"There is no Justice"

As I was hoovering the floors today I got thinking about Hamarabi’s law (just hoovering by itself is boring). Hamarabi’s law, is for all intensive purposes a law of retaliatory justice, which is in many ways traditional justice, and at the time of its inception a liberal law used to restrain overzealous, vengeful forms of "justice."

Todays Justice system seems focused on deterrence, keeping people from committing crimes and keeping criminals away from the rest of society. This type of Justice could be called a Restraintative Justice.

Now the question for us Christians is what kind of justice are we called to practice? Jesus says "You’ve heard it said ‘love your neighbor and hate your enemy’ I say unto you love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you." This is in some ways no justice at all. Then I think deeper it’s a Relational Justice. This goes back to loving others as ourselves. It is projecting the I into the Thou, it is admitting that in general people do things not because they are our enemy, not because they are "evil" but because what they have experienced in their life has made them see the world in the way they do.

Now, one might say, "that means everything is relative, we should let rapists rape us, murderers murder us, and terrorists terrorize us, after all they are just acting out in a way rational within their world." By no means, after all loving our neighbor includes loving oneself, and further loving someone doesn’t mean letting them do whatever the hell they want. Instead it includes entering into dialogue with them so they get a wider understanding of why we feel their actions are wrong?

So what of "punishment" or "enforcement" or "education" or whatever we want to call it? My first thought was to create a situation in which they would experience their crime through their victim’s eyes. Basically a symbolic version of Retaliatory Justice. I thought about this for a while. It might foster empathy within the criminal.

Then I thought of the case of Dolstoyevski’s mock execution. When the writer Dolstoyevski was still a young lad he was quite radical, which isn’t a lauded thing in Czarist Russia. He and some of his radical brethren were caught being radical and the order went out "off with their heads" and the first two radicals were killed, next was that author of yore, and the Czar’s horseman came, galloping quickly, and said "the Czar pardons they all, they just have to live in Siberia." Those radicals who remained swore fidelity to the Czar, gave up their radical ways and were emotionally scarred for life.

Now it could be said, in favor of symbolic punishment, that the Czar’s methods were not proportional to the crime, neither in the first action, mock execution, nor in the secondary punishment. Still, when I think of Clockwork Orange and such I wonder about the results of non-physical punishment.

This post is pettering off. If anyone has any thoughts about justice that they had while cleaning rooms in an old abbey post them…

Peace,

Chris