Delphic Maxim 145: As of middle-age be just
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
145. As of middle-age be just
I’m always frustrated as I sit down to write these each morning. Firstly, because sometimes it’s difficult to make the words work. Sometimes gathering your thoughts super quickly to get something written is difficult. Imagination takes time to turn into creativity which takes effort to turn into words. Sometimes it’s the lack of knowledge that frustrates me — knowing that I don’t know enough to do each maxim justice. Today, it’s the awareness of my lack of knowledge about justice that is frustrating me — particularly because on my reading horizon I have some chunky books by Amartya Sen and John Rawls which I know will develop my understanding in that domain.
That’s the problem with reading theory and philosophy: it unfolds in your mind, and like Socrates the more you learn the more you realise that you have so much to learn. It’s a lifelong project, the only thing that will stop me reading is death.
I read a book recently by Martha Nussbaum, a frequent collaborator with Amartya Sen, and one of the world’s foremost (and most readable) moral philosophers. I’ve probably referenced it in a previous maxim, but the book is called Poetic Justice, and it’s essentially about the way a literary imagination can help us to be more just and understanding. Reading expands our moral horizon. It gives us a view to worlds other than the one we walk through every day, and it puts us in the mind of other people — authors, characters, heroes, villains. It develops our empathic literacy, deepening our moral development (which, per yesterday, continues to grow as we do, to ever more abstract and political domains).
I mention this book because I think Nussbaum’s concept of justice is an important one. She doesn’t divorce it from emotion, but rather recognises that emotion and compassion play a key role in the administration of justice. Nussbaum is quite Aristotelian in her approach to ethics. She admires the virtues, she argues that they are a good basis for developing character. More importantly, she recognises the way our character is bound up in our social selves — we have an obligation, both empathic and material, to the communities we live in.
This is particularly important in ‘middle-age’, where people come into their most powerful capabilities. In Australia you can see how this power manifests in politics: right now is the age of the baby boomers and Generation X, in a decade or so it will be the age of the millennials (maybe a little longer — political power that arises from demography is quite sticky). I think this political power is coupled with a demographic loyalty — you only have to look at the most recent Australian federal election to see how the vote skipped issues of intergenerational justice (climate change being the most obvious), and zeroed in on the preservation of wealth (rants about death taxes, franking credits, coal-fired power).
It’s a political point, but I raise it because it’s an example, I think, of why it’s important for us to be just in middle-age. By that stage in our lives we have accrued the authority to administer justice. Appeals for a just society are made to the middle-age group, because justice, social justice, is bound up in structures of power. So it’s for people when they hit middle age to define whether a society is just or unjust — whether it preserves unjust structures, or whether it finds ways to expand the goodness of our society to encompass everyone.
Today’s maxim, like all questions about justice, shouldn’t be about ‘winners and losers’. The biggest tragedy in our political life is that community gets framed as a zero sum game. It isn’t. It’s up to those with the most power — not all of a generation, and not all of the power, but much of it — to remember to be just.
