Justice Stalks You at Night

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

What a nice sentiment, you are thinking. Wrong, child. It should be keeping you awake at night. Properly understood, it is cosmic horror.

We like to think that when justice comes, our oppressors will get theirs. Yes, they will. Relish it. But justice is shown as blind and armed with a sword for a reason. You will get yours also. “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. If you think, I’m a good person, I don’t do wrong unlike *those* people . . . it only means that one of your sins is complacency and blindness and lying to yourself, and one more misery will be added to your fall. There will be the horrible moment where you realize how greatly you were self-deceived. You will be stricken before you are struck.

To embrace justice is to embrace the night. You see, justice literally is entropy. It takes no great prophecy to foretell the triumph of justice. It only takes putting a bit of shine on the laws of thermodynamics.

That is because justice consists of people making meaningful choices where they experience the consequences of those choices. If there are no consequences, there is no justice. But there can’t be meaningful consequences in a world without entropy. My efforts to create order don’t matter much if order just happens along on its own. What need to put the tool away if the tool crawls off the shed in the twilight?

Earth is an interesting compromise. It gets free energy from the Sun yet it is still party to an entropic universe. So not everything is a grim fighting retreat against ever increasing decay, it is possible to build–but left to their own devices, everything falls apart.

Curiously enough, reality itself seems to be just that sort of compromise. We live in an entropic universe, but from time to time it is invaded by bounty from the outside. And we are promised that one day the conditions of this universe will end and the curtain will rise on the real eternal world, where gifts run like rivers. The choices we make now affect what we will be able to accept then, so in a sense we will always still have one foot in this world of entropy, but only one foot. Justice is not denied, but Mercy has her day.