A couple of years ago I was invited to dinner with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Friends warned me not to go, but I couldn’t resist the temptation. I thought I might finally hear some big secrets that are divulged only to important ears behind closed doors. What a disappointment it was! There were about thirty people there, and everyone tried to get the Great Man’s attention, impress him with their wit, curry favour, or get something out of him. If anyone there knew any big secrets, they did an extremely good job of keeping them to themselves. This was hardly Netanyahu’s fault, or indeed anybody’s fault. It was the fault of the gravitational pull of power.
If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power, and allow yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery. Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the centre, because the centre is built on existing knowledge. The guardians of the old order usually determine who gets to reach the centres of power, and they tend to filter out the carriers of disturbing unconventional ideas. Of course they filter out an incredible amount of rubbish too. Not being invited to the Davos World Economic Forum is hardly a guarantee of wisdom. That’s why you need to waste so much time on the periphery – they may contain some brilliant revolutionary insights, but they are mostly full of uninformed guesses, debunked models, superstitious dogmas and ridiculous conspiracy theories.
Leaders are thus trapped in a double bind. If they stay in the centre of power, they will have an extremely distorted vision of the world. If they venture to the margins, they will waste too much of their precious time. And the problem will only get worse. In the coming decades, the world will become even more complex than it is today. Individual humans – whether pawns or kings – will consequently know even less about the technological gadgets, the economic currents, and the political dynamics that shape the world. As Socrates observed more than 2,000 years ago, the best we can do under such conditions is to acknowledge our own individual ignorance.
But what then about morality and justice? If we cannot understand the world, how can we hope to tell the difference between right and wrong, justice and injustice?
16
JUSTICE
Our sense of justice might be out of date
Like all our other senses, our sense of justice also has ancient evolutionary roots. Human morality was shaped in the course of millions of years of evolution, adapted to dealing with the social and ethical dilemmas that cropped up in the lives of small hunter-gatherer bands. If I went hunting with you and I killed a deer while you caught nothing, should I share my booty with you? If you went gathering mushrooms and came back with a full basket, does the fact that I am stronger than you allow me to snatch all these mushrooms for myself? And if I know that you plot to kill me, is it OK to act pre-emptively and slit your throat in the dark of night?1
On the face of things, not much has changed since we left the African savannah for the urban jungle. One might think that the questions we face today – the Syrian civil war, global inequality, global warming – are just the same old questions writ large. But that is an illusion. Size matters, and from the standpoint of justice, like many other standpoints, we are hardly adapted to the world in which we live.
The problem is not one of values. Whether secular or religious, citizens of the twenty-first century have plenty of values. The problem is with implementing these values in a complex global world. It’s all the fault of numbers. The foragers’ sense of justice was structured to cope with dilemmas relating to the lives of a few dozen people in an area of a few dozen square kilometres. When we try to comprehend relations between millions of people across entire continents, our moral sense is overwhelmed.
Justice demands not just a set of abstract values, but also an understanding of concrete cause-and-effect relations. If you collected mushrooms to feed your children and I now take that basket of mushrooms forcefully, meaning that all your work has been for naught and your children will go to sleep hungry, that is unfair. It’s easy to grasp this, because it’s easy to see the cause-and-effect relations. Unfortunately, an inherent feature of our modern global world is that its causal relations are highly ramified and complex. I can live peacefully at home, never raising a finger to harm anyone, and yet according to left-wing activists, I am a full partner to the wrongs inflicted by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank. According to the socialists, my comfortable life is based on child labour in dismal Third World sweatshops. Animal-welfare advocates remind me that my life is interwoven with one of the most appalling crimes in history – the subjugation of billions of farm animals to a brutal regime of exploitation.
Am I really to blame for all that? It’s not easy to say. Since I depend for my existence on a mind-boggling network of economic and political ties, and since global causal connections are so tangled, I find it difficult to answer even the simplest questions, such as where my lunch comes from, who made the shoes I’m wearing, and what my pension fund is doing with my money.2
Stealing rivers
A primeval hunter-gatherer knew very well where her lunch came from (she gathered it herself), who made her moccasins (he slept twenty metres from her), and what her pension fund was doing (it was playing in the mud. Back then, people had only one pension fund, called ‘children’). I am far more ignorant than that hunter-gatherer. Years of research might expose the fact that the government I voted for is secretly selling weapons to a shady dictator halfway across the world. But during the time it takes me to find that out, I might be missing far more important discoveries, such as the fate of the chickens whose eggs I ate for dinner.