Payback

Yet the female Justice figures persisted. What accounts for their staying power?

If we were primatologists, we could point to the fact that among the chimpanzees it’s often the older matriarchs who are the king-makers: the alpha male can stay in power only with their support. This tendency is even more marked among the gelada monkeys of the Ethiopian highlands, where families consist of groups of tightly bonded females, their children, and the mate they’ve selected, who remains the in-house family male only as long as the females say so. If we were anthropologists, we might point to the female elders in hunter-gatherer bands such as the Iroquois, who had a lot of say when an animal was being divided up and shared out among families, as they were well versed not only in relative social status but in relative need. If we were Freudians, we might talk about psychic child development: the first food comes from the mother, as do the first lessons in justice and punishment and in the fair sharing-out of goods.

Whatever the reason, Justice continues to wear a dress, at least in the Western tradition, which is a possible explanation for the attachment of our Canadian Supreme Court justices to their lovely red gowns and their wigs.

From the Egyptian goddesses Ma’at and Sekhmet to the Roman goddess Iustitia to the Archangel Michael to Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid is a long journey, but if it’s true that human beings don’t create anything unless it’s a variation of the human-behaviour modules present on their Homo sapiens sapiens smorgasbord, then each of these supernatural beings is a manifestation of that inner module we were talking about earlier: the one we could call “fairness,” “balancing out,” or “reciprocal altruism.” As we sow, so shall we reap, or that’s what we’d like to believe; and not only that, but someone or something is in charge of evening up the scores.

Christianity has no goddesses as such. It has some female saints, many of whom are pictured holding their cut-off body parts, but though they may help you get a husband, play the piano, or find lost objects, they don’t have major powers. The Virgin Mary is the strongest one, but all she can do is intercede on your behalf: she performs no devastating lionesslike acts of retribution.

The rule with religions seems to be: take what you need from the religion preceding yours, incorporate those bits into your own religion, and dump or demonize the rest.

Sekhmet was also known as “the blazing eye of Ra,” a goddess who could see injustice and then fry it. (This notion exists in the Old Testament as well—the all-seeing eye of God is usually focused on bad deeds rather than good ones.)

Interesting that it was the heart, even so long ago, that was thought to absorb the effects of your good and bad deeds, like Dorian Gray’s scoundrelly picture. It’s not the heart that remembers your moral pluses and minuses, really—it’s the brain. But we can’t be convinced of that. No one ever sends his valentine a picture of a brain with an arrow through it; nor, in the case of romantic failure, do we say, “He broke my brain.” Maybe that’s because, although the brain’s in the control tower, it’s the heart we can feel responding to our emotions—as in, Be still my beating heart. (Not brain.)

Why was it Ma’at who was used as the counterweight to the heart? Ma’at was a goddess, but she wasn’t a goddess with a specific function or area, such as writing or fertility or animal husbandry: she was much more important than that. The term ma’at meant truth, justice, balance, the governing principles of nature and the universe, the stately progression of time—days, months, seasons, years. It also meant the proper comportment of individuals toward others, the right social order, the relationship between the living and the dead, the true, just, and moral standards of behaviour, the way things are supposed to be—all of those notions rolled up into one short word. Its opposite was physical chaos, selfishness, falsehood, evil behaviour—any sort of upset in the divinely ordained pattern of things.

In the computer program contest won by TIT FOR TAT, it was a given that each player had equal resources at its disposal. Treating a first approach with friendliness and then replying to subsequent ones in kind—returning good for good and evil for evil—can be the winning stratagem only if the playing field is level. None of the competing programs were permitted to have superior weapons systems: had one of the entrants been allowed an advantage such as the chariot, the double-recurved bow of Genghis Khan, or the atomic bomb, TIT FOR TAT would have failed, because the player with the technological advantage could have obliterated its opponents, enslaved them, or forced them to trade on disadvantageous terms. This is in fact what has happened over the long course of our history: those that won the wars wrote the laws, and the laws they wrote enshrined inequality by justifying hierarchical social formations with themselves at the top.

The constellation is now known only as Libra, a Latin word meaning “scales or balance.” It is usually pictured as—guess what—a scales or balance, consisting of a crossbar suspended from a central arm or chain, with a pan hanging from each end of the crossbar. It’s the only zodiac sign that isn’t an animal or a person, although it’s frequently held by a young woman, often identified as Astraea, the daughter of Zeus and Themis. Both Themis and Astraea were goddesses of justice, and Astraea is also known as the constellation Virgo, the virgin. Thus, in the Virgo-Libra configuration, we see a young woman holding a double-armed scales and identified with Justice.

The winner of the contest was called TIT FOR TAT—an expression that descends from “Tip for Tap,” both words having once meant a hit, push, or blow—thus, “You hit me and I’ll hit you back.” The computer program TIT FOR TAT played by a very simple set of rules: “On the first encounter with any program, it would co-operate. Thereafter, it would do whatever the other program had done on a previous encounter. One good turn deserves another, as does one bad turn.” This program won out over time because it was never repeatedly victimized—if an opponent cheated on it, it withheld co-operation next time—and, unlike consistent cheaters and exploiters, it didn’t alienate a lot of others and then find itself shut out of play, nor did it get involved in escalating aggression. It played by a recognizable eye-for-an-eye rule: Do unto others as they do unto you. (Which is not the same as the “golden rule”—Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That one is much more difficult to follow.)