False Justice

I've written on this before, but I thought I'd flag this passage from Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, a philosophical survey of evolving notions of selfhood in the modern age.  At the end of Sources of the Self, Taylor reflects on the way certain efforts for radical social reform can become corrupted, shifting from moral improvement to the denigration of the "deplorable."

High standards need strong sources. This is because there is something morally corrupting, even dangerous, in sustaining the demand simply on the feeling of undischarged obligation, on guilt, or its obverse, self-satisfaction. Hypocrisy is not the only negative consequence....

There are other consequences of benevolence on demand which Nietzsche didn't explore. The threatened sense of unworthiness can also lead to the projection of evil outward; the bad, the failure is now identified with some other person or group. My conscience is clear because I oppose them, but what can I do? They stand in the way of universal beneficence; they must be liquidated. This becomes particularly virulent on the extremes of the political spectrum, in a way which Dostoyevsky has explored to unparalleled depths.

Many young people are driven to political extremism, sometimes by truly terrible conditions, but also by a need to give meaning to their lives. And since meaninglessness is frequently accompanied by a sense of guilt, they sometimes respond to a strong ideology of polarization, in which one recovers a sense of direction as well as a sense of purity by lining up with implacable opposition to the forces of darkness. The more implacable, even violent the opposition, the more the polarity is represented as absolute, and the greater the sense of separation from evil and hence purity. Dostoyevsky’s Devils is one of the great documents of modern times, because it lays bare the way in which an ideology of universal love and freedom can mask a burning hatred, directed outward onto an unregenerate world and generating destruction and despotism.

Taylor here offers a warning: efforts for sweeping social reform--even while marching as an "ideology of universal love and freedom"--can degenerate into a program of despotism when they lose an affirmative sense of the good and instead focus simply on attacking those they characterize as fallen.

Those movements that rely on mass denigration, humiliation, and vituperation might not strengthen human bonds but undermine them. Atavistic impulses toward domination and cruelty can wear the mask of "justice," too.