Or: More thoughts on the Road to the Cathedral

In some sense it is up to me what I believe. What I can do with those beliefs is not.

The determined among us can even continue to hold onto beliefs that cannot be put into practice. We can hold onto beliefs that can probably never be tested. I can continue to believe, for example, that a different way of organising things, a different system or a different set of values would suit human beings - and humanity - much better; would bring out the best in them, while the one we have (here) brings out the worst. If I am optimistic - or naive - enough, I can go on believing, even if everything around me seems to contradict the possibility.

With justice it is different: getting closer to justice depends on others - a huge number of them. To make beliefs about the good and the potential for good in human beings into a reality depends on more than whether or not these are really justified beliefs; more than whether, in theory, I could be right that if the world was different, so would we be different. To put justice into practice depends on making that world different - and that in turn depends on others being ready to believe, and then to act on those beliefs.

The global status quo right now is unjust, and the status quo at any time is not something that those in power or those who benefit from it wish to change. Those in power will always persuade us that the status quo is just, and that it could not realistically be more just if 'our' theories on implementing justice were to be put into practice. And those of us who benefit from the unjust global status quo - the richer countries, Europe, the US, the G8 in particular - want to hear just this: we want to hear that even if we were to sacrifice our comfy living standards, the starving millions still would not be better off.

But it is rubbish to believe that, and we must know it. We can believe it only because our beliefs are, in some sense, up to us as individuals: we can hold beliefs which are transparently false, if we really want to (and we do). Yet, for as long as 'we' persist in holding this irrational (and evil) belief that justice, or at least a little less injustice, is not possible today, now - for so long will it be unrealistic to imagine that we can try to prove the belief wrong.

Unless we try, we cannot know for sure; unless we believe, we will never try; and unless we want to believe, we shall never even believe. And that alone will be enough to make belief in justice genuinely false.