How can a form of social justice be constructed that copes with the culture of contingency?

To quote the spirit of Weber again: human beings need a meaningful cosmos. If an individual becomes radically uncertain as to his or her identity, inaction and social paralysis results. What is the result if a nation has no means of ensuring that the existential feeling of inclusivity is achieved? The appeal of the new common sense of new right realism is to simple certainties and an uncomplicated cosmos. Herrenstein and Murray (1994), for example, attempt to placate both forms of resentment among the black underclass: by arguing that lower I.Q. is the reason for their greater burden of suffering in everyday life, the authors try to down-play contingency, provide a naturalism to legitimise disparity, and sooth the existential crisis. For Murray the members of the underclass should simply change their aspirations to more realistic levels: they should, in other words, deny their modernity. The utopia of modern organisational ‘social or positive’ justice, lay in the expectation that modernity could ultimately show us who or what everyone – women, men, blacks, homosexuals, jews, criminals, the mentally ill – actually or ‘really’ are. When we knew the basic truths of the human condition the just society could be created and stabilised. But the world discovered by science has not become a place of stable identities and essential objects whose secrets are known for all time, but rather a set of techno-objects, of experimental results, of commodities and images. Counterpoised to this unstable world is the nostalgia for the world of familiar, solid, unitary, stable and ‘authoritative’ reality. Can a justice which is fluid and a question of procedure be argued for? An argument that while we can not have a stable state of justice we can act justly? Lyotard (1985), without a touch of irony, calls this Just Gaming.