Justice is what love looks like in public

It was not long ago that I read Cornel West’s famous line for the first time: “justice is what love looks like in public.” It was like a lightbulb in my heart, of course, justice is how we express our commonality, our love for each other, our values, and by extension our sense of self. It seems that we, as a world community, are more than ever in need of such a sentiment. But where do we find justice, what does it look like? What kind of justice is the manifestation of what kind of love? What is justice for, if it is not about love?

In recent reflections on love and politics, Roxani Krystalli and Philipp Schulz tell us that love is an emotion, but that it is also an actions and practice. We feel love and care towards others, and we also act (or not) on those feelings, demonstrating them (or not) through our behaviour, our words, and even through the systems and structures of our societies. David Suzuki put it well during his 2013 Jack Beale Lecture on the Global Environment, Imagining a sustainable future: foresight over hindsight, when he said “We need love, and to ensure love, we need to have full employment, and we need social justice. We need gender equity. We need freedom from hunger. These are our most fundamental needs as social creatures.”

What messages of justice and love are communicated through lines at a food bank, the latest news post about a small boat failing to reach its destination and those on-board drowning, or the re-posting of tweets normalising misogyny and gender-based violence? What messages of justice and love are communicated through diplomatic negotiations to avoid escalating armed conflict, by debate over who can access education and healthcare, or by the knock on the door of a neighbour who needs to borrow a cup of sugar? Perhaps justice, love, violence, and inequality are all tangled up together in this patchwork of human life.

In contexts of inequality, violence, and fear, questions of justice and love seem to be simultaneously urgent and distant. Often the primary recourse to justice comes through the legal system, where the law can bring order and restore a sense of fairness through the adequate punishment of perpetrators of crime. This form of justice, known as retributive, has been criticised for not focusing enough on victims, and for prioritising the interests of the state or other powerful actors. In contrast, restorative forms of justice bring victims and perpetrators together in dialogue, focusing on their relationship and how it can be transformed. The Buddhist philosopher and leader Daisaku Ikeda has said that “True love should be transformative, a process that amplifies our capacity to cherish not just one person but all people.” It is in forms of justice which foster such transformations that we can find love located, and where we can see the benefits of thinking about justice as an expression of love.

I find it helpful to think about justice, and love, as fundamentally about relationships. Relationships between people, between ways of living, places and principles. I cannot think about justice and love outside of a coming together of people, whether this happens by design or by accident of birth. When people come together, they are obliged to debate and decide how resources are distributed, how time and space are allocated, and whose voices are heard. Importantly, these are both pragmatic decisions and ideological debates. We all need to decide what kind of justice is the manifestation of what kind of love, and to see both as central to our daily lives and contemporary politics. We should not be restricted to only those decisions which are pragmatic, but be committed to debating and developing a more inspiring vision for our lives together.

November 2024