Phillip Yoo Asks Who Moves the Target

This year the John Locke Institute’s Global Essay Prize drew 100,227 entries from 183 countries. Phillip Yoo, now a freshman at Singapore American School, was shortlisted in History, among the top 17.5 percent of the field, and was awarded a High Commendation when the results were announced in London in October.

His question was one of the hardest on the list: “‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ Is it? Does it?” Most writers would have answered yes and gone looking for evidence. Phillip answered no, and argued it with unusual composure.

Stability over justice

His first claim is that people, given the choice, prefer what is stable to what is just. He took Ursula K. Le Guin’s Omelas, where the prosperity of a whole city rests on the suffering of one child, and noticed that most of its citizens stay. He added the psychology of loss aversion and the logic of Hobbes: any order is preferred to chaos.

Then he reached for Rome. After a century of civil war, Augustus ended the Republic and offered peace in its place. In Phillip’s words, Augustus “masterfully rebranded stability as the ultimate form of justice,” and the Romans, exhausted, accepted the trade. He has been reading Latin for a little over a year. It shows.

Who moves the target

His second claim is the one that gives the essay its edge. Picture justice as a target, he writes, and history as an arrow. The arrow may seem to bend toward the target, but the target keeps moving, and the people who move it are the people in power. He traced the idea through Nietzsche, and through the history of a revolutionary ideal that, once in office, became the thing it was meant to abolish.

To the obvious objection, that the world has plainly grown more just, he answered with France: a revolution in the name of liberty that ended in Napoleon. History, he concluded, “acts more like a pendulum rather than a clean arc.”

The empty pocket

His closing image is his own. Justice, he writes, is not a destination but an empty pocket, filled by whoever holds the power to fill it. One need not agree with him to admire the essay. The judges did both, I suspect.

Where it started

Phillip began Latin in the eighth grade, with no Latin at all, in a grammar course usually taken by high school students. Meeting once a week, he finished in less than a year what many East Coast boarding schools teach, five days a week, over three. In that same year he earned Gold on the National Latin Exam and the National Latin Vocabulary Exam and was inducted into the National Latin Honor Society; you can read more about him here.

The habit that carried him through it, taking a hard problem apart before trying to solve it, is the same one on display in this essay.

Students in grades 9 to 12 who want to write for the John Locke Institute and the other international essay competitions can apply to Humane Letters, which begins November 21 and 22.