Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  We cannot expect all humans to accept a Christian vision of Caritapolis, the city of caritas, a city in which all humans are united by and in the love of God, in which God’s love sweeps over all of us and urges us toward mutual love and forgiveness of one another. Yet among those of good will, many hold to a secular vision of a united world in which all humans will cherish good will toward all, peace among all, forgiveness among all, friendship among all.

  I do not myself see how that vision can be made real, can descend from the realm of mere wishfulness, without reference to its transcendent origin in our Creator, a point of unity beyond all nations, classes, races, or ideologies. But if Richard Rorty, Bertrand Russell, Albert Camus, or any person of secular vision can do so, we ought to welcome them into our comradeship. All those of good will—together—can go very far.

  Yet here we must not fall into utopianism, the perennial temptation of the rationalist liberal and the pious Christian. Catholic social thought without an adequate and detailed map of the maze of human sinfulness would be too easily sucked in by false utopias. Against powerful pressures from human sinfulness, utopias are not simply innocent illusions but open gates to moral disaster. In 1913, Germany was perhaps the most civilized nation in the world, which had taken music, philosophy, and poetry to classical heights seldom reached. Who could have imagined that by 1943 it would sink to the stinking degradations and depravities of Dachau and the entire network of death camps, whose aim was to kill the soul as well as the bodies of their poor, helpless, pitiable inmates? No available theory of sin prepared Christian thinking for this hell.

  That is why I predict that in the near future, theologians engaged in the work of Catholic social thought, at least the scouts and explorers, will be called upon to sharpen the realism of Catholic social teaching. They will be asked to make a tighter fit between the formal teaching and the actual, wretched humans it aims to teach. Consider this point, brought home to me forcibly by an Asian delegate at a meeting on human rights in Prague in 2013: “Just try to absorb,” she said, “how many tens of thousands of men on earth still take pleasure in torture, even in inventing new and more terrifying tortures.” Many, many prisons on this earth still give blood-curdling witness to human inhumanity.

  If you wish to be sick in your stomach, simply contemplate all the barbarities you encounter in the daily news. Pause to let them soak in. Then face your powerlessness to stop them now.

  The world’s barbarity has not been nearly so tamed by the unspeakable horrors of the Second World War as we might wish.

  [CHAPTER 15]

  Needed: A Sharper Sense of Sin

  When We Lose the Sense of Sin

  A 2014 article in the Huffington Post reported that “Miss Kay,” the matriarch of the family on the popular TV show “Duck Dynasty,” had “forgiven” the Duck Dynasty patriarch, Phil Robertson, for the way he had treated her in the first years of their marriage nearly fifty years earlier. The story is a familiar one, at least for Christians: a story of sin, repentance, forgiveness, and conversion of life, a couple sticking it out through the process and very happy they did so.

  Huffington Post told the story more or less straight, at least compared with other liberal postings of the “gotcha!” kind. But the hundreds of hateful comments that followed made up for Huffpo’s restraint.

  Representative responses:

  Why is it that these Christian values fools that keep telling the rest of us that we are wrong for not believing in “their” ways & teachings time & time again are always the ones caught cheating & breaking their own code?

  So I guess this makes him a hypocrite and she is another enabler. Typical Christian behavior!

  Such hypocrites.

  Not all comments were of this kind. The charge of hypocrisy was common, but some pointed out that to have sinned, repented, and changed your life to conform to what you consider God’s will does not make you a hypocrite. As one reader says:

  Just in case you don’t know:

  hyp·o·crite [hip-uh-krit]

  1. a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, especially a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.

  He WAS an alcoholic and he DID commit adultery. Past tense.

  The gulf of incomprehension between the Christian and anti-Christian commenters is striking. The story of a sinful man repenting, being forgiven, converting his life to follow God is thousands of years old and repeated many times in Old and New Testaments, from David to Peter, Paul, and countless others.

  And yet this Christian vision is incomprehensible to the gotcha crowd who relentlessly judge those they accuse of judging. None of the anti-Christian commenters offers a shred of evidence to show that either Miss Kay or her husband of nearly fifty years is “a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, especially a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.”

  It is said that saints—men and women of heroic virtue—are those most aware of their own sins. But any humble Christian who examines his conscience knows he sins. When asked to describe himself, Pope Francis—himself no drunk or adulterer—said simply, “I am a sinner.” The sinner is the starting place of Christianity. Sin and repentance are elementary.

  Of course, there are hypocrites among Christians who, like the Pharisees of old, puff themselves up with virtues they don’t possess. But in this case that is not the charge of the gotcha crowd. The charge they make is that Phil Robertson once struggled with alcoholism and committed adultery. For this, they allow him no forgiveness, no repentance, no conversion of life. For them, those like Miss Kay who do forgive are “enablers” of behavior, even when such behavior, repented of and forgiven, has not actually recurred for decades.

  So how do we understand people who acknowledge neither sin nor repentance nor forgiveness? La Rochefoucauld called hypocrisy “the homage that vice pays to virtue.” Sure, hypocrites are liars, but the virtues hypocrites pretend to have are themselves good and worthy, qualities people should want to have. (That’s why some pretend to them, even when they don’t possess them.) But that’s an unpalatable premise for relativists who are anti-Christian. They actually condemn the “Christian values fools” not for pretending now to hold values or possess virtues they once betrayed, but for picking up those values once again, this time trying never to betray them again. It’s a little odd for relativists to fault Christians for their practices. On what moral ground do relativists judge others at all? If there are no objective moral grounds and all moral views are relative, why not let Christians be Christians, on equal footing with relativists? Haven’t relativists given up any ground on which to judge others?

  From a postmodern, relativist point of view, the trouble with Christians, of course, is that they insist there are objective moral grounds. To these they hold themselves accountable, and by them they dare to measure others. Relativists seem to suspect that Christians may be right about that, and can’t stand the thought that they may be judged by an undeceivable God—or by anyone else. But if there really is no God, what do they have to fear? Why let silly Christians get under their skin?

  Postmoderns seem not to honor the prodigal son for abandoning his sinful ways and adopting a life of virtue. First of all, they do not admit that there are such things as sinful ways. Second, they sense that, if the prodigal son repents of the sinful way of life he once indulged in, he may also be judging their way of life as sinful. And this is intolerable.

  In other words, one part of the gotcha response seems to be hatred for those who try to live virtuously, and thereby seem to be condemning by their own lives the moral state of those with whom they once cavorted.

  What, then, does it mean to cease sinning and to “repent”? Anti-Christians scarcely recognize that way of framing the problem. There’s no place for sin in their philosophy. The whole idea of living virtuously implies that one holds oneself to s
tandards outside oneself. Virtuous habits are acquired through practice, often with considerable difficulty, and they are lost through disuse. Most humans must work hard at practicing virtue but still, discouragingly, sometimes fall short of their own commitments. In short, the classical and Christian understanding implies that there is a moral truth about what is good and what is evil, and there is a higher good toward which it is human nature to aspire.

  Yet what repels so many anti-Christians seems to be the very idea that there are grounds for discriminating between good and evil—grounds other than just calling good the life that they now find pleasure in. Like Hume, some seem to believe that reason is passion’s slave, the rationalization of whatever one feels like doing. Some share a boo! versus hooray! method of ethical disagreement. They think morals do not come under the authority of reason but of feeling. They recognize no cognitive grounding for morality, only feelings. Morals, in their view, are not cognitive but emotive. When they hear what purport to be ethical arguments, reason is out of play, so the best they can do is cheer for some moral theories and boo others. For in their view, good is whatever I feel like doing; evil is you pretending to judge me by some so-called standard which not even you live up to.

  Better, in the relativist view, to rationalize and justify what we actually choose than to try to aim higher, for that would risk failing. Even aiming for virtue seems like an intolerable judgment on those who do not succeed at it. The best way to escape the charge of hypocrisy is by declining to hold any beliefs or principles. One cannot fail to live up to standards, if those standards are set simply by how one is actually living now.

  Relativism may at first seem pleasant. If one wishes one’s conduct to be judged by nobody, and if one insists that there are no universal standards, that may at first seem to take a burden from one’s back. But to that view there is a dark downside. From there, how and on what grounds would one protest against tyranny or torture? If there were no moral truth, who could “speak truth to power”? If someone were to insist that torture is wrong, the easy retort would be: “That’s just your opinion.” Under moral relativism, further, what could stand firm as “social justice”? And why should anyone care? That is why moral relativism (sometimes called “subjectivism”) has often proved to be a sure path to tyranny.

  Where did this drive toward relativism come from? Some say that Jean-Jacques Rousseau turned Aristotle’s notion of nature on its head. Aristotle said that nature defined not only what man is but what he should be. Rousseau countered that nature is not an end—a telos—but a beginning. Man’s end is his beginning. Allan Bloom encapsulated this view succinctly: “There are no ends, only possibilities.”1

  Like many proponents of the sexual revolution today, for instance, Rousseau had a particular hatred of the family, that most constraining of institutions. He called for the education of children to be taken from the family and given to the state. As Robert Reilly puts it, “Once society is atomized, once the family ceases to interpose itself between the individual and the state, the state is free to transform the isolated individual by force into whatever version of ‘new man’ the revolutionary visionaries espouse.”2

  Something like Rousseau’s influence is everywhere today. Recall the Obama campaign ads featuring “Julia,” who from cradle to grave was nothing more than a ward of the state, and in whose life the family is nowhere present, not even when she wants to have a baby. This cartoonish view of reality has long antecedents.

  As Mary Eberstadt has discerned more clearly than anyone else, the slow strangulation of the family has brought about the death of God. The family did not decay because of the loss of God. God died once the family decayed and ceased to be bound by love and commitment. Without that bond between loving parents, children missed the look of unconditional love in the eyes of their mother, along with the constant love and close care of a watchful father. Without a representation of God in the family, God disappeared from daily view. How could one think of God as love and compassion if these were not overwhelming realities in one’s daily life at home?

  Once God had died, sin also died, and there now had to take place a transvaluation of values. In this sense, sin used to be not just the violation of a taboo, a crossing of a line that one should not cross, disobedience to a code written in stone, but a breaking with a friend, the end of a loving relationship, an affront, a tearing away, a rupture with a personal, warm world. Once God died, Nietzsche warned those who were too giddy at the prospect, reason also died. There was no longer one intelligence, personal or not, infusing intelligibility and meaning into every blade of grass, every grain of sand, every lily in the fields. All became alien, unconnected, impersonal. Opposite of human reason, there was no longer a far greater Logos, omniscient, comprehending (and loving, and filling with beauty) all things—as Socrates might have imagined, and Plato and Aristotle, and then Plotinus, and scores of other pagan sages, who wrote intelligently and beautifully of the divine. Now there was only the void. Emptiness of meaning. Alienation from nature and from each other. Consciousness without purpose and without companions.

  The once-common ground of the Judeo-Christian ethic—the Ten Commandments supported by family, church and temple, the whole community, the whole education system (the McGuffey Reader), and the old-fashioned patriotic local newspaper—all these have given way to a new kind of inner isolation, the loss of the sacred, a sharp awareness (even by the very young) of the pointlessness of life. Rushing in to fill this emptiness is the sexual revolution, defined by Mary Eberstadt as “the ongoing destigmatization of all varieties of nonmarital sexual activity, accompanied by a sharp rise in such sexual activity, in diverse societies around the world (most notably in the most advanced).”3 Delight in sexual life, once a driving force for family and life and the growth of the human population down the generations, has now become a driving force into relativism and nihilism.

  The mediating structures of family, church, and community have virtually lost their role (at least for a time) in defining and shaping sexual morality. These prior institutions, which precede the state both in importance and in time, nowadays increasingly exist on the state’s sufferance. Thus, today, it is the state that determines what marriage is, how many people and of which configurations it may involve, and what kinds of sexual activity outside marriage are not only permissible, but must be enabled by state-enforced morals and promoted among children in schools.

  After experiencing Nazism and Communism, John Paul II warned of “the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism, which would remove any sure moral reference point from political and social life, and on a deeper level make the acknowledgement of truth impossible.” Indeed, he says, if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated by those few who hold power. “As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.”4

  Under relativism, social justice loses all its meaning.

  Learning from Reinhold Niebuhr

  These confusions of today’s secularists offer the perfect opportunity for Catholic social thinkers to prepare the way for the Church to present an updated overview and more sophisticated teaching on what we Christians mean by “sin.” The first great step here is to make plain that we Christians see the world as through-and-through a personal world, a world uplifted by the most exalted of personal relationships, that between each person on earth and the Creator of all, who knew what he was doing when he created this vast universe, and loves what he has created, and invites all women and men into his friendship. Perhaps no group saw this more directly than the Society of Friends, the Quakers.

  Our view of sin, then, lies in ordinary experience, as common as causing pain to those we love, as common as letting down a friend. In daily life we observe that each of us sometimes turns away from what we know is right—turns away from the light—and out of weakness or just plain willfulness chooses what we
know (or heavily suspect) is wrong. This view of sin is not to be believed because it is a doctrine of the Church. To grasp it does not take faith. All it takes is a little introspection. Each of us knows times when we have not done what we know we should have done, and when we have done what we know we should not have done.

  The founders of the United States knew this. That is why they divided governmental powers and organized a check against each of them. That is why they arranged that rival institutional interests would push back against each other, so that each would check each.

  The greatest American Protestant ethicist of the twentieth century, who developed the most detailed handbooks on the ways of sin, saw more clearly and quickly than any other into the aims of Adolph Hitler and Nazism. His name was Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971). Born in the Middle West of both Lutheran and Evangelical heritage, he became the teacher of presidents and legions of secular journalists and historians. He laid out the reality of human sinfulness in plain language: Every man sometimes sins. The capacity for virtue in human persons makes democracy possible; the human capacity for sin makes democracy necessary. Without checks and balances, democracy cannot work. As the saying goes, “In God we trust; for everybody else there are checks and balances.”

  What some might want to denounce here as Jewish and Christian dogmatism, others describe as the lessons of ordinary human experience, sheer common sense. That is the way The Federalist describes human reality, many times over.5

  Thus, the reality of sin belongs not to the category of obscure theological refinements but to daily experience. Our reason for turning to Reinhold Niebuhr is that no theologian of the twentieth century wrote more analytically about sin and applied his analysis week by week to practical events through journalistic commentary. No theologian has been more helpful to practical leaders in many fields. No Catholic theologian has done as well. And without speaking accurately of sin, how can one speak credibly of injustice or even justice?