Reasoned Justice, Peace, and Nonviolence
A Reflective Essay
We cannot have lasting peace without justice nor can we practice nonviolence so adamantly if we already have justice in the world. They are all connected. In this reflection paper, I shall try to define, or even more so, reveal my personal understanding of justice, peace, and nonviolence in a mix of reflection, observation, and social commentary. I will argue that at the very core, reason ties all of these three things together.
Justice is closely intertwined with its anti-thesis — injustice — and therefore cannot be understood alone and separate form injustice. Unlike other species, we humans are gifted with incredible intelligence and resilience. We have been able to supersede previous limitations by inventing complex concepts and things. However, our gift has also been our curse. Because we have been able to defy natural selection through invention, we have multiplied in numbers that far exceed the earth’s finite resources. Because we now live with fast dwindling resources, conflicts, wars, and violence have dominated our narrative; from these comes immeasurable suffering and injustice.
Yet, in suffering, our intelligence, or better yet, reason, tells us that a life of suffering is not just at all. Thus, we seek ways to break those cycles of violence that cause suffering and injustice. We thirst for justice and a life of less or even no suffering. And when we are put in positions of less suffering compared to others, some of us reject such positions and work diligently for justice because our reason equips us with the ability to reflect.
In reflection, we are able to detach ourselves from our corporeal self and see things from a much wider and clearer perspective. We are able to look back at our history, look at our current time, and look towards the future in concern for our future generations. This is justice — the ability to use reason in an engaged reflection of our past, present, and future in order to secure those who are worst-off and our future generations from suffering and injustice.
I argued this very point in my paper, A Discourse on the Best Catalyst for Change by claiming that reason, not emotion, is the best catalyst for change. While emotion gets people out of their seats and into action, without being tamed, it can cause more harm than good. Take for example the case of Michael Brown, a young black man who was shot by a white cop in Ferguson, MI last year. After the “not guilty” verdict was announced, Michael’s step-father stood in front of supporters and yelled “Burn this bitch down!” with Michael’s mom weeping in the background. As a result, looters became more violent and set fire to small businesses. The small-business owners suffered unnecessarily. While the height and rage of the moment might somehow justify what happened, this situation highlights the danger of using emotion as a motivation and response to injustice. There is certainly a better alternative, reason, which my paper argues for as the best model for change agents.
Change agents come in different forms. Here I will discuss those who adhere to the principle of nonviolence. Going back to the Michael Brown case, when the stepfather yelled those words out, #BlackLivesMatter, the movement that started after Brown’s shooting, was set back a couple of steps. Violence that came out in a fury of fire and rage destroyed the town even more by causing unnecessary suffering to innocent people. However, unlike emotions that are temporary, nonviolence guided by reason that calls for justice in a grander and long-term sense, perseveres until today.
Around the country, people are working to improve policing in America. We see big cities like New York changing their citation forms to include the race of the person being cited. These small incremental changes will eventually fix the structural problems that exist in the system and therefore, paving way to a working peace. I say “working peace” because peace in its purest sense can never be achieved in the world we live in. With scarce resources, unevenly distributed wealth and suffering, and now the threat of climate change, our world will always be an incubator for violence as long as we humans exist.
Because of this, there are rare instances where force instead of nonviolence is called for. Force in the form of intervention is necessary at times. However, such intervention must meet a strict criterion like the Just War Theory. Just War Theory is divided into three parts:
: 1) jus ad bellum, which concerns the justice of resorting to war in the first place; 2) jus in bello, which concerns the justice of conduct within war, after it has begun; and 3) jus post bellum, which concerns the justice of peace agreements and the termination phase of war. (Orend 2004)
The idea behind the theory is that if all these 3 criteria are met, then a war is just.
I challenged this idea back in 2011 in one of my essays, Is Just War still Just? A Reflection on the Just War Tradition. In that paper, I concluded that: “It seems to me that the Just War tradition can be challenged and outdated as technology, communication, and power relationships change over the course of history” (Ngoriakl 2011). However, in only 4 short years, my view of war has changed. With the rise of extremist groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram, I see no other way than to remove them by force. Letting them continue their reign of terror for the sake of nonviolence just does not make sense nor is my conscience content. With these world events and the reality of climate change pushing societies into extremes through an unprecedented magnitude of natural disasters, I see no other way than to accept military intervention when necessary. Now I realize that the Just War Theory holds and may be the best response to extreme organized violence.
While the world is plagued by extreme violence and events that call for intervention, we shouldn’t give up on nonviolence and working for justice. Reason calls us to work for peace even though it seems like a moving target. Reason tells us that we cannot be content with injustice that’s done to us or other people because they too are creatures of reason and all lives are equal in worth. While emotion may flick a spark in us, it is important for us to tame that possible fire by looking at the big picture and by letting our reason guide us as agents of change. By doing so, we continue to work for peace and fight injustices with guided nonviolence and strict intervention as we try to live in a world full of violence and suffering.
Work Cited:
War (Stanford University)
By: Orend, Brian.
