Maybe we can start to see an answer now that we’ve had a chance to look back on the alternative. The twentieth century, in many ways, was the century of modernism – the rejection of the past as a guide to living. As I noted last time, modernism brought us Pruitt-Igoe, the grand and innovative housing project that was dynamited as unlivable. But more than that, I think, it brought us Communism, the form of government practised in the Soviet Union, China and their allies in the mid-twentieth century.

Communists tried to design a new world effectively from scratch, a world based entirely on what should be, with little reference to what is or has been. The degree of connection between existing Communism and the originating works of Karl Marx has been a matter for endless debate, but the modernist tendency in Marx’s own work is very strong. Among his most beautiful passages is the one describing the rapid changes of modern capitalism, in which “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” For all his critiques of capitalism, Marx was almost breathlessly excited by its ability to change the existing structures of the world. And those structures were not acceptable; they had to change, as soon as possible.

One might imagine a less modernist Marxism. My father stresses Marx’s faithful approach to reading G.W.F. Hegel and learning from him – a hermeneutics of listening rather than suspicion, in Paul Ricoeur’s terms. Similarly one could imagine the attempt to build a more equal and less alienated world slowly, from the bottom up, beginning with cooperatives and intentional communities, with government imposition taking on a more minor role. But the modernist Marxism of historical fact was a more large-scale version of the destructive thinking that produced Pruitt-Igoe – as one can see from its architecture.

So far I’ve been looking at the political level. But individually too, we seem to do poorly without the past. The twentieth century in the United States had unprecedented access to the findings of scientific psychology, rigorous, empirical, rational exploration of the human mind – yet every American generation suffered more depression than the one that came before it. Today the cutting edge of psychology itself aims at a synthesis of past and present, whether in Richard Davidson’s dialogue with the Dalai Lama or Peterson and Seligman’s study of philosophies of virtue.

With all of this in mind, we may now return to the desire to seek authentication from what is old. Today we can see the wisdom of the past more clearly after a century’s worth of attempts to overthrow it. That knowledge wasn’t there in the same way before the twentieth century – but perhaps people had a sense of it all the same. When people preserve their traditions for centuries, they do it for a reason. Something about it makes sense, and makes good sense – in a way that may make sense to us as well, if we’re ready to listen.

There’s a middle ground to be sought here, of course – some things really do need changing. It’s just about impossible to justify the maintenance of pre-20th-century gender roles. But at the same time, we do have reason to be cautious of innovation. Go too far in the Yavanayāna direction, and we risk losing everything that made Buddhism worthwhile in the first place.

So after the Thailand trip, I started trying to compile a list of the virtues. This was before the long and comprehensive lists found in André Comte-Sponville’s book and the research of Peterson and Seligman, so there were some virtues I missed just because I didn’t think of them. But another virtue was a deliberate omission: justice.

Love and honesty, I thought, did all the work that we might think justice needs to do; justice is superfluous. (Walter Kaufmann made a similar claim in The Faith of a Heretic.) Being honest makes it easier to trust and be trusted by the people around us; giving love allows us to be loved. So the two each make us happy, and together they produce most of what is conventionally thought of as morality: love makes us concerned for the consequences of our actions on others, honesty prevents us from doing deceptive things. Justice seems unnecessary, and especially, it doesn’t make us happy. So it’s dispensable.

I think I had this view about because of an ambiguity in most discussions of justice.
Comte-Sponville’s often edifying book exemplifies the problem. While he says justice is the most important virtue, he doesn’t give us reason to believe that it is a virtue – at least, not a personal virtue in any way comparable to the other virtues in the book (gratitude, gentleness, compassion). Most of Comte-Sponville’s discussion of justice draws on John Rawls, and Rawls is clear from the outset of his book that he sees justice as a virtue of social institutions, not of people. Comte-Sponville could have dropped his justice chapter entirely, and the account of personal virtue presented by the book would not have been diminished; what that chapter addresses .

Eventually, though, my views changed. I came to realize that justice is a virtue after one difficult incident. While I was a visiting scholar in philosophy at the University of Texas, I lived in an apartment complex where the concrete walls were paper-thin, to the point where one could hear neighbours peeing in their bathroom. There was a terrible dispute there between my then wife (now ex-wife, for unrelated reasons) and our neighbours, who insisted on playing loud music at all hours. They didn’t want to speak to each other, so I went between them, trying to make everyone happy – the kind of thing one might be led to do by a worldview like Śāntideva’s, where only others’ happiness and not justice is a significant consideration. The result was the kind of masochism that Śāntideva sometimes seems close to advocating, where you let others walk all over you. Which might work all right if you’re a monk, but it’s a big problem when other people – like my wife – are depending on you. I wound up giving in to the neighbours’ demand that they keep playing the music loudly, and (justifiably) angering my wife as a result.

No solution was going to make everyone happy. My wife, the neighbours, and I all had very different, and incompatible, expectations of each other. How can one be happy in such a situation? What one needs above all, I came to realize, is a clear conscience, a sense that one has done the right thing. And in this case, not merely the loving or honest thing, but the just thing. One needs to have reasonable expectations of others, and act according to others’ reasonable expectations of oneself – which are typically very different from their actual expectations.

Once you say that, once you let in the idea of reasonable expectation, then with it comes obligation, and some of the related concepts one finds in Rawls and analytical moral philosophy (such as permissibility). You are obligated to do certain things, forbidden from doing others; it’s not that you can’t break your obligations, but that doing so will stain your conscience, make you feel guilty, make you less confident and less able to act well in the future. In that sense, acting unjustly is bad karma.

The key point here, though, is that this view of justice only holds up if Aristotle is right and justice is a mean. You’re being unjust if you act selfishly and demand more than you can reasonably expect of others. But you’re also being unjust if – as I had initially done – you cave in and let others demand more than they can reasonably expect of you. Just as importantly, justice here is a virtue of people, irrespective of its role in social and political institutions.

(In the end, in case you’re wondering, we just moved out of the complex. I wish I could say that my new understanding solved the problem, but it didn’t. I do think, though, that it helped me deal better with similar situations in the years that followed.)

Thanks to Jeff Colgan for suggesting this topic.