Justice & Law Quote by Huston Smith

Smith is doing something sly here: he’s stripping “morality” and “justice” of their modern, self-congratulatory secular gloss and returning them to their old address. Not in the sense that only believers can be moral, but in the sharper, historical claim that our most intimate ethical instincts - the face-to-face obligations that kick in when another person’s presence makes evasion harder - were incubated inside religious worlds before they became civic virtues and philosophical positions.

“Always, if we look back” is the tell. He’s anticipating the contemporary rebuttal (“ethics is rational, universal, post-religious”) and answering it with genealogy: track the institutions, the stories, the rituals, the metaphysics that trained people to see the neighbor as morally charged. “Face-to-face” invokes an older moral drama than abstract rights talk: shame, compassion, confession, forgiveness, the terrifying idea that what you do is witnessed - by the community, by God, by your own soul.

Then he adds “modern emphasis on justice as well,” a quiet provocation. Justice, in liberal democracies, often presents as procedural and impersonal. Smith is reminding you that even this language of fairness has roots in religious conceptions of cosmic order, judgment, and the demand that power answer to something beyond itself.

The intent isn’t to sermonize; it’s to complicate. By framing justice as historically religious, Smith invites modern readers to admit their inheritance. You can reject the theology and still be living off its moral capital - and that recognition raises an uncomfortable question: what happens to justice when the source narratives and sacred pressures that once animated it are thinned out?