With liberty and... uh... justice?

This past Sunday, Dr. Um made a statement which I thought was fascinating. He said,

"The survival of the fittest mentality fosters injustice not justice because survival of the fittest is not about fairness or equality for all, but rather, a pragmatic system in which the strongest survive." In other words, the individual is dispensable; the system must be upheld. This idea of "justice" goes to pot, figuratively speaking.

He went on to say, "There has to be a moral framework outside of ourselves for there to be any real sense of right and wrong, justice or injustice." In other words, a competitive system of survival mechanisms does not in and of itself produce an understanding of and longing for a just world.

I hear the words "social justice," "just cause," "justice being served," "striving for justice" and others, all the time, working on a college campus. They are, in a sense, the buzzwords of the day for those savvy and in the know. But maybe its time to take a step back and ask ourselves a few really important questions:

1) What is justice? What does it look like?
2) Where does it come from? How is it attained?

And may I preemptively state that if you think justice comes from education... take a look at how some of the most educated societies in the world have historically handled justice. Might I suggest looking at the Babylonians and Assyrians, the Romans, the United States, the Russians, the Germans, the Japanese, and the Chinese?

Or if we go by statistics, check out some of the most literate nations in the world and consider how literacy correlates to standards of justice. I find countries one and two particularly interesting.

How about the education level? Take a look at the "most educated nations" ... are they upholding justice yet? Yes, maybe their justice doesn't look as bloody and violent; their forms of injustice are more sophisticated, more surreptitious, and more insidious. If you look at statistics like corruption rate, and total crime level, we see some repeats of countries from the most educated list... it doesn't appear that education level radically transforms a society from an unjust one to a just one.

So, we come back to the original question... where does justice come from? And what is justice, at its root level? Thoughts? Questions? Observations?

I'll post on this further in the near future. But for now, the floor is yours!