Douglas Mao, Inventions of Nemesis: Utopia, Indignation, and Justice

Abstract

‘… Who are you?’ Miss Marple pulled down the mass of pink wool that encircled her head, a pink wool scarf of the same kind that she had once worn in the West Indies. ‘One of my names’, she said, ‘is Nemesis’. ‘Nemesis? And what does that mean?’ ‘I think you know,’ said Miss Marple. ‘You are a very well educated woman. Nemesis is long delayed sometimes, but it comes in the end’. –Agatha Christie, Nemesis One of the points Christie makes in her 1971 novel Nemesis is that with perseverance, justice will eventually be done. The underlying assumption is that justice is driven by indignation in the face of injustice—of something that is, according to Douglas Mao, ‘wrong in the order of things’ (p. 56). The establishment or re-establishment of justice is therefore a given, an ideal, yes, but also an inevitability. Mao’s book, Inventions of Nemesis: Utopia, Indignation, and Justice, argues that this connection between indignation in the face of injustice and the inevitable human endeavour to make it right is the core of the often maligned utopian thought and desire. Mao claims that the focus of commentaries on utopia and utopianism has always been the idea of ‘universal happiness’ and that justice has ‘far more rarely been identified as utopia’s consistent concern’. I am not sure that I agree, but I concur that ‘the achievement of justice is utopia’s essential project’ (p. 5). Ultimately, social and political justice are the pillars of human happiness, or shall we say in the current situation of climate destruction, species happiness.