Not All Violins, ed. Charlotte Caron (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1997)
This is not so much a book review as it is a reflection which uses a book as its point of departure. Not All Violins is written by the Barb Wire Collective, a group of women who gave themselves this name as an affectionate nod to a mentor, Barbara Elliott, who inspired them to come together and give voice to their experiences both as women and as people living with disabilities or chronic illnesses. Experience lies at the book’s core. There are accounts of diagnosis, grief, childhood confrontations with bullies, broken relationships, adaptation, marginalization, humour, hard-earned insight. Framing the personal accounts are chapters which give this experience a grounding in more theoretical notions—theologies of liberation and reflections on the experience of women in the Bible, feminist analysis, and a critique of western medical practice and its apparent bias in favour of acute illness.
I could have read this book from any number of points of view, most of which are sympathetic. Reading as a man, I do not find the book’s feminism problematic. I have been politicized, one might say, by a mother who is an exact contemporary of many of feminism’s pioneering voices, and I have witnessed a number of instances where it was patent that gender was the sole basis for denial of access to entitlements. I get the issues. Reading as a person who lives with chronic illness (my wife has lived with type I diabetes for 30 years and I have been wrestling with a major mood disorder for more than 20 years), I have an appreciation for the ways in which modern medical discourse can be utterly alienating. And reading as someone modestly acquainted with the practice of doing theology, I understand how the radical call of liberation theologies can sound a note of hope for these women, and I accept this. But reading as a lawyer … that is where I stumble.
These women claim that what they seek is nothing less than justice. I remember the incredulity I felt the first time a client used that word. It was in the context of a family law proceeding. A woman wanted child support, but she put it in terms of justice. I said to myself: “Oh please, give me a break.” Sometimes, in conversations with colleagues, one of us might say with a smirk, “And my client said she wanted justice!” and we would laugh and we would understand it as a code word to indicate that our client was unsophisticated, probably a legal aid case.
Last year, I remember a professor observing that children have an innate sense of justice; he theorized that it was only as they grew older and became desensitized that they lost this innate sense of justice. But I must qualify his observation. Children do not have an innate sense of justice; they have an innate sense of injustice. They can easily identify when they have been wronged; they can easily lay their grievances at our feet and cry out for redress. But this is not what we ask of our children. This is merely self-interest dressed in fine clothes; this is merely Lord of the Flies in a courtroom. It is a simple matter for me to identify when I have been wronged, but it is quite another thing for me to identify when you have been wronged. At least in theory it is this latter perception we hope will become habitual in our children as they mature into the world. But it is this latter perception—the recognition of suffering in our neighbour—which is so difficult. Most cries for justice are cries from self-interest. Most cries for justice are heard as loud-mouthed lobbying, and easily dismissed as such. Most cries for justice are cries for a justice which is grounded neither in metaphysics nor in theology. Justice, then, is a vague wisp, an airy nothing devoid of content.
If the concept of justice did have content, what would it look like? Perhaps instead of justice, we should speak of justices. There is the justice of retribution. This is the justice of Hollywood blockbusters and California governors, where well-armed heroes wreak vengeance upon malignant foes. There is the justice of restoration. In western culture, this concept has its origins in Attic Greece with its love of balance. Justice is done when a loss is answered by compensation. Retribution is its close cousin, but the balance is struck, not by compensating the victim, but by extracting an equalizing loss from the perpetrator. There is also a justice which would have been unthinkable in Attic Greece—distributive justice—a concept which could not have been possible without other relatively recent developments, such as statistical mathematical models, the emergence of economics as a rigorous intellectual discipline, and a political theory of socialism. Distributive justice can mean an equalization of all life’s goods, or it can mean a distribution of life’s goods in a way that optimizes the good of all (even if a few are treated unequally). Another account of justice holds that justice is the fulfillment of one’s innate entitlements. If I have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then justice occurs when circumstances ensure that I can fully enjoy my life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
Although this is not an exhaustive list of justices, it is enough to demonstrate that different accounts of justice are not necessarily compatible. For example, a socialized account of justice might allow for the possibility that individual interests, including the interest in compensation for injuries, must be subordinated to the common good. Restoration goes ignored where prudence dictates that more people will be better off if one person’s injuries remain uncompensated. Similarly, while the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness may grant me a generalized permission to swing my arms around, nevertheless, the state (as representative of the people) takes a keen interest when my swinging arms begin to break other people’s noses.
The conflicting versions of justice point to the fact that justice cannot be relied upon as an ultimate or grounding value. And yet how often do we hear protesters demanding justice as if its meaning should be self-evident? With the same imprecision, many of the women in Not All Violins call upon the able-bodied to treat them with justice, without indicating what is meant by such a call, apparently oblivious to the possibility that such a call might be problematic.
What might we use to ground our notion of justice? Presumably, because it draws heavily upon liberation and feminist theologies, the Barb Wire Collective views justice as standing in intimate relation to the exercise of power. Whether physical or political or economic or military, power is the capacity to impose one’s will upon another person or creature, or even upon the environment. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in the capacity to exercise power; inequities occur all the time; an earthquake strikes and suddenly an entire population is rendered vulnerable; a person contracts an illness and suddenly needs medical attention. There is nothing strange in this. Issues of justice do not arise from the existence of inequities in power; they arise from our response to such inequities. Do we aid the vulnerable unconditionally? Do we aid them but do so in ways which diminish them? Or do we turn our backs upon them altogether? Such an appeal to power as a ground for justice is pragmatic, it is political, it is performative, it is … ethics.
Twenty-five hundred years of western thinking has yet to uncover a satisfactory solution to the problem of grounding our ethics, so we can hardly demand more from our justice. So why do we keep insisting that we know justice (and injustice) when we see it? So why do we keep insisting that our perpetrators of injustice—who, let’s face it, do not have a reputation for being deep thinkers—should nevertheless be capable of implementing just resolutions to all the problems they have created? Why not acknowledge, instead, that we know very little about the subject? Why not resort, instead, to another important theological concept—grace? Forgive our perpetrators of injustice and stop demanding that they solve what cannot be solved? Get on with the pragmatic, political, performative business of living our lives?