Social Justice: Not What You Think It Is by Michael Novak

Posted on April 14, 2012 by ccpastormike

Published on December 29, 2009 by Michael Novak

Abstract: For its proponents, “social justice” is usually undefined. Originally a Catholic term, first used about 1840 for a new kind of virtue (or habit) necessary for post-agrarian societies, the term has been bent by secular “progressive” thinkers to mean uniform state distribution of society’s advantages and disadvantages. Social justice is really the capacity to organize with others to accomplish ends that benefit the whole community. If people are to live free of state control, they must possess this new virtue of cooperation and association. This is one of the great skills of Americans and, ultimately, the best defense against statism.

Let us begin by asking what most people think social justice is. After that, let us review how the term arose. It is a Catholic concept, later taken over by secular progressives. What social justice actually is turns out to be very different from the way the term is now used popularly.

When the Academics Take Over: Five Common Usages of Social Justice

Distribution. Most people’s sense of social justice is generic, amounting to nothing more than what we find in the dictionary under “social justice”: “The distribution of advantages and disadvantages in society.” Now, notice that the dictionary definition introduces a new key term, “distribution.” Alas, the original notion of social justice had very little to do with distribution. Worse, this newly added term suggests that some extra-human force, “the visible hand,” does the distribution: that is, some very powerful human agency, usually the state.

Equality. Furthermore, the expression “advantages and disadvantages” supposes there is a norm of equality by which to measure disadvantages. Consider this professorial definition:

Although it is difficult to agree on the precise meaning of “social justice” I take that to most of us it implies, among other things, equality of the burdens, the advantages, and the opportunities of citizenship. Indeed, I take that social justice is intimately related to the concept of equality, and that the violation of it is intimately related to the concept of inequality.[1]

This definition expresses a whole ideology: that equality is good and ought to be enforced. And note what has happened to the word “equality.” In English, equality usually suggests fairness, equity, or the equitable; but what is equitable is often not to give people the same portions, but rather to give what is proportionate to the efforts of each.

In European languages, most thinkers followed the model of the French term égalité. Égalité means the “equals sign,” égal. “This” on one side is equal to “that” on the other side. Égalité is a quite different notion from the English “equitable.” This French/ Continental usage is captured in the American Sociological Review:

As I see it, social justice requires resource equity, fairness, and respect for diversity, as well as the eradication of existing forms of social oppression. Social justice entails a “redistribution” of resources from those who have “unjustly” gained them to those who justly deserve them, and it also means creating and “ensuring” the processes of truly democratic participation in decision-making…. It seems clear that only a “decisive” redistribution of resources and decision-making power can “ensure” social justice and authentic democracy.[2]

In brief, shifting to the French égalité changes the entire meaning of equality from equity or fairness to arithmetical uniformity.

This is really a dreadful change, because where people take equality very seriously, they soon insist on uniformity. In the Inca society under Spanish rule, the first utopia was attempted. People were assigned by social class certain colors of robes to wear, and regimented hours were established for everything that was to be done throughout the day–even lovemaking hours, with great emphasis on bringing forth more children.[3] If you are going to make everybody equal, you really have to make uniform crucial items of daily life.

Common Good. Social justice is typically associated with some notion of the common good. “Common good” is a wonderful term that goes back to Aristotle, but in practice, it often hinges on a key question: namely, who decides what is the common good? In ancient societies, often the wisest and strongest person was the ruler, and it was he who made the important decisions, such as where we will camp tonight or near which source of water we shall build our village. The person with the greatest strategic and tactical sense of what is safe and the greatest ecological sense of where there will be good community life would make these decisions.

In contemporary times, beginning a century or two ago, that responsibility gradually shifted to the bureaucratic state. Decisions became too numerous for the ruler himself to make, and they became delegated to a variety of organizations. Further, such decisions came to be decided by many people at once. No longer is there one clear person to be held responsible and accountable for these decisions. Quickly, the beautiful notion of the common good gets ensnared in red tape.

A central misuse of the term “common good” became clear to me for the first time when, at the Human Rights Commission inBern, I was prodding the Soviet delegation to recognize the right of married couples, one of whose partners was from one nation, the other from another, to share residence in whichever nation they chose. The Soviets staunchly resisted–in the name of the common good. TheSoviet Union, they insisted, had invested great sums of money and much effort in giving an education to each Soviet citizen. The common good, they said, demands that these citizens now make comparable contributions in return. Therefore, the Soviet partner could not leave. Individual desires must bow to the common good of all.

In this way, the common good becomes an excuse for total state control. That was the excuse on which totalitarianism was built. You can achieve the common good better if there is a total authority, and you must then limit the desires and wishfulness of individuals.

As a result, there are many occasions when one must argue for individual rights against the argument of the common good. Most people speak of “common good” when they mean something noble and shiny and good, something motherly. But who decides what the common good is, and who enforces the common good? These are fundamental questions.

The Progressive Agenda. The progressive agenda begins with lack of faith in the new discoveries and the new vitalities introduced by what would soon become known as capitalism. Beginning in about 1600, European societies began experiencing a turbulent, dramatic shift from agrarian society to crowded commercial towns.

The first craftsmen ofItalyandFranceandGermanyset up their workshops in towns and small cities, which kept growing. They didn’t live on the farms or make their living from the land. They made their living from their wit, from their crafts, from their skills, and they usually had to work together. They were known as town-dwellers, those who live in towns, and they became the first bourgeoisie.

If you were told, “You have such bourgeois taste,” you may have been uncertain what that meant, but you knew it wasn’t meant as a compliment. But if you think about it, the people of best taste in the world have been the bourgeoisie. Who makes the best wines, the best cheeses, the best lace and millinery? Who makes the best cutlery or fashions the best wooden tables? All the beautiful things ofEuropehave been made by the bourgeoisie.

In their little ateliers, even the painters had their schools, their little factories for paintings, if you wish, in which apprentices would fill in the background work, which the master would finish. Thus, painters in the 19th century–in fact, from the 16th century on–often created in workshops, not one person alone, and they congregated in cities, because that is where they would have to come to learn these skills, and that is where the market for portraits was.

From Horace and Virgil on, there were those who didn’t like the world created by the bourgeoisie. Such poets of pastoral life preferred to think that farming and fishing are what God gave us to do. But the middlemen, who buy their fish and transport them and sell them, “buy cheap and sell dear” in a way that’s unfair. For centuries, there has been a widespread attack on the bourgeoisie and the unfairness and inequity of a commercial system.

There began to be developed a progressive agenda, first around labor. As you increase the numbers and the range of these little workshops and they hire more than 10–maybe 50–workers, the factory system began to grow. Now, for the first time, you were cutting off from their farms working people who used to be farmers, so they no longer grew their own food. They worked in the factory. Neither in the country nor in the factories did they work only eight-hour days. Nobody worked in the fields for only eight hours; they worked from sunup until sunset, and they did the same in the cities and in the factories too.

The problem is that workers were now entirely dependent on their wages. It used to be that those who had a roof over their heads and enough to eat weren’t poor. When the Bible says, “The poor ye shall always have with you,” it suggests that’s a rather good, normal condition. If you have a roof over your head and enough food, you’re living the good life. But in the new towns and cities where workers became wage-dependent, some writers now spoke of “wage slavery.” Workers became so dependent on their employers that they lost their rural independence. They lost the solidity of their old way of life.

In this context, the progressive agenda was to “right” some of these wrongs. It meant being on the side of labor, the proletariat, as Marx put it. “Proletariat” is a word invented to mean people who work in factories, something that they thought hadn’t existed before.

However, in 15th-centuryVenicethere was a huge factory for making cannon, the best cannon in the world. InSpain, there were other factories making cannon; some people thought the Spanish cannon superior. Some scholars even argue that during the 500-year sea war between the Muslims and the Christians, the Venetian and Spanish cannons tipped the balance until even the Muslims conceded the point and began to bribe engineers and others, pay them very well, and brought them toByzantium,Turkey, to open operations there. There were already factories in earlier ages–and incidentally, contrary to Max Weber, these most often grew up in Catholic countries first.

Not to take on too many themes at once, I want to point out that if you read the definitions of social justice that appear in more recent writings, they go on to include one of the main elements of the new progressive agenda, “reproductive rights.” As one group puts it:

The privileged in this world, for the most part, have unfettered access to the reproductive health and education services to decide for themselves when and whether to bear or raise a child. The poor and disadvantaged do not. Thus, the struggle for reproductive justice is inextricably bound up with the effort to secure a more just society.

Accordingly, those who would labor to achieve economic and social justice are called upon to join in the effort to achieve reproductive justice and, thereby, help realize the sacred vision of a truly just society for all.[4]

The privileged of this world have a chance to control births and control the number of children they have, but the poor don’t have this, and that’s not fair. So, in the name of the poor, progressives introduced a concept of reproductive rights, by which they primarily meant abortion.

It’s not so hard to get birth control all around the world; that’s by and large happened. What the issue really comes down to is abortion, and abortion is now promoted under the rubric of social justice. How can you be for social justice and against reproductive rights? The situation is the same in the case of gay rights. Consider the following:

How can the [Anglican] Church be taken seriously or receive any respect for its views on the far more important issues of poverty, violence and social justice when the public keep being reminded of this blot on its integrity, the continued discrimination against gays?[5]

Compassion. All these concerns fly increasingly under the flag of social justice. One more to note: There used to be a Tammany Hall saying: “Th’ fella’ w’at said that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, underestimated th’ possibilities of compassion.” In addition to “equality” and the “common good,” the third term that came to be used in association with social justice was “compassion.”

The most extraordinary thing since about 1832 is that everything is done in the name of the poor. Modern revolutions are almost all fought in the name of the poor. (Not in theUnited States, but in the rest of the world.) What actually happens to the poor under revolutionary systems is a different question entirely.

The Tammany Hall saying wittily calls attention to the fact that more sins have been committed in the name of compassion in the last 150 years–by the Nazis, by the Communists, and by the African and Asian despots who justify their regimes as “socialist”–than by any other force in history. We must not allow that beautiful term “compassion” to blind us. There are true forms and false forms.

In an entirely different order of magnitude, why did the progressive term “compassion” during the “War on Poverty,” which began in 1964, so destroy families? Half of the pregnancies in Washington, D.C., end in abortion–almost. And then, of those who are born, 70 percent are born outside of wedlock. It’s the largest-scale abandonment of women by men in human history, what’s happening all through this country. And not only in urban areas: It’s happening out in Iowaand all across the country. Charles Murray had a famous article on out-of-wedlock births in Ohio.[6] And such births are now multiplying in the developed countries; they are appearing more inItaly andFrance andGermany andGreat Britain.

This chain of events was unleashed in the name of a war against poverty, a war to reduce crime, a war to help the family. But if you look at what actually happened, that war on poverty has not been an unmixed blessing.

It worked very well for the elderly. The condition of the elderly in the United States since 1965, let’s say, is far better. In fact, if anything, the elderly get too much, and now we’re having great problems with the commitments we made for Medicare and even our inability to keep funding the promised Social Security. The premise of Social Security arrangements was that there would be seven workers paying into the system for every benefit receiver. Today, however, we are no longer having the required numbers of children. We’re getting to the point where there are about two workers for every retiree.

It is therefore already clear that we are not going to be able to meet the obligations that we have assumed. That sword of Damocles hangs by an even more frayed thread inEurope. There is going to be a great crisis of social democracy in the next 10 years.

This is a fairly broad search into what people mean by social justice today. Let me add, though, one more anecdote. I recently read the obituary of a Franciscan sister, I think it was, in Delaware who had worked as a missionary in different countries. The author described her as being especially committed to “social justice work.” She helped feed the hungry, tend to the young, care for the ill. She labored for the neediest. In this usage, “social justice” seems rather like a synonym for “followed the Beatitudes.”

What Did Social Justice Mean Originally?

Taparelli–Modern Problems Call for a New Virtue. Now I would like to consider the way the term “social justice” originally emerged in modern history. Where did it come from?

The first known usage of the term is by an Italian priest, Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio, who wrote a book about the need for recovering the ancient virtue of what had been called “general justice” in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, but in a new contemporary form.[7] He gave it the term “social justice.” The term was given prominence by Antonio Rosmini-Serbati in La Costitutione Secondo la Giustizia Sociale in 1848.[8]

Taparelli wasn’t clear what he was looking for, but he was clear about the problems, some of which I’ve outlined to you: the movement away from the country to the cities, moving away from the family food supply, becoming wage-dependent, family members going to work in different locations. The strain on the family was enormous.

Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891)–The Evil of Equality. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII became the first of the modern Popes to really use encyclicals (an encyclical means a letter to the whole world) as means of communication, because now there were thriving societies in North and South America that a century earlier had been by comparison rather primitive, and Christianity was mostly in Europe, plus a few missionaries scattered elsewhere. By 1890, that was increasingly not the case; there were more and more organized dioceses and parishes all around the world. So an encyclical was a letter to communicate with all of them.

Leo XIII entitled one of his encyclicals Rerum Novarum, the new things, the new times. What he meant were the things I’ve just described, the moving from the farms and the strain on families.

What is a Pope doing writing about economic and social matters? That’s not a Pope’s province, except that the cradle of Catholicism–of Christianity more generally–has always been the family. That’s where children first learn by the look in their mother’s eyes when she holds them for the first time and in the warmth of being held–that’s where children first learn the meaning of unconditional love and concern for someone beyond self. Then that understanding is nourished in various ways in the family, and this is how Christian faith is first practiced.

The crisis of the family already in 1890 was something the Pope knew needed to be addressed. He wanted to call attention to the fact that societies were now being organized on an entirely different principle than in the whole preceding history of Christianity. Earlier, almost all Christians had been farmers or associated with farming. If you read the New Testament, you’ll see that quite vividly; the good shepherd, the sower of the seed, almost all of the parables are agrarian in background.

But more and more people were not living agrarian lives, and what does Christianity mean for that? That’s what Pope Leo XIII started to address.

I do want to read one stunning passage from Rerum Novarum, paragraph 26. The threat the Pope sees is socialism, the theory of giving the state total power. He doesn’t use the term “totalitarian.” Very early in his encyclical, he writes first about “civil society.” For Leo, “civil society” is a good term; “civil” comes from the Latin for the town, the city, the citizen. It gains its force from the experience of the medieval towns, centers of safety, commerce, craftsmanship, and prosperity–the highest prosperity and the greatest freedom.

Max Weber even wrote: “City air breathes free.” When you come to the towns, you’re free. That’s where the universities were; that’s where the new commerce was; and that’s where people came from far and near to examine the goods that came from many regions and to set up trading arrangements.

Here is Leo XIII’s attack on the very ideal of equality as a social ideal:

Therefore, let it be laid down in the first place that in civil society, the lowest cannot be made equal with the highest. Socialists, of course, agitate the contrary, but all struggling against nature is in vain. There are truly very great and very many natural differences among men. Neither the talents nor the skill nor the health nor the capacities of all are the same, and unequal fortune follows of itself upon necessary inequality in respect to these endowments.

These words are in one of the older translations of the encyclical. Here is the more modern translation on the Vatican Web site:

It must be first of all recognized that the condition of things inherent in human affairs must be borne with, for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition.[9]

It’s really a rather simple observation, and I would love to linger on this, but I dare not. He goes on:

Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community. Social and public life can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity for business and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which suits his own peculiar domestic condition.[10]

The fact that we’re unequal is a benefit, “for to carry on its affairs, community life requires varied aptitudes and diverse services. And to perform these diverse services, men are impelled most by differences in individual property holdings.”[11] This becomes his defense of the crucial role of the ownership of private property for incarnate beings like ourselves. If we were angels, we wouldn’t need property. But if a human being is going to be free, he has to own his own stuff; he has to have a place to which he can repair that somebody can’t take away from him.

Thus, Leo XIII did not mean by “social justice” equality. On the contrary, Leo held that it’s good that there’s an unequal society. Some people are fitted for different kinds of work, and it’s wonderful to be able to find the work that fits your talents. This had been an argument that the founders of theUnited Statesused to justify a commercial system: that it provided more opportunities for a wider range of skills than farming life did, so it allowed a much larger range of talents to mature and to develop as people found different niches for themselves.

Some people are great as blacksmiths but not as other things. All glory to them for being good blacksmiths. I enjoy very much good waiters and good waitresses in restaurants. There are some who do it as a career–this happens more inEuropethan here–but they do it so well that they always give you a very pleasant hour or so. Theirs is not exactly a job I would want for myself, but if that’s their job and they do it well, it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing.

So Rerum Novarum addresses the evil of equality. Equality is against nature and against the whole range of human gifts. Human gifts make us necessarily unequal in some sense.

Naturally, God is not impressed by the talents of any human being. No matter how great anybody’s talents are, they don’t come anywhere close to God, who created all beauty and all power and all energy and all ability. In that sense, in the eyes of God, we’re all equal. Relative to God, the differences between us aren’t important in the way God sees us. But in terms of looking at each of us realistically in our social roles, we are very different, and that’s what makes society work. Not everybody has to be slotted to be a cog in a machine.

Nothing demonstrates this diversity in individuals better than the difference between raising children and training animals. It’s easier to bring up cats than children. My two daughters each brought home a stray kitten that they promised to take care of; we parents would never have to take care of them. Then they graduated from high school; they went away to college; they left home; we inherited the damn cats.

We didn’t know how to train them very well at first, so they developed very bad habits. A black and white one, a yellow one: two totally different cats. You can’t say they didn’t have different personalities. Pepé Le Pew was quick and witty, and Le Beau (le Duc d’Orange) was slow and fat and dumb. On the other hand, all you had to do was train them, even though we didn’t do that so well. Bringing up children, however, you have to prepare them to be free, to be responsible.

All you have to do with cats is discipline their instincts. They’ll always do what their instincts demand, so you just have to shape their instincts a bit, and then they do it. But with children, you can’t train them, because they have more than one set of instincts. One set of their instincts is warring against another, and they themselves have to learn how to balance these warring passions, recognize them, become master of them, learn self-control to become free. That’s what freedom is.

Cats today may well behave roughly the same way as they did in the time of the pharaohs, but your own children are each so different from the others. You have no idea what they’re going to be when they hit 17 or 18 or 20–or 30 or 40. They go their own ways in religion, in politics, in what they want to do, and the risks they want to run. That’s why Pope Leo was so dead set against the idea of equality understood as sameness, but rather wanted to praise the diversity of human gifts and human vocations and human callings.

A New Virtue of Association

What the Pope was reaching for in Rerum Novarum was the same thing Taparelli introduced: that there’s a need for a new type of Christian with new habits to come into being. He didn’t know the name for this new virtue, but he was groping for it.

But if you don’t want the state to run everything, what are you going to need? You’re going to need people who are able to cooperate and associate among themselves, to solve problems on their own level by themselves. If you want a playground for your children, you’ve got to cooperate with others in the neighborhood to build it. If you want to keep its equipment up, you’ve got to cooperate to paint it. If your village well is inefficient, you’ve got to organize together to dig a deeper one. This is still happening all over the world.

The Pope was reaching for something that would engender the spirit and the practice of association. He came to be known as the “Pope of Association,” and he thought this was the greatest inheritance from the Middle Ages, the way that in all towns one group would adopt the bridge and would be responsible for the upkeep of the bridge, and they’d be allowed to collect a toll to pay for the necessary repairs, and others would adopt roads and so forth. Associations took responsibility for the different needs of life in the village and the town.

If you go through Europe today, especially inItaly, you still see this: associations for this and for that. Each member sometimes wears a different-colored ribbon or special flag to identify him as a member of that association.

In the second half of the 19th century, more and more of the laity were sharing a transition such as my grandparents experienced in the little country ofSlovakiain the center ofEurope. My grandparents’ central civic and Christian duties for centuries had been simple: to pray, pay, and obey. If they did those three things, they were good humans and good Christians.

But when their children moved toAmerica, much different responsibilities were imposed upon them. They were no longer subjects of the Emperor but citizens of a free republic, sovereign in their power. If something was wrong and needed fixing, they were obliged to organize with others to fix it. They organized their own insurance companies to take care of families of men who were hurt in the mill or the mine. They organized their own clubs, and they organized their own recreation; the Slovak Sokol “falcon” is the symbol for athletics. Lots of beer was served, and the men, even the old men, used to show up at the Sokol to play board games. Meanwhile, the young people would train to march, dance, and sing in yearly festivals. The different ethnic groups did this in different ways, but they all did it, the life of association.

So there’s a new possibility in theNew World. More and more people are getting educated. More and more are living independent of the land. More and more are getting used to a life of association and working with others, and that’s precisely what the Pope encouraged. We have no answer for socialism if we don’t do that. You can’t answer statism unless you have an alternative. The Pope didn’t use the term “statism” then, but I think that’s a reasonable alternative for what we’re facing today, because today the state is the rapidly growing leviathan.

If the state has all the responsibilities, it gains all the power, and how do you stop that? In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII predicted nine different things that would happen under socialism, and they all did if you looked at it after 1989, after the fall of the Wall. I know many people inCentral Europe did. Everything he predicted came true, from the drive for equality resulting in the forced uniformity, the killing of creativity and originality, and the breakdown of the whole system. There was practically no invention of new wealth or new products for the world market (except the splendid Kalashnikov). If the Soviets wanted a new technology or a new tool, they had to steal it, and they became very good at that. But they were always a generation or two behind.

The last point I’ll make is that Friedrich Hayek wrote a really powerful little book called The Mirage of Social Justice, in which he picked up on the way the term “social justice” was being used in the first half of the 20th century. He said “social justice” had become a synonym for “progressive,” and “progressive” in practice means socialist or heading toward socialism. Hayek well understood the Catholic lineage of social justice, how the term had first appeared in Catholic thought, until almost 100 years later it became dominant on the secular Left.

The Popes, Hayek noted, had described social justice as a virtue. Now, a virtue is a habit, a set of skills. Imagine a simple set of skills, such as driving a car. The social habit of association and cooperation for attending to public needs is an important, newly learned habit widely practiced, especially inAmerica. Social justice is learning how to form small bands of brothers who are outside the family who, for certain purposes, volunteer to give time and effort to accomplishing something. If there are a lot of kids who aren’t learning how to read, you volunteer for tutoring.

Tocqueville said the most fascinating and insightful thing about America: namely, that wherever in France people turned to l’Etat, and wherever in Britain people turned to the aristocracy, in America people got together and formed associations. They hold bake sales to send missionaries to theAntipodes, to build colleges. They invent a hundred devices to raise money among themselves. That’s what a free people do. That’s what a democracy is.

The first law of democracy, Tocqueville wrote, is the law of association. If you want to free people, for them not to be swallowed up by the state, you have to develop in them the virtue of cooperation and association. It’s not an easy virtue to learn at first, but it soon becomes a vast social phenomenon.

It’s not at all uncommon for 30 college students to show up for a presidential campaign in, say,New Hampshireand organize the whole state for their candidate. They’ve never done that before, but they know how to use a Rolodex, and they can very soon organize an entire state. It’s a skill they learned. It’s one of the great skills of Americans.

InAmerica, we mostly go to meetings. Parenthood, you discover, is essentially a transportation service. Your kids go to so many meetings in a day that you need a sign on the refrigerator telling you which times everybody is scheduled for what and where they have to be. Americans are good at going to meetings, and that’s a tremendous skill to have. You can send a group of Americans in the Peace Corps, even a dozen of them, and they’ll figure out what they need to do and organize themselves how to do it. You don’t have to write detailed orders from headquarters. Association is a tremendous skill to have, but it’s essential for democracy.

And that’s what, in a word, social justice is–a virtue, a habit that people internalize and learn, a capacity. It’s a capacity that has two sides: first, a capacity to organize with others to accomplish particular ends and, second, ends that are extra-familial. They’re for the good of the neighborhood, or the village, or the town, or the state, or the country, or the world. To send money or clothes or to travel to other parts of the world in order to help out–that’s what social justice is: the new order of the ages, Rerum Novarum.

Finally, it’s important to note that this notion of social justice is ideologically neutral. It’s as common to people on the Left to organize and form associations, to cooperate in many social projects, as it is to people on the Right. This is not a loaded political definition, but it does avoid the pitfall (on the Left) of thinking that social justice means distribution, égalité, the common good only as determined by state authority, and so forth. It also avoids the pitfall (on the Right) of thinking of the individual as unencumbered, closed-up, self-contained, self-sufficient.

It is, therefore, no accident that the virtue of social justice slumbered for so many centuries until the profound disruption of social conditions and a new set of civil institutions called it to life and new prominence.

Questions & Answers

QUESTION: You mentioned the French form of equality versus the English form, and I was wondering if you could talk about how that impacted the American and French Revolutions, because there are many people that would consider the two to be one and the same, and then many also that would consider them to be quite different.

MICHAEL NOVAK: I’ve given you a hint of how their outcomes are so terribly different. In France, there’s quite a lot of shame about the Revolution just in the last 30 years, after Chambre’s book and other books, the monstrous acts of bloodshed and so forth, recriminations that we were spared. We have a revolution in which, without ambiguity, people still celebrate the Founding Fathers and honor them. That’s not true in most places.

Hannah Arendt makes that point in a book called On Revolution, and she points out that almost every revolution–200 of them in the last two centuries– has ended up with its founders either assassinated or killed by a later generation or held as objects of shame and torment: Mussolini, Hitler, a lot of them. But not during or after the American Revolution, and so it’s very different.

I’m not trying to make it exactly an American point, but the theory of social justice does fitAmericavery well. You only have to compare with what Tocqueville was writing at the same time Taparelli was writing to see the parallels.

QUESTION: I was wondering if you could look at the White House program that started under the previous Administration and has continued under the current one and discuss how that program reflects the state and civil society’s balance of social justice and whether the state is leveraging certain groups or merely returning certain roles back to civil society. I feel like a large amount of the debate is currently focusing on hiring practices, which is bringing to the forefront who’s in control of social justice in theU.S.

MICHAEL NOVAK: There are many ambiguities about faith-based institutions aligned with government, so even some very religious people, and even socially active religious people, were against President George W. Bush’s faith-based institutions. I was not; I was in favor of them, for this reason: In the rehabilitation of people from drugs, even from despair and poverty, there were a number of organizations you could witness around the country. You could go there with your own eyes and see.

Bob Woodson here in this city is one of the best at spotting them and calling them to people’s attention. He took a bunch of us down to a ramshackle Christian center inSan Antonio. They had something like an 80 percent success rate in overcoming recidivism; that is, most rehabilitated criminals go back to crime. It’s very high normally because mostly what state institutions do, since they can’t touch the internal life, can’t touch the soul, is basically warehousing them. They feed them and clothe them like cattle, give them clean quarters and so forth, but there’s very little they can do.

The religious organizations go to their soul and try to bring about a conversion of life, even if you look at it in the secular way, to put their lives in order. Of course, it does have secular fruits; this is the genesis of the idea of the Protestant ethic and its value for economic development. When people have a conversion of life and learn how to put their lives in order, it has economic effects that are quite beneficial that they didn’t even intend, but they do happen.

As I understand it, what the new Administration is trying to do is take the faith out of the faith-based institutions. You can’t follow the rules of faith in hiring, and you can’t say very much about faith. You’ve got to be wary of the ACLU or others. It’s like taking the heart out of something and keeping the shell. That may be unfair, but that’s what some of my friends who have studied this more closely judge.

QUESTION: I think the examples you raised of reproductive rights and gay rights showed that the language of rights raises its own set of problems. How is it that, in a pluralistic society, we can come to a shared and rigorous conception of what is a right and what is not? What’s the third option, and what sources do we use to move there?

MICHAEL NOVAK: My own solution is to stick to the ones that were written into the Constitution and understand those by strict construction. They have been enormously potent in human history.

And let’s avoid manufacturing rights. Just because those original rights work because they are founded on something internal to human persons and internal habits is no reason to trade on their success by calling everything you want a right. I think there are many false rights.

I, for the life of me, can’t understand in any Lockean sense how abortion can be described as a right. What the social contract means, according to Locke, is that people give up their ability to use violence against another human being and let the state judge these things. Let the state handle conflict rather than private vendettas. By that ruling, abortions were not only deeply frowned upon; they were the lowest form of moral practice you could have. The worst thing to call anybody was an abortionist for most of American history. You do have to overthrow Locke to call that a right.

QUESTION:Given the very little that we know about Sonia Sotomayor, do you believe that she subscribes to the old view of social justice or this new liberal view of social justice?

MICHAEL NOVAK: That’s a very good question. Somebody should ask it of her. I don’t know the answer to that question, but let me give you my guess. I’m not so upset about that sentence of hers about a wiseLatina. That’s what she was taught in law school, even as an undergraduate. It’s as if we should call what we now call universities “diversities.”

Some people attribute the rise of the term “diversity” to a book of mine in 1971 called The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, in which I gave a very detailed theory of American diversity. But I by no means meant the kind of monster that has grown out of it. Claire Boothe Luce used to say, “No good deed goes unpunished,” and you find it true of ideas too. No good idea goes unabused.

I don’t think she means it to be racist. I think, on examination, that she doesn’t mean it at all, but she says it because she knew it would please the audiences she was with. It’s the way they talk, and there’s this mythology, which has been all through American history, of the wise person of color. Jim and Huckleberry Finn are the noble savages. It’s Rousseau’s idea that civilization corrupts and that, as we come from the hand of nature, we’re noble. There’s a little bit of that in the air, and I can see how she’d take a certain satisfaction out of it.

But I have a hunch she’s a lot more conservative than she’s being credited for being. I heard a lawyer, a conservative lawyer, defense attorney, who has argued over 30 cases before her in her different capacities as judge, say she is tough. She’s a defense attorney’s nightmare. She’s very tough on criminals and defense attorneys. He said that usually she’s described as a liberal, but usually you look for liberal judges. With Sotomayor, you’re going to be very disappointed on that front.

QUESTION: Your description of social justice is based on voluntary cooperation and the model of Tocqueville and Burke, which relies on a certain understanding of citizens inculcating certain virtues into their lives. They have to be taught to be free, and we have to practice these virtues in daily life. What happens when you have a society in which the very freedom that they’ve been granted in their model of social justice starts to eat away at those virtues?

What I’m thinking of is a fairly recent article in the Weekly Standard on howIreland, which used to be a very strongly Catholic country, has begun to wither away from within, and it’s been at the same time that their marketplace has taken off. The article describes how, with the financial crisis, they have a weak economy and don’t have the religious basis that used to be undergirding their society.

What kind of social justice model is going to work for them? Is there a way to recover the one that you’ve described?

MICHAEL NOVAK:Ireland became one of the economic tigers long before their sexual crisis and the emptying out of the seminaries and the convents. In fact, I attributed it, against the grain of many commentators inIreland who interviewed me, to the fact that so many Irish citizens were trained in parochial schools. They really learned how to read and write and add and subtract, and they had great penmanship that only nuns can teach you. So I thought they really had all these habits.

I would be surprised if the increasing secularization of Irish society doesn’t bring about a decay of many of those virtues. There will be more unformed families, more and more births out of wedlock. Whatever we think morally about it, what happens in real life is, young men who grow up without a father particularly have no one to discipline them, no one to tell them you can’t behave like that, or no one to support them when they go out for a job interview. There’s nobody to tutor them in the way you have to become a male, and there’s a certain anger that grows up.

I can’t swear for Ireland, but that is growing up over in Europewherever the welfare state is. Let me say that under Communism, too, there was a tremendous decay of these basic virtues; in fact, the Communists’ effort was to heap manure, garbage, on all the old bourgeois virtues and Christian virtues, and Jewish virtues for that matter. They have the same root.

So when people came out from that and started trying to form free societies, they didn’t have all the proper habits. The last 20 or 30 years has been a process of learning what habits you need to have. It’s not enough to say freedom and democracy. You get them, then what? People have to change the way they live. I think that this sense of social justice as a virtue is very useful to them, very important in building free societies from the ground up.

Michael Novak is George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Show references in this report

[1]G. J. Papageorgiou, “Social Values and Social Justice,” Economic Geography, Vol. 56, No. 2 (April 1980), pp. 110-119.

[2]Joe R. Feagin, “Social Justice and Sociology: Agendas for the Twenty-First Century: Presidential Address,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 66, No. 1 (February 2001), pp. 1-20.

[3]Cf. Igor Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon, trans. William Tjalsma (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).

[4]Quoted in Randy Sly, “A Catholic College and Abortion Advocates: Here We Go Again,” Catholic Online, May 22, 2009, at http://www.catholic.org/collegiate/story.php?id=33617.

[5]“Gay Minister Claims Discrimination,” Waikato Times (New Zealand), June 27, 2008, at http://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/509074/Gay-minister-claims-discrimination.

[6]Charles Murray, “Here’s the Bad News on the Underclass,” The Wall Street Journal, March 8, 1990.

[7]See Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio, S.J., Theoretical Treatise on Natural Right Based on Fact (1840-1843). Friedrich Hayek notes expressly that the Roman Catholic Church especially has made the aim of “[s]ocial justice” part of the official doctrine, while “the ministers of most Christian denominations appear to vie with each other with such offers of more mundane aims.” Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1976), p. 66. Pope Pius XI incorporated “social justice” into official Church doctrine in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. Oswald Nell-Breuning, S.J., who wrote a major part of this papal document, published a line-by-line commentary, The Reorganization of Social Economy (Milwaukee, 1939), which treats social justice as both a virtue and a regulative principle. In the subsequent debate, no one generally accepted definition has emerged. The index of the famous post-Vatican II Encyclopedia Sacramentum Mundi lists only one reference, a single paragraph alluding to the concept, but no specific entry (Vol. IV, p. 204). Rodger Charles, S.J., in The Christian Social Conscience, does not even mention the term, but relies on the classical distinctions among commutative, distributive, and legal justice. Rodger Charles, S.J., The Christian Social Conscience (Hales Corners: Clergy Book Services, 1970), p. 25. Johannes Messner, in his magisterial 1,000-page Social Ethics (St. Louis: Herder Books, 1965), treats the concept only on pp. 320-321. His understanding, however, is not an example of clarity: “‘social justice’ refers especially to the economic and social welfare of ‘society,’ in the sense of the economically cooperating community of the state.” Fathers Yves Calvez, S.J. and Jacques Perrin, S.J., in The Church and Social Justice: Social Teaching of the Popes from Leo XIII to Pius XII, conclude that “social justice is general justice applied to the economic as distinct from the political society.” Fathers Yves Calvez, S.J., and Jacques Perrin, S.J., The Church and Social Justice: Social Teaching of the Popes from Leo XIII to Pius XII, trans. J. R. Kirwan (London: Burns and Oates, 1961), p. 153. Cardinal Höffner, Christian Social Teaching (Ordo Socialis, 1983), p. 71, also adopts the position that social justice is legal justice. He suggests calling it “common good justice, a virtue that is exercised only by the state, territorial authorities, professional classes and the Church.” Father Ernest Fortin drily summarized the confusion surrounding the term: “As nearly as I can make out, social justice, in contradistinction to either legal or distributive justice, does not refer to any special dispositions of the soul and hence cannot properly be regarded as a virtue. Its subject is not the individual human being but a mysterious “X” named society, which is said to be unintentionally responsible for the condition of its members and in particular for the lot of the poor among them” Father Ernest Fortin, “Natural Law and Social Justice,” American Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. 30 (1985), pp. 14-15.

[8]Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice, p. 176.

[9]Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, n. 26.

[10]Ibid.

[11]Ibid.

The Fallacy of Social Justice: All for One and Theft to All

Posted on March 12, 2012 by ccpastormike

*This article was orginally published on October 6, 2010 by Forcing Change, a ministry of Carl Teichrib. Used by permission of the author. Visit the website at www.forcingchange.org

A boiling, seething emotion rose from my chest into my throat. An avalanche of angry words tumbled from my small mouth. My indignation could not be quenched. A final declaration sounded with thick certainty.

“When I’m older, I’m going to do something about this.”

How old was I? Ten: maybe younger? But I had seen enough to know. Gross injustices had been observed.

I well remember the bitter experience. Me, a sensible farm boy – and my grandparents, owners of a small fabric shop in a sleepy prairie town – had traveled to the claustrophobic city of Winnipeg. The purpose: to visit textile outlets and make purchases of cloth. After two days of warehouses and shop floors, I knew this was the end of the world. Working conditions were deplorable: Too little sunshine, poorly chosen paint colors, smelly old merchantmen.

“Here’s some candy, kid.” It tasted stale.

At one critical point Grandma had to shush me. Didn’t she know? Didn’t anybody care? The lone Pepsi machine we had passed in the darkened hall wore a sign of prophetic importance: “Out of Order.” And I was dying of thirst.

Yes, the textile industry – indeed the entire business world – was out of order. How could anybody work in these depressing places? Boredom alone had to be killing people; it was killing me!

As we loaded up with fabric and left this urban wasteland I caught a glimpse of something else. A brick-lined smokestack was silhouetted against the evening sky; and smoke – or steam, it didn’t matter– was belching forth to choke out nature’s life.

That’s when I lost it. Didn’t those people know what they were doing? Didn’t anybody in the government have a brain? Not only was the city a depressing place and the warehouses terrible for workers, but also the factories were going to kill everything! When I grew-up, I was going to put a stop to this madness. Others would join in this desire to change the world. We would save the worker from his intolerable slavery and rescue the environment from the hands of greedy merchantmen. Justice, or vengeance, would be served: whether at home or abroad.

Grandma soothingly patronized me. Grandpa, lips tights, said nothing. He just drove faster.

Bending Minds

Looking back I marvel. As a young mind I had a keen sense of “social rights” and “justice.” And I was a prime candidate to have swung to the more extreme side of the leftist camp. In fact, my impressionable mind was already moving in that direction. Unaware that I was mimicking a Marxist approach – social revolution through mass action – I was emotionally convinced that radical surgery was the only recourse. Where had this come from?

My parents and grandparents were no-nonsense farmers and business owners. They worked very hard at their respective livelihoods, were quick to help anyone who needed assistance, and contributed to the local community in different ways – including, on my Mother’s part, teaching English to Laotian immigrants (those were the days of the Boat People). Both my parents and grandparents emphasized Christian ethics and values, to stand up for the underdog, and remain independent in the face of peer pressure; “You were born an original, don’t die a copy.”

The church I attended had Mennonite roots, but didn’t cater to leftist ideologies. In fact, it had separated itself from a Mennonite denomination in part because of a growing socialist-slant in the larger body. At heart we were probably the only non-pacifist Mennonite church in the district.

Television? No. At that time TV consisted of Bugs Bunny on Saturday evenings, and Dad trying to watch The Lawrence Welk Show while we kids faithfully re-enacted Wile-E Coyote cliff-falls from the top of the couch. There just wasn’t much time for television.

Public school? This was the late 1970s, and “environmental” curriculum was already in play. In the high school across the street The Environmental Handbook was used as a text – complete with overtly anti-Christian, anti-family, and anti-capitalist rhetoric (See Forcing Change, Volume 3, Issue 2). The Environmental Handbook for all practical purposes was a Marxist/Trotskyite call to radical “green” action – “nothing short of total transformation will do much good.” (The Environmental Handbook, 1970, p.330). Other school texts, such as the Prose of Relevance and Worlds in the Making, shaped minds to accept quantum cultural shifts – including the move towards socialist and technocratic ideals.[4]

Elementary school and Junior High also witnessed a steady stream of transforming curriculum. I remember hearing about the growing problems of over-population and the destruction of the ecosystem caused by human greed and pollution. Injustice was occurring in different parts of the world. Nuclear annihilation was around the corner.

Whether overt or subtle, the message was clear: The old ways of how society functioned could no longer be tolerated. Too much was at stake, and it was up to my generation to fix the world’s problems. Whether the teachers knew it or not, we were being shaped to change the system. Thus, a variety of cultural and social alternatives entered the classroom – including Marxism.

The late 1960’s and early 70’s was a hinge time for Western society. The New Left, with its vanguard techniques, challenged traditional cultural norms. Radicalism clashed with conventionalism, the drug culture blossomed, and Eastern forms of spirituality entered the mainstream. In America the welfare or “servile state” was greatly expanded, including experiments in community housing. All of this was coupled with the Vietnam War, first demoralizing France and then the United States. During this time, “peace” groups parroted Soviet propaganda; Capitalism was equated with “war mongering” while socialism reflected equity and peace.

The liberal-mined West embraced this trend, even though Frederick C. Barghoorn, a Yale professor who had been interned by the Soviet government in 1963, had warned America about the use of “peace” as a method in furthering Marxist ideology. Published one year after his arrest and release, his book Soviet Foreign Propaganda provided an important warning,

“It should be emphasized that all of the Soviet leaders, from Lenin and Trotski through Stalin and Khrushchev, strove in their peace propaganda to appeal both to revolutionaries seeking the overthrow of constitutional democracy and to western businessmen, liberals, pacifists, and the general public whose non-dialectic conception of peace was limited to the simple absence of armed conflict.”[5]

Liberals and pacifists of Western nations were viewed as important players in the cause of international Marxism. Their importance came not from an understanding of the Moscow-Hegelian-Marxist program, but in their ignorance. Convinced of holding the moral high ground and blinded by a sense of enlightenment, these individuals advanced the Communist agenda by acting on the emotion of the ideal. In other words, they were emotionally drawn to a Marxist-oriented “social justice” cause; the “plight of the worker,” economic and social inequalities, the desire for class-based justice, and the “struggle for peace.” These individuals would then become activists, educators, and cultural trendsetters. And they demanded social transformation that would, invariably, have an anti-Capitalist and anti-individualist tone. The boys in Moscow grinned.

The only way of “assuring lasting peace in the world” from the Marxist perspective, explained Barghoon, is the “elimination of capitalism.” [6] Peace, solidarity, and justice throbbed with a Leninist heartbeat throughout this turbulent time period. Capitalism, with its emphasis on private property and a free enterprise, was considered the prime cause of social strife. Socialism, with its emphasis on community and social order, was the path to progress.

This leftist ideology was solidly embedded in Canadian education during the 1970s, and from that point on its fingerprints can be observed in practically all major institutional systems, including churches.

Retna Ghosh and Douglas Ray, in the preface to their 1987-book Social Change and Education in Canada, provide a short outline of social theories that have shaped modern education. This included Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism, the conflict theories of Karl Marx, modernization, and the concept of human capital with its emphasis on workforce development. Each impacted the Canadian school system, as has Technocracy and a host of other philosophies. And while the system may see distinctions in these theories, the classroom was far more blurred. Indeed, any of the above – or a mix of all – may have shaped the student’s worldview. But rarely did he or she understand the ideal behind the curriculum.

As Ghosh and Ray explain,

“Social change, whether gradual or revolutionary, is inevitable and brings with it new patterns of social interaction. The place of education in this process is both complex and critical.” (Social Change and Education in Canada, p.vii).

For a young mind in the late 70s bombarded by a host of conflicting educational patterns, the emotional tug attached to exploited social issues seemed the most relevant. No wonder my trip to Winnipeg ended with a Trotskyite call for revolution.

What has any of this to do with “social justice”? Everything.

Catholic Social Justice

In today’s Christian world – and Western culture in general – there’s a myriad of changes taking place, and with it comes new language. “Social Justice” is certainly in the spotlight. Jim Wallis of Sojourners uses this term repeatedly. Brain McLaren’s book Everything Must Change seeks to reframe Christianity in a social justice context. The Christian Reformed Church has a social justice office, as does the Salvation Army; and the Mennonite Church USA, the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Canada, and an endless list of other denominations and church bodies speak of “social justice.”

But where does this term come from, and what is its dominant history?

“Social justice” appears to have been first employed in the early 1840s by an Italian Catholic theologian and Jesuit, Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio.[7] As Daniel M. Bell points out in his book, Liberation Theology After the End of History, d’Azeglio’s concept was “justice as a general virtue that coordinated all activity with the common good.” [8]

The notion of virtue is important, for it brings a flavor of charity. Taparelli’s vision circled around justice as a system of moral norms that included individual rights and the freedom to associate.The greater whole of the community – the “sum total of individual goods” [9] – would thus benefit. This form of “justice” was also known as economic justice, and looked upon wealth redistribution as a coordination of rights. Direct government administration should be avoided wherever possible, for Taparelli recognized the danger of centralization.[10]

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued his encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which dealt with the conditions of the working class, the right to private property, and the workplace relationship. Leo XIII rejected Communism and the greed that arises from an amoral application of Capitalism, instead advocating that worker and employer should come to an honest agreement regarding labor and wages.

Decades later, Pope Pius XI penned his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. In it he denounced Communism and at the same time embraced wealth redistribution – the sharing of benefits – as a function of a social justice (§ 57).

“By this law of social justice, one class is forbidden to exclude the other from sharing in the benefits.”

While this idea started to stretch the earlier limits of Catholic social justice, he at least recognized that all sides of the class divide could be negative players: the rich withholding the wages due the worker, and the worker demanding all from the rich. That aside, the free market system wasn’t an acceptable means to build a civilization on social justice.

“Just as the unity of human society cannot be founded on an opposition of classes, so also the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching… free competition, while justified and certainly useful provided it is kept within certain limits, clearly cannot direct economic life – a truth which the outcome of the application in practice of the tenets of this evil individualistic spirit has more than sufficiently demonstrated. Therefore, it is most necessary that economic life be again subjected to and governed by a true and effective directing principle.”(§ 88)

In reading through the encyclical an unsettling doublespeak emerges. Communism is chastised, yet the free market is evil. In this dialectic the end result is that “certain kinds of property…ought to be reserved to the State.” The “public authority,” according to Pius XI, should maintain ownership of enterprises that advance the “general welfare.” (§114-115). A slide down the slippery slope had now begun in earnest; “social justice” would become the excuse par-excellence in calling for a global collectivist system.

Speaking of Pius XI’s views on economic justice, Pope John XXIII pointed out that “man’s aim must be to achieve in social justice a national and international juridical order, with its network of public and private institutions, in which all economic activity can be conducted not merely for private gain but also in the interests of the common good.” [11] John XXIII advocated a “universal authority” to ensure this “common good.” [12]

Later in 1965, Pope Paul VI made similar comments while at the United Nations, openly suggesting “the establishment of a world authority.” [13] Why? Because a world authority is needed to establish and maintain an international “common good.” That same year, Paul VI’s document Gaudium et Spes – Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World – recognized that the Catholic church has an important role to play in constructing “a peaceful and fraternal community of nations.” (§ 90)

In that vein, he recommended in Section II, titled “Setting Up An International Community,” the creation of a Catholic organ designed to promote “international social justice.” (§ 90). Individualism was upheld in the document, but it must support the greater good. Collectivism in production was considered erroneous, yet a form of social collectivism was deemed necessary.

An excerpt from paragraph 65 demonstrates this social justice relationship,

“Citizens, on the other hand, should remember that it is their right and duty, which is also recognized by the civil authority, to contribute to the true progress of their own community according to their ability… those who hold back their unproductive resources or who deprive their community of the material or spiritual aid that it needs – save the right of migration – gravely endanger the common good.”

Here we see a swing far past the earlier idea of a charitable virtue. The implication is forthright; you will participate. In the context of this particular document, that participation includes the demands of a global community and world civil authority.

Although Pope John Paul II was perceived as more conservative, he too espoused a globally minded social justice agenda. This was evident in his endorsement of the UN Millennium Development Goals, which gravitate around wealth redistribution. [Note: The Millennium Development Goals have admirable targets, but the methods are highly suspect]. The US Catholic Bishops, operating under John Paul’s reign, were open regarding social justice in their 1986 letter, Economic Justice For All.

“The common good may sometimes demand that the right to own be limited by public involvement in the planning or ownership of certain sectors of the economy. Support of private ownership does not mean that anyone has the right to unlimited accumulation of wealth.” (§115)

Interestingly, Catholic commentators from all sides of the political spectrum described the Bishops’ document as “pro-capitalist.” However, a cursory read demonstrates that Economic Justice For All is pro-socialist. Yes, the responsibility of the individual is highlighted and private property is validated. However, it’s the Bishops’ version of justice that displays a different set of cards, with its call for collective, government-directed programs aimed at curing social ills. Individuals, therefore, are obligated to contribute to the common good, In other words, if you can contribute to the common good, then you must contribute. This is reminiscent of the Marxist maxim:

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Writing for the Journal of Business Ethics, William E. Murnion gives a straightforward assessment of the Bishop’s text; “…the conception of justice it espouses is… clearly socialist, and communist at that.” Murnion conceded that the Bishops were not “crypto-communists,” just that their “conception of social justice is indeed identical with the communist principle of justice even though the bishops have arrived at it from a route entirely opposed to Marx’s.” [14]

Remember too that the 1980s was the era of Liberation Theology inLatin America, which combined revolutionary forms of Marxism with Catholic social teachings. And although theVaticandenounced certain aspects of Liberation Theology, this Roman Marxism was nevertheless a logical extension of “social justice.”

Finally, from the Catholic perspective, Pope Benedict XVI has amply demonstrated his affinity to social justice through his encyclical Caritas In Veritate (NOTE: Forcing Change published a major review of this document in Volume 3, Issue 8). Here, social justice is recognized as an issue of prime economic and political importance, one that goes beyond the free market approach.

And like a broken record, the market system must be directed “towards the pursuit of the common good.” (§36)

“The political community,” so explained Benedict XVI, “must also take responsibility.” Economic redistribution, according to this encyclical, is justice. The pope also recommended that the United Nations be reformed, along with the global economy, so that that a “true world political authority” would emerge “with teeth.” (§67) Why?

To “seek to establish the common good.” (§67).

Concluding this section: Although some Papal teachings uphold private property and reject Communism, such as Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum, the Roman Catholic hierarchy over the past century has increasingly bridged “social justice” with economic and political collectivism.

But another historical movement arose in parallel to the modern Catholic version of social justice, giving active energy to the phrase. And if the Papal idea of social justice found itself on the slippery slope to Collectivism, this parallel movement intentionally aimed for the bottom of the hill.

Marxist Social Justice

For generations there has been an activist side to the idea of wealth redistribution. This popular front, with a web of splinter groups, organizations and fellow travelers, used “social justice” as the rallying cry for cultural transformation. In fact, this movement is very much alive today, and continues to use the term as an effective banner. These social justice flag wavers have been the most vocal preachers of Collectivism; the followers of Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and dozens of other socialist and communist leaders.

Communists and social radicals have been, hands-down, the winners when it comes to employing this term. The Socialist International has always used it, as has Trotskyite organizations, Red factions, and a multitude of socialist political parties. It’s a favorite of the Green Party too, with little difference in meaning from that of its socialist sisters.

The idea of social justice within a more political context goes back a long way. In 1848 the Society of Fraternal Democrats, an international body that rubbed shoulders with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, published a veiled threat against the British system;

“Let the privileged classes renounce their unjust usurpations and establish political equality and social justice, andEngland will have nothing to fear against a world in arms.” [15]

Marx and Engels fleshed out their “science of socialism” during the same time frame as Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio’s “social justice.” And The Communist Manifesto was published the same year that the Society of Fraternal Democrats called for social justice. Under Communism, wealth redistribution was to be used for social ends. In this structure, private property for personal gain was viewed as the cornerstone of the class system, and was seen as the cause of social injustices and strife. Wealth redistribution, therefore, was aimed at producing a society where all people were economically equal. Hence, the abolition of bourgeois property (that of the capitalist class) was the key to Communism.

To make this work something else was needed: A framework to give the masses a political voice. Marx and Engels looked to democracy. Once the proletariat (working class) had attained political power, a more just social system could be birthed.

“…the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property…”[16]

This concept of social justice, the raising of an “oppressed” class through the degradation of another class, is a reactionary process based on the arousing of envy. At this base level Communism is directly linked to the French Revolution – an event that had sparked worldwide revolutionary fervor, and one whose shots are still echoing today. Austrian philosopher and defender of freedom, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, provides historical context.

“If one were to take paper and pencil to make an estimate of how many people were murdered or killed in battle because of the ideas of the French Revolution in their various stages, guises, and evolutionary forms, because of the ideas of equality, ethnic or racist identity, a ‘classless society,’ a ‘world safe for democracy,’ a ‘racially pure people,’ ‘true social justice achieved by social engineering’ – one would arrive at simply staggering sums. Even the Jewish holocaust offered by the National Socialists with five or six million dead would seem almost a drop in the bucket.” [17]

Weaving the thread of envy and social change, Kuehnelt-Leddihn reminds us,

“In the last 200 years the exploitation of envy, its mobilization among the masses, coupled with the denigration of individuals, but more frequently of classes, races, nations or religious communities has been the very key to political success. The history of t he Western World since the end of the eighteenth century cannot be written without this fact constantly in mind. All leftist ‘isms’ harp on this theme, i.e., on the privilege of groups, minority groups, to be sure, who are objects of envy and at the same time subjects of intellectual-moral inferiorities. They have no right to their exalted positions. They ought to conform to the rest, become identical with ‘the people,’ renounce their privileges, conform. If they speak another language, they ought to drop it and talk the lingo of the majority. If they are wealthy their riches should be taxed away or confiscated.”[18] (italics in original).

This method of arousing envy, often disguised as virtue – “we’re doing this for the poor and oppressed” – is built upon a sense of moral superiority and indignation, which then ferments into loathing and “social action.” At this point the emotion of the ideal becomes the driver of transformation. Perched on this self-constructed high point, we quickly sanction Socialism (the theft of all for the “greater good”). Or, not content by the slowness of Socialism, we pursue Communism through revolution (the gutting of one class for the “greater good”). Either way we institute Collectivism – the empowerment of those who claim to guide the general good.

In all of this democracy comes to full form, taking on a purification role expressed as “Mob Rule.” Whoever controls the biggest mob through the emotion of the ideal is the one who rules.Social change then occurs either through the ballot box or the barrel of a gun. It doesn’t matter: the Mob has spoken, equality will be enforced, and we can bask in the “warm herd feeling of brotherhood.” [19]

Literary critic and former Marxist, Herbert Read, well understood these connections.

“Communism is an extreme form of democracy, and it is totalitarian: but equally the totalitarian state in the form of fascism is an extreme form of democracy. All forms of socialism, whether state socialism of the Russian kind, or national socialism of the German kind, or democratic socialism of the British kind, are professedly democratic, that is to say, they all obtain popular assent by the manipulation of mass psychology.” [20]

Over the years, Communist and socialist leaders have rallied the masses with the message of inequality (“oppression”) and the social justice solution: economic equality. “Communism was meant to have a universal liberating purpose. It was to bring the end of inequalities and establish real social justice.”[21]

In 1898, Eugene V. Debs – later dubbed “America’s greatest Marxist” – equated a collective society, industrial freedom, and social justice.[22] A few years later, during World War I, he noted that permanent peace based on social justice wouldn’t occur until “national industrial despotism” was replaced by “international industrial democracy.” Economic profit was anathema to peace, and the ending of war could only come with the ending of “profit and plunder among nations.”[23] A new order was needed where one class was striped and replaced by a more progressive, humane, and international apparatus.

V.I. Lenin and his gang “came to power with an ambitious programme of measures designed to ensure social justice and improve the lot of the poor.”[24] Maxim Gorky, a friend of Lenin’s couches this in glowing words of endearment.

“…It would be a difficult task to paint the portrait of Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin. His words were as much a part of his external appearance as scales are of fish. The simplicity and straightforwardness of everything he said were an essential part of his nature. The heroic deeds which he achieved are surrounded by no glittering halo. His was that heroism which Russia knows well – the unassuming, austere life of self-sacrifice of the true Russian revolutionary intellectual who, in his unshakable belief in the possibility of social justice on earth, renounces all the pleasures of life in order to toil for the happiness of mankind.”[25]

The result was disastrous. Mervyn Matthews tells us, “The efforts to banish ‘capitalist exploitation’ had all but destroyed the wealthier classes without benefiting more than a tiny proportion of the poor.”[26]

But it did benefit Lenin and company. Never mind the mountain of corpses; progress always comes with a price.

“Since the French Revolution established a new high mark of political liberty in the world, there has been no other advance in democratic progress and social justice comparable to the Russian Revolution…” (Socialist Party of America news release, August 1918).

By 1922, the Russian Revolution had cost the lives of six to ten million.

Decades later in theAmericas, Castro summed up the Cuban revolution “as an aspiration for social justice.” [27] Che Guevara couched his bloody revolution as an “armed struggle for freedom of rights and social justice.”[28] This crude theme is common to all leftist uprisings, because it rests in the heart of all leftist ideologies. The Will Miller Social Justice Lecture Series demonstrates this fact through the symbolism found on its banner: Marxism, world peace, social revolution, feminism, etc.

Celia Hart, an Internationalist, put it this way on December 2003.

“…we must understand that the only road to peace and social justice is socialism. Peaceful coexistence and all its fallacies have tragically lost their opportunity to triumph. With the exploiting classes there will never be social justice; without social justice there will never be peace… Let’s join the people under the banner of the International. Never before has the world needed, as now, to remember November seven [the anniversary of the October Revolution]. Never before must we understand that the banner of Bolshevism never died… And let us shout to our enemies, regardless of whether they call us terrorists, that we will not fight for the imperialist war, or for the miserable peace of injustices; we will fight together for the socialist revolution in permanent combat. Workers of the World, Unite!” [29]

It’s a radical call. Today we see social justice linked to a myriad of radical movements, including environmentalism. Nice sounding, morally-high terms arise from this Marxist-green marriage; “Eco-justice,” “green justice,” and “climate justice.” How does this look?

In 1990, the Manitoba government in partnership with UNESCO, convened the prestigious World Environment Energy and Economic Conference. The theme was provocative: “Sustainable Development Strategies and the New World Order.”

A report was released with the findings, titled Sustainable Development for a New World Agenda. Chapter 2, “Towards A Global Green Constitution,” fleshed out a section with the subtitle “Social Justice.” Population control, green energy regulations and accounting systems that suggested “an official global policy of one child per family,” and the “principle of global economic equality” would be central to the “green government,” the text reported. Human rights would also be at the forefront. Here’s how it would look; keep in mind that the following was deemed a positive state of affairs.

“Popular or not, green governments will oppose any culture if it proves to be prejudicial by reason of gender, age, colour, race, religion, belief, sexual orientation, mental or physical condition, marital status, family composition, source of income, political belief, nationality, language preference, or place of origin.”[30]

“Intolerable attitudes” wouldn’t be tolerated, all in the name of protecting the oppressed. Now, real oppression is evil. Nobody in his or her right mind wants oppression to occur or flourish. But social justice ala Collectivism is the most dangerous form of oppression imaginable. Moreover, the truly downtrodden – like the peasants of the old Soviet Union – rarely have their load lightened under social justice. Instead, with the destruction of the creative capital inherent in a free market, the plight of the poor continues. Life becomes more difficult.

No wonder F.A. Hayek called Marxist-based social justice a “pseudo-ethics.” One that “fails every test which a system of moral rules must satisfy in order to secure a peace and voluntary cooperation of free men.”[31]

Getting Our Terms Right

“My church has a social justice mandate… This is something I support.”

Sounds nice, but can you tell me what you mean? The usual response I get, thankfully, centers on feeding the poor, helping at a homeless shelter or safe house, assisting the elderly, working with troubled teens, or supporting an orphanage.

Sorry, that’s not social justice. The dominant social justice concept for the past 150 years has been centered on the sliding slope of Papal-advocated wealth redistribution, and a Marxist version of Collectivism. Feeding the poor and assisting the helpless, from a Christian perspective, isn’t social justice – its Biblical compassion, a generous act of love. Such acts of compassion engage individual lives, and are based on the Christian call of loving others more than self. This is the heart of compassion: An individual sees a need, and operating out of love, reaches to meet that need. Churches too are to function in a similar manner. A need is evident, and moved by compassion, the congregation works to solve the dilemma. Coercion never enters the picture, nor does a political agenda emerge, nor is a call for economic equality heard.

The Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan demonstrates true compassion (Luke 10). A Jewish man has been beaten, robbed, and left to die on the road. Various people pass him by, including the religiously pious. However, a Samaritan traveler sees the individual, and although the Samaritan is culturally alienated from the beaten man, he recognizes the desperation and individually takes action – dressing his wounds and providing a place of rest and refuge. And the Samaritan pays for it himself without demanding remuneration or compensation, either from the victim, his family or community, or from the government or ruling class.

However, if the Samaritan were a supporter of the dominant theme in social justice, he would have acted with a different motive for different ends. The Samaritan would have used the occasion to lobby for social transformation.

The robbers were really victims of an unjust economic system, and had acted in response to the oppression of the ruling class.
In order to bring justice to this oppressed class, and to steer them back to a caring community, equitable wealth redistribution should take place. The rich must be taxed to fund necessary social programs. A more equitable society is needed.
Who will pay the victim’s medical bills? The community or the rich.
This tragic event, the Samaritan would tell us, is a graphic reminder of the class struggle. We are all victims of an unjust economic order. Therefore, we must be the “voice of the voiceless” and advocate for radical social change.

In the social justice framework there is another agenda that lurks behind the tragic: A political/economic cause is piggybacked and leveraged – the cause of economic equality through wealth redistribution. This isn’t about truly helping the victim; it’s about using the victim.

Biblical justice, on the other hand, never seeks to dismantle class structures. Evil actions are condemned, but this isn’t specific to a particular social strata. Consider the words of Leviticus 19:15. “You shall do no injustice in judgment. You shall not be partial to the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty. But in righteousness you shall judge your neighbor.”

Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson helps put things into perspective.

“[Biblical] Justice not only means that nobody is to be picked on because he is poor or favored because he is rich, but that (contrary to the doctrine of ‘social justice’) nobody is to be picked on because he is rich or favored because he is poor.”[32]

Dr. Hendrickson further elaborates,

“The fundamental error of today’s ‘social justice’ practitioners is their hostility to economic inequality, per se. Social justice theory fails to distinguish between economic disparities that result from unjust deeds and those that are part of the natural order of things. All Christians oppose unjust deeds… [But] it isn’t necessarily unjust for some people to be richer than others.

God made us different from each other. We are unequal in aptitude, talent, skill, work ethic, priorities, etc. Inevitably, these differences result in some individuals producing and earning far more wealth than others. To the extent that those in the ‘social justice’ crowd obsess about eliminating economic inequality, they are at war with the nature of the Creator’s creation.

The Bible doesn’t condemn economic inequality. You can’t read Proverbs without seeing that some people are poor due to their own vices. There is nothing unjust about people reaping what they sow, whether wealth or poverty.

Jesus himself didn’t condemn economic inequality. Yes, he repeatedly warned about the snares of material wealth; he exploded the comfortable conventionality of the Pharisaical tendency to regard prosperity as a badge of honor and superiority; he commanded compassion toward the poor and suffering. But he also told his disciples, ‘ya have the poor always with you’ (Matthew 26:11), and in the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:24-30) he condemned the failure to productively use one’s God-given talents – whether many or few, exceptional or ordinary – by having a lord take money from the one who had the least and give it to him who had the most, thereby increasing economic inequality.

The Lord’s mission was to redeem us from sin, not to redistribute our property or impose an economic equality on us. In fact, Jesus explicitly declined to undermine property rights or preach economic equality when he told the man who wanted Jesus to tell his brother to share an inheritance with him, ‘Man, who made me a judge or divider over you’ (Luke 12:14).”[33]

I must confess that it’s easy to fall into the social justice way of thinking. My childhood rant over what I perceived to be injustices showed me, in retrospect, the power of an emotional ideal. Yet if by some twist I had followed up on my self-righteous outburst, and had become a social justice advocate in the true sense of the phrase, a sad irony would have occurred: In the name of “justice,” I would have promoted socially-sanctioned theft.

Dear Christians, let us act with compassion, be charitable, and pursue true justice; Let us be wise in our actions, clear in our language, and honest in our motives. FC

Carl Teichrib is editor of Forcing Change, a monthly online publication detailing the changes and challenges impacting the Western world.

To learn more about Forcing Change, including membership benefits, go to www.forcingchange.org

Forcing Change

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ENDNOTES:

1. Celia Hart, The Flag of Coyoacan, edited by Walter Lippmann in August 2004. Reprinted in Marxist.org.

2. William E. Murnion, “The Ideology of Social Justice in Economic Justice For All, “ Journal of Business Ethics, p.848, 1989.

3. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (Arlington House, 1974), p.17.

4. Prose of Relevance, Volume 1 & 2 (Methuen, 1971); Maryjane Dunstan and Patricia W. Garlan, Worlds in the Making: Probes for Students of the Future (Prentice-Hall, 1970).

5. Frederick C. Barghoorn, Soviet Foreign Propaganda (Princeton University Press, 1964), p.93-94.

6. Ibid. p.89.

7. Marvin L. Krier Mich, Catholic Social Teaching and Movement (Twenty-Third Publications, 1998), p.80-81. See also Daniel M. Bell, Liberation Theology: After the End of History (Routledge, 2001), p.104.

8. Daniel M. Bell, Liberation Theology After the End of History (Routledge, 2001), p.104.

9. Ibid. p.104.

10. Thomas Behr, “Luigi Taparelli and Social Justice: Rediscovering the Origins of a Hollowed Concept,” Social Justice in Context, Volume, 1.

11. Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, paragraph 40.

12. Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, see section 4, paragraphs 130 to 141.

13. Pope Paul VI, Talk at the United Nations, October 4, 1965; section 3.

14. William E. Murnion, “The Ideology of Social Justice in Economic Justice For All,” Journal of Business Ethics, see pages 847-857, 1989.

15. The Chartist Movement: The Fraternal Democrats to the Working Classes ofGreat BritainandIreland, January 10, 1848. As republished at Marxists.org.

16. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Penguin, 1967), p.104.

17. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (Arlington House, 1974), p.419.

18. Ibid., p.18.

19. Ibid., p.17.

20. As quoted in Leftism, p.174.

21. Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (Vintage, 2007), p.10.

22. Eugene V. Debs, “The American Movement,” published in Debs: His Life Writings and Speeches, and reprinted at Marxist.org.

23. E.V. Debs, “The Prospect for Peace,” American Socialist, 1916, reprinted at Marxist.org.

24. Mervyn Matthews, Poverty in the Soviet Union: The Life-styles of the Underprivileged in Recent Years (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p.7.

25. Maxim Gorky, “Days With Lenin,” Readings in Russian Civilization, Volume 3 (The University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp.517-518.

26. Matthews, Poverty in the Soviet Union, p.7-8.

27. Castro, “When the People Rule,” speech on January 21, 1959,Havana,Cuba.

28. Che Guevara, interview, April 18, 1959. Two Chinese journalists, K’ung Mai and Ping An conducted the interview “on the 108th evening after the victory of the revolution.”

29. Celia Hart, ibid.

30. Jim Bohlen, “Towards A Global Green Constitution,” Sustainable Development for a New World Agenda (Proceeding, October 17-20, 1990), p.11.

31. F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty: The Political order of a Free People (University of Chicago Press, 1979), p.135.

32. Mark W. Hendrickson, “The ‘Social Justice’ Fallacy? Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing,” April 7, 2010 (The Center for Vision & Values,Grove CityCollege).

33. Ibid.

Dr. Mike Spaulding

Random thoughts from a disciple of Jesus Christ

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