June/July 2003

Imagining A New Model of Justice
Denise Breton, Christopher Largent & Stephen Lehman

Breaking the Bank: The Economic Heresy of Herman Daly
Lissa Harris

A New Vision of Development
Roar Bjonnes

Sustainable Businesses Combine Ideals and Vision
Debi Smith

The Politics of Water in the Middle East
Leah C. Wells

Making Media Monopoly Part of the Constitution
Robert W. McChesney

Why People Don't Heal: A Homeopathic Perspective
Douglas Falkner, MD, M.Hom

A Change of Heart: The Sacred Journey of Relationship
Sri Estes

In Search of Enlightened Relationships
John Darling

Ten Things Couples Can Do to Enhance Their Relationship
John Eisman

Witnessing
Peter Moore, MFCC, CGP

The Movie Mystic: Matrix Reloaded
Stephen Simon

The Urban Permaculture Homestead
Jude Hobbs

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

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Imagining a New Model of Justice

by Denise Breton, Christopher Largent & Stephen Lehman

We can’t imagine a new world, a new America, without imagining justice anew. Justice isn’t only about law, courts, police, and prisons. It’s about how all of us live, every day. Justice shapes how we think and feel about ourselves in the world because it touches everything we do every expectation we have, every decision we make, and every action we choose. Justice has this all-pervasive quality because it forms our sense of meaning and self-worth: What are we here to be and do? Where is it worthwhile to channel our energies?

Because justice is so pervasive, we ask much of it. Immediately, we need its help in balancing our relationship with ourselves, since this most intimate relationship is fraught with injustices for all sorts of past-experience reasons. What does it mean to regard and then treat ourselves fairly? Which internalized self-messages do us justice, and which don’t? Whatever model of justice we apply to ourselves shapes our relations with others. Ideally, we ask justice to harmonize and protect all of our relationships with loved ones, communities, businesses, animals, nature, and the Earth so that justice serves as the backbone of personal, social, and planetary well-being.

When we see hurts inflicted, we ask justice to work as a correcting, reforming power. We want wrongs righted. But even more than that, we want justice to keep us alive to the possibilities of who we can be together, how diverse beings can share a house or planet happily and peacefully.

We ask all these things of justice, and rightly so, but we’re not getting our requests answered. The current model simply doesn’t work. For one thing, it’s depressing. It’s all about judgments, punishments, guilt, and fear. For another, we’re not even sure justice exists. How many times have we heard the lament, “Justice? There is no justice!” not economically, politically, or legally, nor even in families and love relationships. The lack of justice plagues us so much that we resign ourselves to injustice as the inevitable way of things.

Contemplating justice, the three of us have come to believe that the current model presents a counterfeit justice, and it’s the job of a new century to replace it with the genuine article. A new vision of America calls us to do justice greater justice by evolving models that come closer to fulfilling our ideals of what true justice can be.

The Current Paradigm of Justice

Before we explore what justice can be, let’s look at the current model, the counterfeit that we’ve all accepted. In courts, families, schools, religions, and workplaces, justice has meant getting our just deserts—the rewards and punishments coming to us. Tests, grades, praise, disapproval, merit programs, promises of heaven, and threats of hell all teach a model focused on externals: Who gets which reward or punishment? Accordingly, we come to think about our lives in external terms. What’s in it for me if I do “x”? What punishment will I suffer if I do “y”? When harms occur, retribution is used to right them: pain for pain, hurt for hurt.

As much as this model is ingrained in us, it makes a mockery of justice and a mess of our lives. First, the standards for meting out rewards and punishments can be unfair. For millennia, race and gender have decided who gets what, as have favoritism, money, and clout. Second, externals can be manipulated, so that the most aggressive and cunning get the rewards and avoid the punishments. Those who hold power over others define justice in ways that serve their interests. For example, economic powers claim land from indigenous peoples and enslave them—a Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest justice. Corporate culture has its own version: CEOs give themselves stellar salaries and golden parachutes while laying off workers by the tens and even hundreds of thousands. Third, many factors go into human thought, feeling, and action. For a fair reward-punishment system, all factors should be taken into account. Yet they aren’t, nor could they be. We’d have to be omniscient to do so. Every judgment is inevitably based on incomplete knowledge. Finally, is justice reducible to who gets what? In the end, do externals satisfy us, living as we do for meaning, purpose, transformation, and healing stuff that transcends externals?

Whereas true justice—harmonizing, healing, transforming justice—deepens our philosophy of life, supporting all that’s good and true about us, counterfeit justice—judging, punishing, pain-extending justice—plays havoc with our philosophy of life. It dismisses our uniquely personal meaning, superficializes our values with the common coin of the marketplace, and then installs a view of existence that’s harsh, impersonal, meaningless, and unforgiving.

How? Simple: An externally focused justice makes us think of ourselves in outwardly measured terms. We judge ourselves on the basis of externals (grades, incomes, possessions, visible achievements), and the quest to maximize externals, “What will most advance my outer interests?” becomes our criterion for making decisions.

How we conceive of ourselves is directly affected by the current paradigm of justice. Because we gain externals through competitive struggles, we come to think of our interests as not only separate but also in conflict with others’ interests. If we want rewards for ourselves, then we must beat someone else to get them. Or if we want to avoid punishments, then we learn to deflect blame, direct it elsewhere. Instead of asking, “What are the problems we face, and how can we work together to solve them?” we fight over such questions as “Whose fault is it?” and “How can I spin things to my advantage, and what’s the penalty if I don’t?”

In other words, with counterfeit justice comes a philosophy of what it is to be an individual in the world. Counterfeit justice makes us see ourselves as isolated beings, put on this earth to compete for external rewards. We think about ourselves in narrow, ungenerous, scared, and reactive ways. How we’re connected doesn’t enter our minds. It is not that we wish to conceive of ourselves this way; rather, externalized justice creates these self-perceptions. One of our university students said, “I feel terrible about it, but I can’t help feeling relieved when a fellow students fails, because then I have a better chance of getting a higher grade.” This is justice? This harmonizes our relationships?

Reward-punishment justice takes an equally heavy toll on our emotions. We feel as if we’re constantly being judged, which we are. In schools and businesses, in sports and at home, every action carries a reward-punishment tag. Because we internalize the model early in life, we soon become to ourselves the critical judge that parents and teachers were to us. The judge lives on in our own feelings and reactions as the external standards of counterfeit justice take up residence within.

With judgment comes fear. Will we make the grade? If we slip up, how badly will we be punished? From this model of justice, we inherit a life of stress and anxiety. No amount of rewards satisfies, since punishments may well hit us ahead. We become insatiable about winning, gaining. Not only are we entirely occupied with externals, over which we often have little control, but also we’re chronically afraid of being judged negatively.

Author Alfie Kohn goes further, arguing that even praise works against us. It reminds us that we’re being judged and that next time the judgment on us could be the reverse. When we react to praise, we step out of our authentic activity and focus on how we’re being judged, even if it’s positively. Not the activity itself but the judgment on how we’re doing it predominates and takes all the fun out of it.

Indeed, our inner life becomes the greatest casualty of counterfeit justice. Reward-punishment justice forces a shift in our motivation structure. Instead of being inwardly guided, we become outwardly motivated. We don’t learn because learning is fun and we’re drawn to a subject; we learn because we’ll be graded or paid. We stop listening to what’s within as a reliable guide. We do things for external reasons; not because we find joy in the doing, but for what we’ll gain outwardly by doing so. We do what’s expected from without.

By dismissing inner experiences, the external model of justice disconnects us from our souls’ leadings. It teaches us not to listen to the ways our souls speak to us, not to honor the messages we get from our feelings, intuitions, longings, joys, dreams, excitements, bodies, or, above all, our loves. With a model of justice that disregards inner values, all the rich inner resources we possess to create a meaningful life get dismissed at one stroke.

That’s why we call this model counterfeit; true justice doesn’t work this way. Far from reducing or fragmenting us, true justice defends our wholeness. It protects what’s most essentially us—our whole being, inner and outer.

A New Model: Justice from the Inside Out

Can we envision an alternative? A justice that rings true to who we are and to what we ask of justice? Absolutely. An alternative model of justice has been sitting around, begging to be noticed in Western culture for 2,500 years and in indigenous cultures long before that. In The Republic, Plato and Socrates take a dim view of the reward-punishment model of justice. It’s not justice, they suggest, but a distorted shadow of it. In fact, reading The Republic was what spurred us to rethink justice from the ground up. In place of the external model, Plato and Socrates suggested a justice that operates from the inside out, from our whole being to our life’s expression. Instead of imposing social order on people from family, law, and culture, they envisioned justice as us cultivating the gifts that we bring to the world. We make our contributions to society not because we’re forced to conform or stay in rigid roles, but because our entire beings move us to do what’s ours, what feels right and good, what has meaning and makes life worthwhile.

That’s true justice—satisfying because it embraces all of who we are and affirms what matters to us. The 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi expressed this way of living from the inside out:

When you do things from your soul,
you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
When actions come from another section,
the feeling disappears.

Nor is this inner orientation unique to a few esoteric thinkers. Some indigenous cultures have practiced their own versions for millennia. Observing the Pawnee during the early 1930s, Gene Weltfish wrote:

“[The Pawnee] were a well-disciplined people, maintaining public order under many trying circumstances. Yet they had none of the power mechanisms that we consider essential to a well-ordered life. No orders were ever issued. No assignments for work were ever made nor were over-all plans discussed. There was no code of rules of conduct nor punishment for infraction. There were no commandments nor moralizing proverbs. The only instigator of action was the consenting person … Whatever social forms existed were carried within the consciousness of the people, not by others who were in a position to make demands … Time after time I tried to find a case of orders given, and there was none. Gradually I began to realize that democracy is a very personal thing which, like charity, begins at home. Basically it means not being coerced and having no need to coerce anyone else.”

But what is ours to do? To answer that, we have to know who we are. We need to get in touch with our souls, our inner beings. As we do, we may at first encounter question marks and gaping silences, since we’re not accustomed to poking around inside our essences. On the other hand, we may find our souls bursting to tell us what gives us joy, what inspires meaning. For justice to honor us and our relations with one another, we have to be there, all there, not just in body and possessions but in soul and meaning. We have to first honor ourselves by finding out who we really are and what’s ours to do. What calls us in life?

Without this foundation of self-awareness, justice becomes an external matter, an empty shell fiddling with which stuff belongs to whom. As justice, this is unsatisfying, because there’s not enough of us in it. We’re more than our stuff, and true justice means more than shuffling property. We feel justly treated when we’ve been seen for who we are, when our life stories have been heard and our sense of meaning understood. Then we feel that we’ve found our fair place in a relationship, family, or community.

All the Platonic dialogues suggest a radical shift from an outer to an inner orientation, and the dialogue on justice is no different. To have justice live for us and fulfill our ideals of what justice can be, we cannot reduce it to external terms. The inner must have a place, and if Plato is right, the inner must lead. Being true to what’s within us reveals the path of justice.

But won’t each of us doing what’s ours to do lead to chaos? It all depends on which philosophy we accept about the nature of things and about human nature in particular. If we assume that we’re all greedy so-and-so’s competing for the biggest piece of the pie, then no way would an inner model of justice work. Our inner lives under that paradigm get so traumatized and soul-disconnected that we lose our compass and behave at our worst. As long as we’re externally oriented and dismiss our souls, we’ll have trouble.

But then, that’s what we have now. The chaos and suffering that we see every day is not because we’re all following our souls or living the model that Plato, Rumi, or the Pawnee understood. It’s because we’ve factored our souls out of our officially regulated lives.

An inner approach to justice calls our souls back in, front and center. Following our souls is the key to real social order, mystics believe, because they assume that reality is one. At the deepest levels of our being, who we are is connected to who everyone else is, and through that core connection, our soul-guided actions are synchronized. We don’t think it out from our heads, because we don’t have access to that level of whole-knowing. Rather, in being true to ourselves, we tap into our link to the whole. Through our souls, we’re whole-guided, which means that we’re led into harmony with one another. Our actions are coordinated from beyond us.

Granted, it’s not ours to see how. Rather, it’s ours to follow what’s within, for that’s how the symphony of being speaks to us and guides us. Rumi says that God speaks to us through our loves, our most powerful inner feelings:

Love is the way messengers
from the mystery tell us things.

In following our loves, we follow the “messengers from the mystery,” and this mystery-connectedness unites us with the true loves—the souls and authentic expressions of everyone else.

Restorative Justice

Not only can an inner-oriented model of justice work, it is already working, and far more powerfully than the one-sided, external-only approach. We’re referring to the paradigm shift in justice practices that falls loosely under the name of restorative justice. This new vision of justice, birthed somewhat independently around the world over the last few decades, seeks not to punish but to heal, not to extend hurt by adding more pain but by restoring broken relations and righting whatever wrongs have occurred.

To do this healing work, everyone must be involved: victims, offenders, families, and communities. We hurt one another when we don’t feel connected, either to ourselves or to others. From isolation, we act connectedness-blind, and that’s when harms happen.

Restorative justice helps us rediscover our soulful connectedness. In the “healing and sentencing circles” of the Hollow Water community in Canada, of which Canadian prosecutor Rupert Ross writes, everyone comes together and listens to one another’s stories. People talk not only about immediate circumstances but also about what happened in the course of experiences that led them to behave one way rather than another. Through this open, inner-revealing exchange, transformations occur. Those who have harmed others feel genuine remorse as they hear victims speak. Victims, in turn, understand what led offenders to act as they did, which often inspires compassion and heartfelt forgiveness. The trauma that plagues victims diminishes and sometimes dissolves entirely.

Whereas punishment sends offenders to years of crime school, restorative justice strives to break the cycle of crime and so achieve prevention. By inviting everyone involved to interact person to person, soul to soul, restorative justice restores the balance between inner and outer. We come to experience one another not only through the outer “what” of our lives but more through the inner “how” and “why.”

The healing impact is powerful. In Yes! magazine, Tag Evers tells the story of Thomas Ann Hines, a mother whose 21-year-old son, Paul Hines, was murdered by a 17-year-old car thief named Charles. Her immediate response, which persisted for 13 years, was the desire for punishment. Yet a life driven by revenge is no joy, she discovered. After years of support groups with other parents of murdered children, as well as 3 years of preparation in a victim-offender mediation program, Thomas Ann Hines was ready to meet her son’s killer. The effect of their first, emotional, 6-hour meeting was profound. The mother saw a boy, now 30, abandoned on the street at 13, left to fend for himself, never having received the mothering her son enjoyed all his life. Charles, on the other hand, experienced from his victim’s mother, now herself transformed, an understanding and compassion that he’d never known.

“I wanted him to look in the eyes of the mother of the boy he had killed,” says Hines. “I wanted him to know there is love in the world …”

“The intensity and depth of emotion ran the whole gamut from hopelessness and sheer despair to hope and a sense of faith,” says Dave Doerfler, who mediated the session. “Charles was locked in his pain, saying there was nothing he could do to bring back Paul’s life. But Thomas Ann was relentless—she broke through and insisted while Charles couldn’t do anything about her son’s life, he could do something about his own …”

[Charles] agreed to work on his GED and pursue vocational training. Additionally, with Thomas Ann’s support, Charles listed personal and spiritual goals that might strengthen him as he prepared for his eventual release from prison.

Up to that point, Charles had amassed 148 disciplinary violations, losing up to 10 years of possible “good time.” But he now had something he did not have before: hope and the knowledge that someone loved him.

“The criminal justice system operates on the principle that if someone is down, you kick ’em,” says Hines. “Until we start looking at the roots of crime instead of the results, it’s not going to change … At the close of our session, I said to Charles: ‘I had a choice—I could spend the rest of my life hating you. But I don’t hate you. I just want you to move forward with your life.’ As we parted, Charles reached out and wrapped his arms around me. I’ve had lots of hugs in my life, but besides Paul, I can’t think of a person in the world I’d rather have hug me.”

Amazing as this story is, it is not uncommon in restorative justice. It demonstrates the healing power of justice, not as a judging, condemning force in our lives, but as a powerful advocate for who we are, honoring our innate worth and urging us to find and fulfill our life’s callings. By shifting the focus from outer to inner and working to heal our lives from the inside out, we imagine not only a new justice for America but that more of us can live it right where we are. Starting with ourselves, our relationships, and how we deal with hurts, we can invite a new and truer justice to be born among us.

As this happens, we together create a revolution in justice that can’t be stopped— a revolution that will transform, heal, and lighten every aspect of our lives. That’s powerful stuff. That’s true justice.

Philosophers Denise Breton, Christopher Largent, and Stephen Lehman have worked together on several books, including “The Paradigm Conspiracy: Why Our Social Systems Violate Human Potential,” “How We Can Change Them” and “Love, Soul, and Freedom: Dancing with Rumi on the Mystic Path,” Denise and Chris as coauthors, Steve as their editor. They are currently writing “The Mystic Heart of Justice,” on which this essay is based. This essay was taken from the book “IMAGINE: What America Could be in the 21st Century,” edited by Marianne Williamson, a collection of essays from America’s foremost visionaries offering a prescriptive plan for what every person can, and must, do to create a better future for themselves and the world. For more on this topic visit the Global Renaissance Alliance website www.renaissancealliance.org, or contact them at PO Box 3259, Center Line, Michigan 48015; (586) 754-8105, Fax (586) 754-8105, office@renaissancealliance.org.