this right if we have entered the subjective world populated with all manner of various free feelings? We began this whole endeavor to leave the objective world behind in the rubble of religion past. So where are we finding something as impartial as a right that other people ought to be mindful of? Nonetheless, we might be tempted to say that there are things called universal human rights that transcend feelings, and indeed keep us safe in the multitudinous sea of feelings (they are rules for our protection, and so in a matter of speaking, loving: showing care), but if we are the ones creating the rules, the ones feeling the feelings—where did the rights come from to correct our rules and tame our feelings?

Universal rights to protect us from emotion

If human rights are indeed ‘universal,’ bigger than any one of us, in what sense are they universal? Perhaps they are obvious, self-evident? Well, if we even grant the highly suspect position that they are obvious in our present age, they aren’t obvious in antiquity and so therefore, time. Nor are they obvious outside the cultural milieu that I would want to argue is the Christian inheritance we are so familiar with, and so, therefore, space. This may be made by an example, that of the atheist humanist anthropologist who went to study an isolated tribal community. And upon her finding their mistreatment of women in the community, raised a protest. ‘You cannot treat the women here like that!’ she said. Unreceptive to her position, the leaders of the community countered with more than a terse reply. ‘Well, if what you believe is not a divine law, as you believe there is none, but only a subjective one—enlightened upon by your culture, then what is it to us? Our culture isn’t yours, and doesn’t believe as yours does. So what are you left with? Your only recourse would be to do the same thing you yourself rail against—if you were to change us, make us into who you are, by mere preference, would you not just be another colonialist in a long line of colonialists imposing your culture onto ours? We are not interested in your opinion.’¹

And so we are at the impasse of is and ought again. Maybe we need to change tact once more, from creating rules, rules from our emotive feelings—to something deeper, something stronger: we need to discover the basis for rules, for rights, and how to treat each other. We need to find an arbiter that can supersede the erroneous emotions and rules amongst us humans, without resorting to the old religions. We need to discover a universal way when those in the ‘universal’ bit are in disagreement. This sort of activity has been attempted for quite a while now. How do we root ourselves in a way of living that outworks love with rules that govern passions and changing moods (and decide between our disagreements about how to live, love, and govern) without resorting to God? This is where the word ‘natural’ comes in forcefully in our current age. ‘It is natural for me/us to______ such and such’ the space being occupied with whatever we see fit in our discussion: feel, believe, want, think, ask, require. And so let’s start with basing our endeavor there in the natural: in the natural world.

Perhaps there is a Natural Law from which we can extrude our ‘laws of love,’ our universal human rights. Yet as we consider the natural world, we quickly come up against a problem, the natural world isn’t very interested in universal rights. In fact, it doesn’t take too many experiences with nature to see that vulnerability is anything but protected, far from it, it is costly. This was something that anyone growing up in the Rocky Mountains knew well. There are many examples, I’ll just provide one. Every year in the spring, especially where I was raised near the Yellowstone National Park, there is bison calving, where the wild bison of the region give birth in the fields. It also happens to coincide with a statistical spike for bison as food source for the resident wolf packs. Neonatal bison are, along with weak and/or sickly bison, not given some special exemption, but rather, given extra attention when it comes to predation. To be outside of the solidaric mass of a herd in the natural world is to be vulnerable. We might observe how a herd will survive at the cost of its weak members, but the weak members themselves are the payment and so the words ‘universal’ or ‘rights’ need not apply.

“The wish, that of the living whole
   No life may fail beyond the grave,
   Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?

Are God and Nature then at strife,
   That Nature lends such evil dreams?
   So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life”

“Nature, red in tooth and claw.”

― Alfred, Lord Tennyson

If not natural, then something else

So if it is not so easy to discover rights, and if they are not so natural after all, but more unique than that, we return to human rights being things we create as opposed to discover. Create in order to tame nature, so to speak. And so now we observe a very popular current trend: practicality. Whether this is utilitarianism (as Sam Harris seems fond of) or emergent consensus morality, the trend says this: it should be decided that what most people find is good, is good, and not only good, but right. So, let’s consider the first option, utilitarianism as the way forward. It goes something like this: what if we pursue the greatest amount of pleasure or good for the greatest amount of people, or similarly, what if we minimize the greatest amount of pain for the greatest amount of people. Now forgive me, this will be collapsed down into a small section in the name of time and space, but utilitarianism is a big and intricate sort of thing. But one thing that I find is generally true about it is this: if what you are doing is looking to economize care fit for the most people, you will naturally create a minority that are left uncared for as a byproduct, those who ‘weight the system down.’ This is where the cost and resource of caring for a handful of intensive care patients might take resource from a hundred patients that are not as badly off. And so is it better to look after the hundred—insuring the most people find health—even at the cost of the handful, or vice versa? Now you might look after the intensive care population as a matter of course within the life of the society, but it isn’t utilitarianism that got you there, but some other driver. The thing I want to point out generally is, within this economization, you have no basis for ‘caring for the least of these’—if the numbers are against it. It is the same sort of thing with consensus morality, that is: what is consensus is moral. But what is the arbiter in place to tell the consensus to respect the rights of the few when it is the consensus that is the arbiter? The point of a right is that the few may appeal to justice in the face of the many, when they have no other appeal. We need no greater reminder than this—the Nazi party was voted in in the 1930’s. Love without rules may be just as easily love of country (or love of idea of country) that supersedes love of the actual people of the country—of neighbor, or even more improbably, love of enemy.

There are a bunch of other directions I want to go, but I must sum this up now, I’ve gone too long. There is a very fine, and ambiguous line that separates the emotions of vox populi from mob will, and, indeed, mob justice. And in the end, if all we have is our emotions of what we love, leading to rules of how that should be applied, we shouldn’t be shocked when we end up with the question from the anthropologist and the tribe: ‘So what are you left with?’ And if what we are left with ends up being nothing more than consensus, or utilitarianism, it will end in a predictable way. When right and wrong are decided by the mass, the few will have two alternatives, assimilation, or domination. Both in the name of ‘love.’ That might be the real Natural Law.

Very little separates the emotion of the crowd from the surge of the mob. Is fervor really enough to live justly by, emotion enough to create ethics? Do we not know that a mob feels deeply, emotes vividly, yet seeks justice inadequately? Love without a Justice outside of its own interests ends only in preference, and that will quickly devolve into tribalism, which, if left be, will betray justice, and forsake love.

This is the great difference, in the end. When we create the rules—whatever we call good we also call right. But when the rules aren’t made by us, even when we seek good and create rules in the name of justice—if we do these things unjustly—we only fool ourselves, and are still under the law of justice. If justice is something we take part in, and are not the inventors of, justice will survive despite us, and have the last say, even when we fool ourselves into seeking injustice in its name.

In the end, you need to correct the love that creates injustice and seek a justice that reminds love to be loving, otherwise, both will lose their way.

1. *Forgive me, the example I had in mind is in a book I do not currently own, and so I wasn’t able to include its verbatim exchange.