This is part two of a four-part series analyzing the saga of the crucifixion and its implications. Click here to begin at the introduction and also find the table of contents/bibliography.

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If we are to read Scripture purely as a historical document, as an account of things past, we inevitably relegate its relevance to that of relic. Yet this is what we continuously do as Christians. The fundamentalists and modernists wage their war primarily over the historicity of various Biblical events, but what unites them is the implicit relegation of Scripture to this status of document, each word to its own dispensation. Both the apologist and the historical-critical scholar, in their attempts to reconcile Scripture with “history”, place themselves in a position of pure retrospect, s sort of distant analysis.

Yet to do this — to speak of Rome purely as that state which existed from 509 BC to 395 AD — is to sever the personal connection between the Gospels and the reader. As I see it, such a perspective is limited; it prevents us from properly being able to identify and see ourselves in the situation, the crisis faced by Christ and Israel throughout the Scriptures.

The progressive conceit is to believe that history is linear; that it continually advances from barbarism to civilization. The Bible tells us otherwise, time is cyclical: one generation passeth, and another generation cometh, but the Earth abideth forever. (Ecclesiastes 1:4). The marks of our mortality, our inability to do good (Romans 3:10-11), means that humanity is continually destined to repeat it’s mistakes, as a dog returns to its own vomit. (Proverbs 26:11). And in history we see this: ideas and institutions may take new forms, but every new idea bears the heritage of a previous tradition. The fundamental motifs and attitudes underlying the Roman Republic leave their footprint all over our modern secular civilization. The blood of the Roman runs through liberalism.

When the artists of the Renaissance were rebelling against the religious dogmatism and stagnation of the Middle Ages, what did they turn towards? The humanism of the Greeks and Romans. The valorization of reason, a concern for the mortal, and an increased belief in science over the superstitious. Machiavelli prided himself on reviving the Greco-Roman spirit in politics. Even in art and architecture one could see the Roman influence all over. This continued into the Enlightenment, with the arts once again finding their prime influence in Classicism. Politicians and philosophers began to look to Cicero, and we see this influence how we run our democracies even today. Separation of powers, codified citizen rights, republican government, all of these have their roots in Rome. One need only look at the volume of Latin used across our legal system to appreciate the legacy.

Yet for all of these traits, the common theme is separation: separation of one branch of government from another, separation of the spheres of life in which government may or may not intrude, separation of authority into democracy. Separation is the essence of secularism. It is a myth that a secular society need necessarly be anti-theistic, or even atheistic. The secular society tolerates religious beliefs, insofar as it keeps to its own realm. The religious sphere mustn’t mix with the government, mustn’t mix with the workplace, mustn’t mix with public life.

Likewise the Romans also bestowed their own form of religious tolerance: their ire was reserved for those who were not content with a place in the pantheon, those who posed a threat to the political balance. The charges the Pharisees leveled against Jesus were correct: “anyone who claims to be a King opposes Caesar” (John 19:12).

So when we read into the role of the Rome in Scripture, what we are really being given an insight into is the justice of secular society. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s (Mark 12:17), because the law of Caesar is the law of “each to its own sphere”. The justice afforded to Christ was his rights at trial; because he was run through the same processes as any other man of his status, Pilate could comfortably wash his hands of the affair. This language of justice which precisely formed the bedrock of Roman society: the grounds on which they define justice and the grounds upon which they claim authority are one and the same.

For Romans, justice was the value that most legitimised their right to rule other peoples. Internally, it was a leading political principle that justified the power entrusted to emperors and senatorial, equestrian, and decurional elites… Yet, it nonetheless addressed elites, city-dwellers, land-holders and peasants from widely different ethnic, cultural, and social backgrounds as stakeholders of a social order governed by law and justice. Remarkably, many genuinely believed they were. The ‘rule of law’ imposed by Rome was eventually—if not initially—accepted as legitimate by the vast majority the empire’s inhabitants. During the first centuries of our era up to a quarter of the entire human race expected justice from Roman authorities or Roman backed local authorities and arranged their lives accordingly. (Verboven and Hekster 2017, 1-2)

Justice existed not purely as some lofty ideal for the Republic to realize, but as synonymous with the Republic itself. To be Caesar was to be a god in the world. To appeal to Caesar (Acts 25:11) is to put one’s faith in him as the embodiment of Justice. Low-level jurists may fail you, but ultimately Caesar will see what is right.

Roman religion had many gods and spirits and Augustus was keen to join their number as a god himself. This was not unusual: turning political leaders into gods was an old tradition around the Mediterranean. There was also precedent in Roman history – Aeneas and Romulus, who had helped found Rome, were already worshipped as gods. (PBS, “Augustus”)

The relation of the emperor to the law and to justice is one of the more central themes of this book. The emperor was guarantor of justice, source of statutory and precedent law, the highest judicial authority, and the ultimate enforcer of distributive and corrective justice. Emperors were judges who received petitions and issued rescripts on paper involving litigants who wanted a ruling on a legal point. Emperors also heard lawsuits or prosecutions themselves and issued verdicts (decreta). This was mostly but not exclusively on appeal. Fergus Millar famously summarized this as the petition-and-response model, showing how emperors were expected to be approachable by their subjects and guarantee justice. Emperors were also legislators of general laws, holding extraordinary legislative powers from Augustus onwards, ultimately even allowing Ulpian to argue that princeps legibus solutus est. (Verboven and Hekster 2017, 4)

As the law of Caesar is said to be the law of God, so the law of the world becomes the law of God. All men in their separation are united under Caesar, but only insofar as he continues to act as their mediator. In the moment Caesar may hold the crown, but authority ultimately rests with the people: Vox Popli, Vox Dei.

2.1. Law De Jure

As history progressed, we found we no longer needed an emperor: a Republic alone proved sufficient. But where democracy meant an end to Caesars, it would still build itself upon halls of marble. The buildings of Washington D.C. would be deliberately modeled after a Roman temple: no longer honoring a man, but procedure itself (Architect of the Capitol, “Neoclassical”)

A law of procedure exists for men, among men. It is by definition interpersonal, as it derives its authority from the bottom-up, as opposed to instating it top-down. Every democracy envisions itself as a social contract, an agreement between individuals as to how they can cooperate in a society.

Before the social contract, people relied upon a “primitive” (or more accurately, intuitive) conception of justice. To carry out justice was to live by Hammurabi’s famous words: an eye for an eye.

In traditional societies, this justice would be realized either personally or through the extended family unit in blood feuds. If you or someone within your kin has been slighted or hurt, it is your moral duty to exact vengeance. An attack on my brother is an attack on me, blood can only be repaid with blood. To turn the other cheek would not be an act of mercy, but of weakness.

Honor is a kind of status attached to physical bravery and the unwillingness to be dominated by anyone. Honor in this sense is a status that depends on the evaluations of others, and members of honor societies are expected to display their bravery by engaging in violent retaliation against those who offend them (Cooney 1998:108–109; Leung and Cohen 2011). Accordingly, those who engage in such violence often say that the opinions of others left them no choice at all…. In honor cultures, it is one’s reputation that makes one honorable or not, and one must respond aggressively to insults, aggressions, and challenges or lose honor. Not to fight back is itself a kind of moral failing, such that “in honor cultures, people are shunned or criticized not for exacting vengeance but for failing to do so” (Cooney 1998:110). Honorable people must guard their reputations, so they are highly sensitive to insult, often responding aggressively to what might seem to outsiders as minor slights (Cohen et al. 1996; Cooney 1998:115–119; Leung and Cohen 2011)… Cultures of honor tend to arise in places where legal authority is weak or nonexistent and where a reputation for toughness is perhaps the only effective deterrent against predation or attack (Cooney 1998:122; Leung and Cohen 2011:510). Because of their belief in the value of personal bravery and capability, people socialized into a culture of honor will often shun reliance on law or any other authority even when it is available, refusing to lower their standing by depending on another to handle their affairs (Cooney 1998:122–129). (Greer 2021)

Under this conception, the essence of justice is retribution. But what is retribution but a form of balance? An eye is to be exchanged for an eye, no more, and no less. To go too far is tyranny, to go not far enough is cowardice. It does not matter if the loss is unrecoverable, my loss can be made right if someone else is there is someone else’s loss to balance it out.

Among these traditional societies were Ancient Greece, Ancient Israel, the Antebellum South, and most notably the Middle Ages.

The Middle Ages, from beginning to end, and particularly the feudal era, lived under the sign of private vengeance. The onus, of course, lay above all on the wronged individual; vengeance was imposed on him as the most sacred of duties … The solitary individual, however, could do but little. Moreover, it was most commonly a death that had to be avenged. In this case the family group went into action and the faide (feud) came into being, to use the old Germanic word which spread little by little through the whole of Europe—’the vengeance of the kinsmen which we call faida’, as a German canonist expressed it. No moral obligation seemed more sacred than this … The whole kindred, therefore, placed as a rule under the command of a chieftain, took up arms to punish the murder of one of its members or merely a wrong that he had suffered. (Greer 2021)

If we are to speak of the Enlightenment as a response to the supposed “barbarism” of the Middle Ages, then what we see is a move away from the highly personal, punitive justice towards a cosmopolitan, procedural justice.

The societies of old structured themselves in a highly localized fashion. One’s concern was one’s own family, one’s own village, one’s own immediate surroundings. The strength of these communities are built on exclusion: one is compelled to participate because one has no other choice. Outsiders cannot be held to these obligations, and therefore outsiders cannot be trusted.

By contrast, our image of a modern civilization is (just like Rome) one where we continually come into contact with “outsiders”. Your family could be different, your culture could be different, your values could be different, and your interests could be different: we still meet in the market, in the schools, in the streets.

This movement from the particular towards the universal warrants a rethinking of justice, as when these groups experience conflict, their intuitions also conflict. We have seen the destructive trail left by lynchings, pogroms, and blood feuds, and recognize them as having no place in a civilized society. We recognize how when we cannot speak of a common justice, the only language left is the language of power: might makes right.

So the secular society derives common justice from common law. Every citizen is afforded the same rights, the same boundaries others may not violate, and the same procedures when those boundaries are crossed. Justice is to be identified with neutrality and consistency, towards the aim of cooperation. Or to use the words of the renowned Roman philosopher Cicero, justice is “an attitude that assigns each person their due and thus preserves the cohesion of human society. Our nature is endowed with an innately civic and social character.” (Wolfe 2020)

Justice is no longer identified with honor, but the underlying principle of balance still remains. But as opposed to a balancing of loss, we now speak of a balancing of interests.

If a crime is committed against me, I don’t immediately lash out because I trust that the State (which enforces the contract) will properly balance things on my behalf. The State might value process, but at the end of the day, what I am paying attention to is whether or not the one who offended me gets the due retribution.

On the flipside, criminals are deterred from acting out because they also have that confidence that if they do, they will receive appropriate and just harm due to due process. He may not like or comply with it, but he recognizes it as legitimate anyways.

This brand of justice is considered procedural because it finds its definition not in punishment itself but in everything surrounding it. Trials, constitutions, rights, appeals, all of these form the basis of procedural justice.

Legitimacy is ultimately a collective perception, and as long as it exists people should be willing to peacefully cooperate, even if begrudgingly. Individual men may have their own short-sighted impulses, but in the long-term the wiser judgement of the State and its process should prevail, and people should have enough of a share of satisfaction to preserve order and balance.

After all, cooperation is the ultimate aim of the social contract, and its ultimate source of moral legitimacy. The secular man knows murder is wrong, because murder is an infringement upon another person’s boundaries. To undermine boundaries is to undermine the balance which keeps peace and order. If everyone murdered everyone, society wouldn’t function, so murder is wrong. If nobody paid their taxes, society wouldn’t function, so not paying your taxes is wrong. The entire system is self-regulating.

Even criminals have their own system of cooperation and order. Criminals don’t exist entirely dispersed as lone-wolves, but rather instead form gangs and organizations with their own rules and expectations for cooperation. Once again, there is a set of restrictions: it’s wrong to snitch, it’s wrong to defy orders, it’s wrong to unnecessarily start fights. All of these laws once again, are based upon what is necessary for continued cooperation and stability. Or to put it more concisely: a godless society privileges not anarchy but equilibrium.

2.2. Vox Popli, Vox Dei

As such, the language of the contract becomes the language of justice: cooperation, consent, freedom, boundaries, fairness. We are no longer dealing with empirical concepts but moral ones. The neutrality of this balance, the neutrality of the institutions underpinning liberalism is in reality a false one.

A contract by definition requires two independent actors. If they aren’t independent, they cannot enter or exit the contract of their own volition. For a choice to be free, it has to be independent of external influence, therefore each sphere of society must be strictly segregated. It must assume equality, not just in some abstract quantitative sense but in a qualitative one. If every man is to be granted the same rights, same due process, etc, then there must be commonality. All people must foundationally have the same approach to resolving conflict, the same desire for cooperation, the same social organization which allows for independence, etc. Diversity is only conceived in terms of detached icons (cuisine, language, fashion, etc) but never in the terms that are actually relevant to the stability of such a balance: communal structure, religion, political inclinations, etc).

We are no longer dealing with a contract which finds its neutrality in “unbiased, objective” judgements regarding human nature (as secular society claims) but rather instead an ideology which merely assumes the universality of its applicability. Ironically, the modernists return back to the medieval logic — dogma derived its legitimacy from church authority and the church derived its authority from dogma. Now, the Humanist philosophy points to civil society as its proof, whereas institutions are to be defined in relation to Humanist ideals. The logic is circular, but the conclusion is clear: Society is Truth, Society is Justice, Society is God. This transcendence afforded to the social realm in order to self-justify its ideology is what Marxists have long termed reification.

The foundation of justice according to liberal thinkers from Hume to Locke to Hobbes is derived from the laws of property and commerce: both entirely social constructs which have taken radically different characters at different points in history. Even many socialists took to arguing capitalism’s injustice based on capitalism’s own premises.

Justice éternelle was Proudhon’s principal category of judgment, which he used to decry the glaring inequalities of the present, so Marx singled it out for special abuse… Later, in Capital, Marx repeated this point: “Proudhon creates his ideal of justice, or justice éternelle, from the juridical relations that correspond to the production of commodities. He thereby proves, to the consolation of every good petite-bourgeois, that the production of commodities is a form as eternal as justice. Then he turns around and seeks to reform the actual production of commodities, as well as the corresponding legal system, in accordance with this ideal. What would one think of a chemist who, instead of studying the actual laws that govern molecular interactions, claimed to regulate such interactions by means of eternal ideas such as naturalité and affinité, etc.” Reversing cause and effect, Proudhon tried to transplant the ideological superstructure of society onto its material base. (Wolfe 2020)

Because procedural justice claims not just a pragmatic, but a moral authority, it implicitly is assumed the development of institutions must lead to the progression of outcomes. However this “must” is a normative “must” as opposed to an empirical one. There is no iron law of nature which states that institutions will magically conform to this Platonic ideal of procedure which perfectly balances everyone’s outcomes. That is why, even in a 21st century America — one which has undergone countless reforms, progression, and upheaval — we still see widespread discontent with the state of the contract.

And where procedure diverges from outcome, that is when the detached neutrality of procedural justice gives way to social justice. The impulse underlying social justice is an explicitly normative one, it doesn’t just simply assert that the institution is aligned with the ideal, but actively seeks to make the institution align with the ideal. It emerges where procedural justice fails. Some of the common issues brought up by proponents of social justice include:

• For every 1000 incidents of sexual assault in the US, it is estimated that 25 will actually lead to any form of incarceration (RAINN). This is only among reported incidents, as victims are often discouraged due to both long been not having been taken seriously by authorities and fear of retaliation (an example of this is how 62% of those (Rhoad 2015) who report their own abuse in the military experience some form of retalitation).
• Going off of exonerations, African-Americans make up approximately 14% of the population, but 47% of all wrongful convictions (Gross et al., 2022). In other words, an innocent black person is seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than an innocent white person, 3.5x more likely (Rosenfeld 2023) to be killed by a police officer while unarmed. Accountability is difficult, especially since reports are handled internally, settlements are paid with tax dollars, most union contracts have provisions which undermine disciplinary action (Olson 2020).

This isn’t even to get into the other myriad of issues surrounding race, gender, class, etc. which were the focus of the bulk of social reform efforts over the past century. Regardless, these sorts of questions point to failures of justice not in some abstract moral sense, but also in the practical terms upon which procedural justice grounds itself. Affected groups do not trust the state and civil society to satisfy their end of the contract, and in turn seek justice extrajudicially. This could be rioting (such as with the Watts Riots), protesting, forming communal self-defense units (such as with the Black Panthers), or through media campaigns (such as MeToo). In each of these cases, we see a return to the more vigilante, intuitive senses of justice which is to be delivered from one’s own community. Whatever the cause of these concerns, or how valid we assume any one concern to be, it’s ultimately irrelevant: perception is king. As mentioned before, legitimacy in the social contract exists not as a transcendent truth, but as a collective decision. Polarization is up (Pew Research Center 2014), faith in institutions is low (Jones 2022), and political violence (Bergengruen 2022) is on the rebound: this is ultimately what is relevant.

Of course, a secular society is perfectly capable of admitting its own injustices, but the failures never lie with the contract itself, merely our implementation of it. “Not enough accountability”, “systemic bias”, “insufficient representation”: these are the sorts of critiques liberals will level at injustices in the status quo, whether we’re talking about the market, policing, or even media. But what these critiques share in common is that rather than undermining the system, they reinforce its necessity. Progressives are reformists at heart: regulation, representation, and oversight all involve further expanding and refining institutions to ensure everything is functioning as “intended”. A failure is not an indictment of the ideal, but rather instead an indictment of reality for its failure to conform to the ideal.

This is the trap many fall into when critiquing liberalism: it’s a complete motte and bailey. To point out disconnects between procedure and outcome (the keystone of liberal justice) is to level an attack against the current-justice, not the ideal-justice. The shape of that ideal-justice is always nebulous, discursively insulated from any questions of what its reality would actually mean. When one discusses the virtues of the system, the ideal-justice comes out, but when one discusses the vices we now speak of the current-justice. So comes the great irony that leftists (such as Proudhon) critique liberalism on grounds of being insufficiently liberal.

So one can critique the current-courts as unfair, the current-markets as unequal, or our current-government as un-democratic, but the values themselves go unquestioned. But why should that be the case? Just as we can’t take for granted that insisting upon our current institutions will lead to just outcomes, who is to say that there exists such an ideal configuration of institutional parameters where everything balances out? Who is to say that we can even speak of a society built on a universal independence, a universal fairness, a universal equality, when we can’t even consistently define these terms?

Even take a concept such as foundational as “neutrality”: what does it mean to be neutral? Obviously, on a basic level we can say it means to not arbitrarily discriminate, but that isn’t the only form we see in our society. In contrast to traditional taste-based discrimination (for example, denying a job to someone because you take personal issue with their race), economists have also widely noted the existence of statistical discrimination in our society. In scenarios where information is limited, economic actors (employers, lenders, university admissions) may take to incorporating demographic statistics in order to assess risk. To cite an example:

Suppose there are two cases of discrimination (C1) and (C2). Case (C1): The employer of a company rejects a female applicant because he receives and believes the statistical evidence from company research showing that the average productivity (measured by output) of female employees is lower than that of male employees.

Case (C2): The employer of a company rejects a female applicant because the sacred text of his religion says that God does not want women to work outside of home.

Both employers in (C1) and (C2) engage in discrimination against women. The employer in (C1) engages in statistical discrimination according to our definition, but the employer in (C2) does not. The main difference between statistical discrimination and non-statistical discrimination is in the third condition spelled out at the end of 2.1, namely, the role of evidence. While statistical discrimination is motivated and grounded by belief in statistical evidence about the correlation between social group membership and particular attributes, non-statistical discrimination is motivated by other attitudes, such as hostility towards certain social groups or belief in the inferior moral status of the groups.

…[S]tatistical discrimination is arguably less likely than other forms of discrimination to involve an intention to disadvantage the members of the group in question. It is true that, as Pauline T. Kim points out, statistical discrimination can be intentional, as when the agent relies on algorithms to make decisions because “it knows the model produces a discriminatory result and intends that results to occur” (Kim, 2016, p.884). However, usually, the agent engaging in statistical discrimination does not intend to disadvantage the group. Given the same statistical estimation of productivity, the employer in (C1) might be equally willing to hire female as male applicants. In fact, one reason given for using statistics in employment is to reduce intentional discrimination in decision-making. (Sun 2021, 3-4)

On paper, sounds rather neutral: an employer with limited information has to make a probabilistic judgement, and consider all sources of information. As long as the statistics are objective, then shouldn’t that remove the bias? After all, this should mean that opportunities writ large will go to the groups deserving. But once again, we run into another divergence between procedure and outcome, this time manifest in the vicious circle: a phenomenon in which the results of this process inadvertently reinforces the initial statistics which caused the problems in the first place.

Statistical discrimination adds to the existing injustice suffered by the subject group. This is realized through a dual mechanism. First, statistical discrimination contributes to existing injustice directly through causing disadvantageous outcomes for the group. For example, statistical discrimination in the workplace increases the difficulty for members of minority groups to get employment, salary raises, and promotion, preventing them from moving out of poverty and improving their living conditions. These consequences, in turn, reduce their access to good education and skill training, which then worsens their performance in the workplace, creating a vicious circle. Statistical discrimination in education, housing, and services also exacerbates the quality of life of minority groups. Besides the material disadvantages, statistical discrimination causes reasonable feelings of powerless, stigma, resentment, hatred and other traumatic experiences. (Sun 2021, 18)

So, what are we to make of a system which reinforces the problems which it punishes groups for? Is it systemically unjust? Is it not neutral, since the spiral only occurs to previously discriminated groups? Even if we were to run these judgements through an algorithm (whose entire purpose is to process data and identify quantifiable trends), we still see questions regarding their objectivity be raised:

The use of algorithms is transforming the workplace. Many employers rely on algorithms to determine who gets interviewed and whom to hire or promote (Kim, 2016). Algorithms learn based on the data on which they are designed. Unable to distinguish correlations that represent causal connections from correlations that are not themselves causal but can be explained by a third-party cause or other underlying causal process, algorithms treat instances of prejudice in training data as valid examples and simply perpetuate these injustices in its outputs (Hayes et al., 2020, p.12).

For example, suppose an algorithm is trained on a data pool including gender and occupational information of a county’s population over the past ten years, and it is asked to predict whether a candidate is likely to succeed in a leadership position. The algorithm can easily detect that being male is correlated with higher possibility of becoming leaders and make decisions favoring male candidates over female candidates. The algorithm is not able to distinguish the situation where females are intrinsically unsuitable for being a leader and therefore have lower rates of taking leadership position, from the situation where there are third-party factors that unjustifiably make it more difficult for women to get a leadership position. (Sun 2021, 17-18)

So clearly this isn’t just a matter of “bad actors”, but a larger crisis of definition: should one define neutrality with respect to the procedure or with respect to the outcome? Regardless of whichever side one takes on the issue, the implications end up raising a great deal of ambiguity regarding what exactly these concepts mean. And because these are normative concepts, there’s no reason to assume this ambiguity will ever be resolved.

It’s precisely because the entire framework rests upon such a quixotic foundation that it takes upon an absurd character. Vox popli, vox dei fails because the people are not God. How can the State stand as a neutral mediator above men when all these institutions are directly the product of men? When one speaks of systemic bias as the root of political evil, are they not implicitly positing that their Platonic system requires the complete absence of humanity to function? But then what is a political system if it have nothing to do with men? What good is this Roman justice if — when push comes to shove — Pilate’s first response was to wash his hands and declare “this is your responsibility” (Matthew 27:24) to the very same people he claimed dominion over?

This question holds not just on a level of practical implementation, but even the foundational ideas, which is why “well it can’t be perfect, but we can try” is not an argument. It neglects the fact that even the ideals against which all things are calibrated are in and of themselves immanent in their character. Which is why liberals struggle to define things like justice, why a line such as “equal is not equal” can be said without a hint of irony, and why we are called to have faith in institutions in order to protect the health of said institutions.

It should come as no surprise then that a writer like Hobbes can first describe society mechanistically, and then come to the conclusion that the State must act as a sort of secular god, lifting men above the state of nature (O’Flynn 2009, 27-31). A machine is fully within our control, it’s parts can be swapped and optimized at will. The machine carries with it a dual-definition: design and implementation, problem and solution. This separation paves the way for a politics of reform and rational choice. However, this analogy ignores that machine operates according to the laws of physics: laws which stand true across time and independent of human relations.

But the language of the social scientists remains just as mathematical regardless. Marx once criticized the classical economists for treating men as “Robinson Crusoes” (Marx 2005): hypothetical rational actors put into a hypothetical context cut off from the real world. Modern economics, for all of its evolution, remains stuck in this paradigm. Policymakers, economists, and planners understand their goals numerically: indices, targets, and investments. The goal precedes practice, and preceding the goal is the terms of said goal. Filtered through the goal, practice can only be a matter of accounting: to direct human behavior as one would turn a wrench, human beings must be reducible to an objective dimension. So, we may mistake the narrowness of individual questions (resource allocation, crime rates, consumption patterns, etc.) for the objectivity of the endeavor, but taking a step back, we begin to see the patterns. If society is god, then equilibrium becomes not just a base question of survival or stability, but the pursuit of justice itself. The activist and the wonk end up in the same place: performing social alchemy in the hopes of synthesizing ideals into reality.

Either way you look at it, to appeal to such an ideal requires one to appeal to an authority outside of men and things, to what is functionally a god. But this god has to define himself in concord with the ideals of property, justice, and right: all concepts which have their roots in social organization. This god in harmony with society is in reality defined by society — it becomes more accurate to say society becomes god. With the power of technology to seemingly “rationally” organize nature, mankind begins to see itself in the position of god.

In striving to become god — to conform to this ideal law that has been erected — limitations become all the more apparent, and the drive towards perfection becomes a drive towards purging humanity. So it is that personal forms of domination and social organization give way to domination by abstract forces. No longer is there a king, but a bureaucracy. Legal and political systems become increasingly byzantine to navigate and absurd. One in theory is given class mobility, but the market renders all labor fundamentally alien. Men no longer find themselves oppressed by other men, but by the products of their own creation. The aforementioned ‘qualitative equality’ has the effect of stripping all men and things of their sense of agency and individuality. This purification of mankind is indistinguishable from its annihilation. Or, to put it short: if society is a machine, then what can men be but its cogs?

Capitalist society, as the latter saw it, had made everything equal by subjecting it all to indiscriminate exchange. “One man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour,” Marx explained. “Time is everything, man is nothing; or else, he is but time’s carcass. Quality no longer matters, as quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day. Yet this equalizing of labor is by no means the work of Proudhon’s ‘eternal justice.’ Rather, it is simply a fact of modern industry.” In other words, far from conflicting with the norms of capitalist production, the “eternal justice” championed by Proudhon instead hypostatized them. (Wolfe 2020)

This is ultimately the conclusion of secular justice — far from overcoming religion, it finds itself hopelessly trapped within it.

Contract preaches “choice” but fails to recognize the ways in which not choosing is a part of human existence: we don’t get to choose what we are born into, we don’t get to choose who we are dependent upon. The decisions we make will always have ripple effects to the rest of the social web. The only way you can truly “mind your own business” is to exit society. The only way a society can turn “minding one’s own business” into an ethos is to create a system in which social participation is entirely passive. Should it come as no surprise then that with the might of the capitalist machine leveraged towards realizing this end of “perfection in isolation”, our world is the most atomized it has ever been?

Rather than bringing people together, the entire premise rests on the idea that your fellow man is an obstacle to be overcome. How can one possibly speak of social justice from such anti-social foundations?

Continue to Part III