Good, Bad: It's all so Messy

Justice. Everyone thinks they know what it means is. Unfortunately, as Yuval Noah Harari says in 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century:

“Our sense of justice… has ancient evolutionary roots.”

Unfortunate why? Because it evolved to come up with rules like not stealing from your neighbor. But the world we live in is nothing like the world of our hunter-gatherer ancestors:

“An inherent feature of our modern global world is that its causal relations are highly ramified and complex.”

Thus, as Harari exaggerates only-a-bit to make a point:

“I can live peacefully at home, never raising a finger to harm anyone, and yet…  according to the socialists, my comfortable life is based on child labour in dismal Third World sweatshops.”

Once you start thinking deeper about almost anything, things get very murky. Say, you own shares in a petrochemical company. You’re getting good returns, but they dump toxic waste into the river, thereby harming people’s health and wildlife. And they have lobbyists who ensure environmental regulations never see light of day. Does this make you a bad person? After all, as a shareholder, you are part-owner of the company. Or what about those English ladies who used sugar in their tea, unaware of the horrendous slave labour it took to ensure the continuous production of sugar?

“The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference.”

Even more problematically:

“Most of the injustices of the contemporary world result from large-scale structural biases rather than from individual prejudices, and our hunter-gatherer brains did not evolve to detect structural biases.”

We tend to use four methods to resolve moral dilemmas. First, we over-simplify the issue, identifying one set as the good guys, and the other as the bad guys. Even though we know reality is far more complicated. Second, we “focus on a touching human story” as being representative of the whole issue even though no one instance can capture the entire issue at hand. Third, we weave conspiracy theories, so “twenty multibillionaires are pulling the strings behind the scenes, controlling the media, and fomenting wars to enrich themselves”. Fourth, we “create a dogma, put our trust in some in some allegedly all-knowing theory, institution or chief, and follow them wherever they lead us”:

“Such a solution, however, only takes us from the frying pan of personal ignorance into the fire of biased groupthink.”

It’s all very depressing, and Harari ends on that note:

“Should we call it quits, then, and declare that the human quest to understand the truth and find justice has failed? Have we officially entered the Post-Truth Era?”