When a carpenter makes a joint and says with satisfaction, “Just fits,” he surely means that the two surfaces of the joint meet perfectly, that they match each other, are mirror images, so that the joining surfaces have no gaps and the joint doesn’t wobble. When you try on clothes and they “just fit,” you mean that the clothes are appropriate for your body. And if a machinist is fitting a new part into a piece of machinery, and the new piece aligns with the old one he might think that what he has done is a “just alignment.” We know what the word “just” means. It means “just right.” Keep that meaning in mind.
The word “just” is very common for us. It is ranked 51st in frequency of use out of over a billion words checked by the Corpus of Contemporary American English. We use it in many different ways in different situations to mean exact, precise, accurate, true always implying a sameness or an equality or compatibility between two things. And, we use it in non-physical situations like saying that an opinion, an idea, or an argument is right, true, reasonable, factually correct. We use it in music to say that a note is in tune. But the word comes originally out of public morality, deriving from the Latin word jus, meaning law and justice. It is the basic definition of how a group of people can live together happily, productively, and peacefully (that is, without fighting all the time), the “right” way to live. For thousands of years, it has meant that the way people relate to other people has to be just and right, meeting together and fitting each other in an even, seamless, equitable way, or the society breaks down. Christians have thought of this as justice before God. Non-Christians have thought about it as morally right conduct, impartiality (an equality of sides, like just alignment), equity before the law.
But in spite of this ancient idea among peoples, the past thousands of years have not been just, or so it seems. But that hasn’t wiped out the idea of justice, since we all understand the term. One might think that justice occupies a special place in American thinking since Jefferson invoked it as the first principle of this country in his rough draft of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.” People fit justly together because they are created equal (because they are created equally). Because of that equality, people derive the equity of rights. You don’t have life, liberty or happiness unless those rights are equally shared. That is justice. Jefferson thought the idea of justice so common to all our understanding that he changed the “sacred and undeniable” to “self-evident.” And it is self-evident if you think of the way things that just fit nicely together is a manner of social cohesion.
How, then, does it happen that the government which is founded on the self-evident understanding of justice, of equality, of equity has outlawed it? It has outlawed equity from government action. It has forbidden it to be taught in schools, both public and private, from kindergarten to post-graduate studies. It has removed all support for study and research on equity, on the idea of justice in law. The government of the people has decided that the history of conflict is preferable to the idea of justice. I don’t much care for the feuding nonsense of Republicans vs. Democrats, or conservatives vs liberals, of us vs. them. A government outlawing justice is something to worry about.
At this time when we are asked not to understand what the word “just” means, not to enjoy things sliding together neatly, we may want to return to a time when justice, equality, equity were not self-evident. More than 400 years before the Christian era, the Athenian teacher Socrates debated with a group of citizens and foreigners the meaning of dikaiosyne (which we call justice, righteousness, or morality). Their debate was written down by Plato years later, perhaps decades later. Plato’s Politeia, which we call The Republic, has been read and argued about ever since. It used to be standard reading in colleges but has not been since the 1960s. But the debate seems pertinent to our sudden banishment of justice, and maybe we can understand what living without justice means.
Politiea means things having to do with the polis, the city, and it is the root of our word politics but used in its literal sense, just as republic literally means public issues and not our form of constitutional government.
Let’s set the scene. There’s not much point trying to understand words without their contexts. We are in Athens’s port community in the second half of the 5th century BC. A war is going on with neighboring city Sparta. The war will end badly for Athens and end Athens’ “golden age” of art and thought. Though we talk about Athens in its prime as a “democracy,” it was ruled by the prominent landowning clans, and its “citizens” were all male clan members. The majority of the people were excluded. Writing had been invented a few hundred years before, but this golden age was when the works that created what we think of as Western Civilization were written down. Plato’s Politeia is one of these civilization founding works.
Plato wrote the work many decades after the debate described in the book, and we can’t be sure whether the book represents his ideas or those of its characters who were all prominent, public men in Athens and known to the readers. I’m going to short-cut drastically and summarize the debate between Plato’s long deceased mentor, Socrates, and Thrasymachus, a sophist who teaches people how to win arguments in court (a lawyer before lawyers).
The question they debate: what is justice (dikaiosyne)? Everyone has an answer except Socrates. He’s a gadfly (the “Socratic method”) and asks series of small questions whose answers everyone agrees with. These small steps not only lead a speaker with a fixed position to recognize his position as irrationally based but advances the discussion by establishing a growing number of criteria that a proper answer has to satisfy. I single out the gruff and easily angered Thrasymachus not only because his position explains our situation today but because he recognizes that justice is a structural concept of government and not just, as some in the debate hold, a personal matter of getting one’s due or being rewarded for some inborn virtue.
Thrasymachus claims that justice is whatever those in power say it is. If the city’s leaders exercise their power properly, they make clear what their concept of justice is, and that is it. Justice has no fixed meaning. This issue leads Socrates to an elaborate discussion of how a society can be organized (that is be politically governed) in a way that achieves justice for all. That society is the Politeia. The Politeia has classes of people whose functions reflect their personalities and abilities. How they live satisfies themselves and also satisfies the society’s needs for those actions. Everyone promotes that fittingness by understanding rationally the social context of their actions and attitudes. From childhood one is educated to be reasonable, to function for the community, to tell the truth. Thus, fiction writers, like myself, who function by lying must not form part of the Politeia.
It’s important to remember that the Politeia for Socrates is simply the result of a series of questions about justice. It is not a model of an ideal government. What it was for Plato is complex since he knew perfectly well that not too long after this debate, Socrates was condemned to suicide by the leaders of Athens for misleading the youth and not respecting the gods. For us, in our culture, the Politeia begins the notion that justice stems from a social structure. A just person, who relates morally with people, isn’t born moral, but acts that way because the society breeds those kinds of relationships. In a just society, in the Politeia where thoughts of the common good, political thoughts, have priority over desire and self-serving emotions, one finds justice. It is why for 2,500 years people have argued and discussed and thought about how governments should govern in spite of the fact that for 2,500 years governments have not governed well but have been perpetrators of exploitation, fraud, and violence. History and civilization are not the same things.
The contrast between Thrasymachus and Socrates, between them as personalities, as kinds of argumentation and verbal engagement, between their ideas could not be more stark and more appropriate to the political (in both the original meaning and in our modern sense) situation in the US today. Thrasymachus in reality won that argument when Socrates accepted the Athenian judgment against him and drank the hemlock poison. Today, we live in Thrasymachus’ world of no fixed values, constant conflict, winners and losers, and power. And, considering how easily and quickly individuals are targeted and disappeared in broad daylight on public streets, many of us may be facing the hemlock.
On the other hand, in the world of ideas, (and the Politeia is a debate about ideas, not a policy statement, not a plan of operations, not a formulaic guide) Socrates’s questions are the foundations of this culture. That tradition is so much part of us — in spite of our long anti-civilizational history — that every one of us knows exactly what “just right” means, what it feels like, and so every one of us has internalized an understanding of justice. Where, then, are those conservative defenders of traditional values who will speak up for justice?
A few days ago, our president posted a comment claiming that he was removing “criminals” from our midst without a court hearing to determine guilt because court hearings take too long. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:l4w23uvtok7risxtvwmvwzpu/post/3lne5pgp3ac2r?ref_src=embed&ref_url=https%253A%252F%252Ftalkingpointsmemo.com%252Fmorning-memo%252Fthe-constitutional-clash-began-when-rubio-cut-a-deal-with-bukele. We now live in a system (if it even is a system) in which anyone, not just foreigners, are guilty by accusation. Do defenders of the traditional values of Western Civilization think that is justice?
In Executive Order 14168, our president declared that the word “men” can only refer to people with the small sexual reproductive cell, thus forbidding any agency of the national government from understanding the words “all men are created equal” as protecting the independence (the equality and rights) of women. Federal Register :: Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. Notice that this EO is about “defending women”; that is, as the weaker sex, women (and women’s dignity) must be defended by the stronger sex, by male laws or, if necessary, by male violence and lynchings. Does outlawing the use of the word “gender” in order to re-institute male superiority feel just right to you — men, women, in-between, and none-of-the-above?