Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  [PART ONE]

  The Theory

  Michael Novak

  [CHAPTER 1]

  Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is

  “SOCIAL JUSTICE” IS ONE OF THE TERMS MOST OFTEN USED IN ethical and political discourse, but one will search in vain for definitions of it. Because of its fuzziness and warmth, everybody wants to share in it. There is a whole band of Catholics calling themselves “social justice Catholics.” But they rarely give you a forthright definition of social justice, or an explanation of how their view differs from other views of social justice that are widely held.

  It is true that Pope Leo XIII in 1891 was searching for a new virtue for “new times.” Yet he didn’t choose the term “social justice.” He thought briefly about “social charity,” then Pius XI in 1931 settled firmly on “social justice.”

  Today the term has slipped into being used so broadly that a fairly recent obituary in the diocesan paper of Wilmington, Delaware, reported that a dear Sister Maureen gave her entire life as a nun for “social justice.” Sister Maureen was a missionary in Africa for forty-six years, cared for the sick, taught the young, and brought assistance to the suffering and the poor. Are we to gather that “social justice,” then, is a synonym for the deeds we must do to “enter the kingdom of heaven,” that is, care for the widows, the hungry, the poor, and those in prison?

  Saint Matthew’s gospel lays out the underlying principle of both the traditional and the new understandings of social justice in two meaty chapters (24 and 25). His account includes the warning that the Last Judgment will be, yes, quite “judgmental.” It will also be sharply “non-inclusive.” It will separate the sheep from the goats, and some indeed will be cast out:

  Then it will be their turn to ask, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or lacking clothes, sick or in prison, and did not come to your help?” Then he will answer, “In truth I tell you, in so far as you neglected to do this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me.” And they will go away to eternal punishment, and the upright to eternal life.1

  As Professor Adams noted in his introduction, the modern papal concept of social justice seems to go rather far beyond the demands of the Beatitudes (which demand the contributions of all Christians, often in private and barely recognized ways) and the heroic efforts of the saints. The new virtue enunciated by Leo XIII and Pius XI invites new modes of analysis, for both strategic thinking and immediate practical thinking. It also invites new capacities for organization never before summoned into being.

  I ONCE HEARD a young professor at the Catholic University of Ružomberok, Slovakia, say that he thinks of social justice as “an ideal arrangement of society, in which justice and charity are fully served.” This description appealed to me, and yet I found something troubling in the fact that it pictures social justice as an ideal arrangement toward which society should progressively strive.

  The American Socialist Irving Howe wrote in Dissent in 1954: “Socialism is the name of our desire.”2 He meant a dream of justice and equality and democracy. Is social justice also the name of a dream, but not exactly the socialist dream?

  In our search for a definition of the term, we may also ask: To which genus does social justice belong? Is it a vision of a perfectly just society? Is it an ideal set of government policies? Is it a theory? Is it a practice? . . . In sum, is it a virtue, that is, a habit embodied in individual persons, or is it a social arrangement?

  On another plane entirely, we may ask: Is social justice a nonreligious concept? Many secular sociologists and political philosophers use it that way, trying to tie it as closely as possible to the term “equality”—in the arithmetical French sense of égalité. Like the equals sign.

  Or is social justice a religious term, evangelical in inspiration?

  Has social justice become an ideological marker, favoring progressives over conservatives, Democrats over Republicans, social workers over corporate executives? Is that the sort of favor “social justice Catholics” mete out?

  To understand the meaning of this term, “social justice,” we need to do two things: first, walk through the origin and early development of the term. To know where we are going, we must first know where we have been.

  Second, we need to seek out a fresh statement of the definition of social justice—one that is true to the original understanding, ideologically neutral among political and economic partisans, and applicable to the circumstances of today.

  Then, in chapters three and four, we shall confront one of the severest critics of the “mirage” of social justice, Friedrich Hayek, and the irony that he himself practiced social justice.

  Social Justice—A Brief History

  Let us begin with the locus classicus of the term “social justice,” which was made canonical in the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of Pius XI in 1931. This was at the height of the Great Depression, a time of crisis for the capitalist world. Hitler was gaining power in Germany. Mussolini had been ruling in Italy for nearly a decade. Stalin was about to stage the systematic starvation of millions of Ukrainians for clinging to their private property.

  The occasion for Pius’s encyclical was the fortieth anniversary of the first papal document on economic life. To begin, then, we must understand the eponymous “new things” in cultural and economic life at the turn of the nineteenth century, which prompted Leo XIII to write Rerum Novarum in 1891.

  A quick aside: Popes are duty-bound to be concerned with the life of the spirit and with eternity. If humans do not work in the light of eternity, there will be an important dimension missing in their lives. This was Tocqueville’s point when he said that religion is the first institution of democracy. Unless you understand that every human being has a transcendent importance beyond any pragmatic or utilitarian consideration, you cannot understand the meaning of human rights. That is the crucial frame of reference that religion supplies to democracy. For this reason, Tocqueville thought, in the United States, as distinguished from Europe, religion and liberty were lucky to have remained friends, because the doctrine of rights received its proper foundation in the Creator. As he wrote:

  I have already said enough to put Anglo-American civilization in its true light. It is the product (and this point of departure must always be kept in mind) of two perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere are often at odds. But in America, these two have been successfully blended, in a way, and marvelously combined. I mean the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty. . . .

  Far from harming each other, these two tendencies, apparently so opposed, move in harmony and seem to offer mutual support.

  Religion sees in civil liberty a noble exercise of the faculties of man; in the political world, a field offered by the Creator to the efforts of intelligence. Free and powerful in its sphere, satisfied with the place reserved for it, religion knows that its dominion is that much better established because it rules only by its own strength and dominates hearts without other support.

  Liberty sees in religion the companion of its struggles and triumphs, the cradle of its early years, the divine source of its rights. Liberty considers religion as the safeguard of mores, mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its own duration.3

  In any case, with Rerum Novarum Leo XIII departed from the traditional papal consideration of eternal things to consider what was happening in the social economy of Europe. He did so because, as people began living longer, subsistence farms could no longer sustain growing families, and people were being driven from the countryside. When a father died, the eldest son inherited the farm; younger sons had to leave and find work elsewhere. They emigrated to North and South America and to the newly industrializing cities of Europe. These vast migrations to urban environments had devastating effects on traditional family life and, therefore, on the Christian faith. So, in the name of the family, Leo XIII decided to address the social crisis of the late nineteenth century.

  In particular, Leo came to the defen
se of industrial workers. At any earlier time, he would have had to address an encyclical primarily to farmers because, for centuries, farming had been the occupation of 90 percent of the people on earth. In 1891, many of the world’s leading philosophers and greatest minds thought that socialism would be the system of the future. To the contrary, Pope Leo listed a dozen reasons why socialism would prove to be not only evil, but also futile.

  Flash forward to 1931 and Quadragesimo Anno. In this encyclical Pius XI pointed out the many successful reforms undertaken in capitalist economies since 1891. Still aware of the gathering storm, he urged the nations to address more seriously the social crisis still wracking Europe. On nine different occasions in the encyclical, he used the relatively new term “social justice” to designate his ideal. In other words, a sense of crisis and change was built into the term, or at least surrounded it.

  The basic idea behind social justice has its roots in Aristotle and in medieval thought. The core of the ancient idea—then called “general justice”—may be adumbrated by the following: In times of war, occupation, and exile, it was hard for individuals to live sound moral lives. Order broke down; the rule of homo homini lupus (“man is a wolf to man”) prevailed. The ethics of individuals, wise men observed, are much affected by the ethos of the city in which they live. Thus, the readiness to make sacrifices, to maintain the health and strength of the city, seemed to be good and virtuous, and needed a special name, beyond the simple “justice” that consists of giving each individual his due. This concept of general justice was not sharply developed until the twentieth century, but its roots were ancient. It pointed to a form of justice whose object was not just other individuals, but the community.

  Nowadays, many people speak fervently of “social justice.” Progressives everywhere speak of it; the Communists loved the term. Everybody has heard of it, but very few have defined it. Even in 1931, important commentators on Pius XI displayed considerable confusion. Allow me to quote the Jesuit priest who probably drafted the encyclical, a brilliant thinker who died at the age of 104, Oswald von Nell-Breuning. Nell-Breuning wrote:

  The encyclical Quadragesimo Anno has finally and definitively established, theologically canonized, so to speak, social justice. Now, it is our duty to study it, according to this strict requirement of scientific theology. And to give it its proper place in the structure of the Christian doctrine of virtue on the one hand and the doctrine of rights and justice on the other.4

  Note the fateful ambiguity. We are left to wonder: Is social justice an abstract, regulative ideal? Some people who note a growing disparity of income in the United States say that such inequality is a sin against social justice. Is that the true meaning of the term? Or is social justice a virtue that individuals practice? Does the term refer to something inherent in society or to something inherent in individuals?

  Here we must take an abbreviated tour through the terrain of virtue. In the ancient city of Athens in the time of Aristotle, there were roughly 300,000 inhabitants, most of them slaves. The consequence was that every Greek male citizen who was free and able to vote (about 30,000 men) needed to learn the arts of war. He needed to know how to handle a sword, a spear, and a horse and chariot. Such skills were crucial to defending the city, which was constantly in danger of being overrun by enemies far and near. In addition, the young men needed to learn the arts of peace. They needed to know how to persuade, how to make laws, and how to run an estate. By the time he was eighteen, a young Greek male was expected to be well-versed in these and other habits and skills.

  That is what they meant by virtue: the kind of habit (or skill) you are not born with and do not always use, but which you develop and, when called upon, deploy. Virtue means those habits in particular that help a man to govern his passions and emotions so that he can act through reflection and choice. Virtues (and vices) are the habits that make you the distinctive kind of person you are. They define your character. A man who has prudence, for example, deliberates well and is reliable in action.

  Until the 1930s, most education in America, especially in Sunday school, at the YMCA, and through the McGuffey Readers in the schools, concentrated on training in character, on bringing up Americans of sound habits. Why? Because if people do not know how to manage their passions and emotions when they make decisions, they cannot govern themselves. “Confirm thy soul in self-control,” runs the old hymn; “Thy liberty in law.” Citizens who cannot practice self-control cannot succeed at republican self-government. Without self-controlled citizens, the American experiment must fail.

  To return to the main theme: Virtue is something you have to learn and master through practice. True, some people seem to be “naturals” at certain things and hardly have to learn them; virtues sometimes seem to be gifts some people are born with. For others, this or that virtue is a hard-earned self-modification. Once attained, however, it is an enduring and stable part of one’s character. George Washington had a combustible temper when he was young, but by middle age he had disciplined it to achieve his legendary calm.

  Now, is social justice such a virtue? As Friedrich Hayek points out, most of those who use the term today do not talk about what individuals can do. They talk about what government can do.5 They talk about social justice as a characteristic of political states. Often they mean, in particular, situations of inequality, to be remedied by state-enforced redistribution. In most modern progressive usage, the cry for social justice is not a cry for greater virtue on the part of the citizenry. Indeed, the citizenry is deemed to lack sufficient virtue to such an extent that the state must intervene and effect by coercion the redistribution that individuals lack the virtue to effect on their own.

  In brief, Hayek’s challenge is the following: Either the modern term “social justice” refers to a virtue to be practiced by individuals, in which case it retains its claim to the traditional language of virtue, or else it refers to a state of affairs in society, in which case it is not about individuals or their habits at all. The problem, then, boils down to this: if social justice is not a virtue, its claim to moral standing falls flat.

  Alas, I have not encountered a satisfying answer to Hayek’s critique. We shall have to face this question more fully in chapter four.

  The New Virtue of Association

  So far ours has been a fairly broad search into what people today mean by social justice. Almost all current usages fall prey to ideology. A nonideological definition such as we are seeking is seldom encountered. But, in the words of Pope Leo XIII, new times demand a new response. So let us see if we can construct an approach to social justice for today’s world that recovers its original understanding and does not fall prey to the current traps.

  It is highly instructive to reread Rerum Novarum in the light of the events of 1989. Certainly, these events were fresh in the mind of John Paul II in 1991 as he repeated the century-old warnings against a growing socialist state:

  According to Rerum novarum and the whole social doctrine of the Church, the social nature of man is not completely fulfilled in the State, but is realized in various intermediary groups, beginning with the family and including economic, social, political and cultural groups which stem from human nature itself and have their own autonomy, always with a view to the common good. This is what I have called the “subjectivity” of society which, together with the subjectivity of the individual, was cancelled out by “Real Socialism.”6

  I know from the experience of my own family over the past four generations, as many others must know, too, from their own families, how great the transformation has been. My family served as serfs on the large estate of the Hungarian Count Czaky, whose ancestor was a hero in turning back the Turks near Budapest in 1456. My ancestors were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and as near as I can determine they were not able to own their own land until after World War I, in the 1920s. Prior to that time, the Czakys’ cattle, sheep, goats, and other livestock were counted annually, for purposes of taxation—and in the sa
me column with men, women, and children. All were the property of the Count.

  My ancestors were taught to accept their lot. Their moral duties were fairly simple: PRAY, PAY, and OBEY. What they did and gained was pretty much determined by the Count and by settled customs. But beginning in about 1880, small farms could no longer sustain the growth in population that had begun. Almost 2 million people from the eastern counties of Slovakia began migrating to America (and elsewhere), one by one, along chains of connection established by families or fellow villagers. Usually the men left first and sent back for wives later.

  Once in America, my grandparents were no longer subjects. They became citizens, which meant that if social arrangements were not right, they now had the duty (and liberty) to organize to change them. Now they were sovereign. Now they were free, but also saddled with personal responsibility for their own future. They needed to learn new virtues, to form new institutions, and to take responsibility for the institutions left to them by America’s founding generations. All of this was called into being by a new form of political economy, a democratic republic and a capitalist economy, both of which positively cried out for grassroots action by people with initiative and new skills in forming associations of their own.

  In this context the new term “social justice” can be defined with rather considerable precision. Social justice names a new virtue in the panoply of historical virtues, a set of new habits and abilities that need to be learned, perfected, and passed on to new generations—new virtues with very powerful social consequences.

  This new virtue is called “social” for two reasons. First, its aim or purpose is to improve the common good of society at large, perhaps on a national scale or even an international scale, but certainly on a range of social institutions outside the home. A village or neighborhood may need a new well, or a new school, or even a church. Workers may need to form a union, and to unite with other unions. Since the cause of the wealth of nations is invention and intellect, new colleges and universities need to be founded. All these are social activities—the social activities of a free and responsible people.