Over a cup of coffee, as I faced this week’s cacophony of current global political discourse, I came face to face with a well-groomed young thrush outside the kitchen window.
I hadn’t seen one of its kind for a while, although with hindsight, I had been trying to spot the source of an unfamiliar but triumphant birdsong in the treetops and had never managed to see either of the owners of the well-made nest in my rampant grapevine.
We eyed each other without stress and then the visitor was gone, focussed on a lively search for food to support its two-parent family. And perhaps add an extra phrase in its song.
How clean and simple it seemed.
In the current global maelstrom, words have become increasingly slippery, scorned, copy-catted or completely appropriated by bad actors, while the makings of dystopia creep closer. Book burning in the 21st Century? Education turned on its head, Harvard and the mighty Smithsonian institutions threatened, the courts raided.
History is telling us we won’t come out unscathed and we will eventually need to design a fairer rebuild from the grass roots up, so we probably need to get a grip on language before money and power succeed in uncoupling us all from history.
Liberalism, or any sense of ‘liberal’ justice, eluded me for a long time until I put it together with the newly fashionable “commutative justice”.
Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, known as the ‘father of economics’, set out “commutative justice,” or “mere justice” in his book Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1777.
Its very precise rules about how to treat one another basically boil down to ‘don’t harm people and don’t take their stuff’.
The Greek greats had been ahead of Smith there, but he was staring at European society and the political and societal mores with the French Revolution coming up.
Justice is foundational. No society can survive without justice. Any society where different individuals are treated unjustly, where their person or property is under constant threat, will tend to extinguish itself, if not through in-fighting then through conquest or dissolution by more robust societies, Smith said.
A key figure of Scottish Enlightenment who wrote on political economy, ethics and free market, he said that when – in the progress of the division of labour – the employment of people who lived by mindless work came to be confined to a few very simple operations, the labourer naturally lost the mental training and habit of such exertion, and generally became “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become”.
“In every improved and civilised society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless the government takes some pains.”
Fifty years later, a copy of a letter written in 1838 by Amsel Rothschild to his New York agents introduced the idea of ‘the mortgage” – which was probably the antithesis of government “taking pains” .
“The few that can understand the system will be either so interested in its profits or so dependent on its favours that there will be no opposition from that class. While, on the other hand, that great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that Capital derives from the system, will bear its burden without complaint and, perhaps, without even suspecting that the system is unamicable to their interests.”
The apple of ‘economics’ had fallen a long way from Smith’s metaphorical tree and governments still leave capitalism to flourish in the name of GDP and plundering both planet and its inhabitants.
Liberalism reminds us we owe everyone this basic (or commutative) justice, and injustice, when recognised as such, is a powerful and repulsive force requiring action.
Authoritarians, favouring or enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of true personal freedom, divide up the world into categories and, far from “taking pains” on ensuring rewarding lives for rank and file citizens, may conduct horrific and evil acts.
“All of us count,” former US president Barack Obama said in his recent speech at Hamilton College. “All of us have dignity. All of us have work. We have set up a system for rule of law, separation of powers and the freedoms of worship, of the press, access to impartial law.
“It is up to all of us to fix this,” he said in a speech that felt of a piece with my encounter with a young thrush in the garden. Serene presences as the human race teeters on the brink of savagery.
We are facing a rare, defining scramble in recent human history to devise a healthy and inclusive dialogue for the future.
Whether we choose the easy egalitarianism of Captain Kirk’s starship Enterprise or default into that great Scifi stereotype, the Evil Empire and the grim prognostications of Star Wars, is in the balance.
• Liz Waters
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