A Passion for Social Justice?
A Passion for Social Justice?
Saw a commercial for www.ancestry.com the other day. The tag line was about how a young lady found out what a great guy her grandfather had been – fighting for other peoples’ rights as a lawyer in Guatemala back in his day and which “fueled my passion for social justice.” But I had to wonder what she meant by social justice. Jonah Goldberg, in his book, The Tyranny of Clichés wrote:
“The social justice syllogism goes something like this: 1) We are liberals. 2) Liberals believe it is imperative that social justice be advanced wherever we find it. 3) Therefore, whatever we believe to be imperative is social justice.”[1]
Jonah criticized liberals and made no distinction between liberals and the Left – but today the political landscape has evolved. Liberalism and Leftism are no longer on equal footing, if they ever were. There was a time (and I hope it’s still true) when liberals cared about (or at least gave lip-service to) the truth. Leftism today doesn’t care about truth. And that’s the postmodern mindset. It’s Nietzsche’s “will to power”. Facts don’t matter and the truth drools because it’s all about the struggle for power. Personal power. Political power. Social power. Even economic power. “Whatever we believe to be imperative is social justice.” I can’t help but equate these things with Dinesh D’Souza’s concept of the conquest ethic.
D’Souza writes,
“Consider the taking of the land from the native Americans. That certainly constituted conquest by the Spanish, the Portuguese and the British, going all the way back to the Columbus landing in 1492. But most native American tribes that were occupying land had themselves gotten that land by taking it from some other tribe. In other words, the native Americans, no less than the Europeans, subscribed to the conquest ethic. Pretty much everyone did.”[2]
In other words, might makes right. But not everyone lives by that principle. D’Souza mentions that the American experiment is the first time in history where a government set aside that principle in favor of personal freedom and free-market economics. It’s also a theme in my book, Alfedora and the Drakebureau. Neither the deity nor the powerful beings in the other realm, the Phoberon, live by the “might makes right” principle. It’s why I believe the Good News (the Gospel) of Christ is still applicable today: there is no coercion in the Kingdom of Heaven. Free-moral agency is valued and might doesn’t always make right.
So how do we understand social justice in the 21st Century? Wiki defines it as follows:
Social justice is a concept of fair and just relations between the individual and society. This is measured by the explicit and tacit terms for the distribution of wealth, opportunities for personal activity, and social privileges. In Western as well as in older Asian cultures, the concept of social justice has often referred to the process of ensuring that individuals fulfill their societal roles and receive what was their due from society. In the current global grassroots movements for social justice, the emphasis has been on the breaking of barriers for social mobility, the creation of safety nets and economic justice.
Social justice assigns rights and duties in the institutions of society, which enables people to receive the basic benefits and burdens of cooperation. The relevant institutions often include taxation, social insurance, public health, public school, public services, labor law and regulation of markets, to ensure fair distribution of wealth, and equal opportunity.[3]
But who decides what are “fair and just relations between the individual and society”? Or who decides how wealth is distributed or who gets certain “social privileges”? Who decides what it means to ensure “that individuals fulfill their societal roles and receive what was their due from society? There can be only one answer: the political elites. The ruling class. Those who wield the power of the State with its monopoly on violence and threat of imprisonment. As Jonah wrote, social justice becomes “whatever we believe to be imperative.”
Think about economics. The thing about a free-market economy is that human desires are infinite. Supply and demand are finite. In a free-market economy, there are always opportunities to find a niche in fulfilling human desires. I use the term “free-market” instead of “capitalist” because capitalism is often corrupted by cronyism and then discredited in favor of socialist or communist economic systems. When Steve Jobs invented the smart phone, most folks didn’t even know they wanted one. But now it’s like, who doesn’t experience separation anxiety if they part company from their smart phone for more than a few hours?
But the social-justice warriors want to use the power of the State to tax those who have been most successful in meeting the desires of others and re-distribute wealth to those who perceive themselves to need their help. They set themselves up as the so-called “warriors” who champion the needs of the little guy and are therefore entitled to their fair-share of the redistribution pie. Like the death-eaters in the Harry Potter books, these totalitarians live off the perceptions of one or more dependency classes. They take it upon themselves to define who the winners and losers are instead of allowing the free market to decide. I would suggest that it isn’t a passion for social justice as much as it is a well-veiled passion for political power. Using Shakespeare-inspired terminology, one might call them mewling, milk-livered miscreants.
Back to Goldberg:
“The phrase social justice began as a technical term within Catholic theology – coined by Catholic moral theologian Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio in an 1840 treatise on natural law. Taparelli was concerned that with the growing popularity of various social contract theories of the nineteenth century (Rousseau’s in particular), people might lose sight of the “the social fact” of humanity. Simply put, we humans are social beings. We are born into families, and live in communities. An individual belongs to more institutions – more “societies” – than just the State. In other words, there isn’t just civil society, there are civil societies. And those societies maintain a level of autonomy apart from that of the State. We form groups and associations in order to obtain basic goods and complete tasks that would otherwise be very difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish.
These intermediary associations act as both bridge and buffer between the individual and the State. The associations of “lower society” maintain their own autonomy so long as they do not threaten to destroy the unity of the “higher society” – i.e., the State. The State, in turn, has a responsibility to not “destroy the inner unit” of those association, but rather respect their freedom and autonomy within the society. In other words, the government cannot trample the structure of social ecosystems that make life worthwhile.
Against the backdrop of the dramatic rise in the size, scope, power, and authority of the nation-state system, Taparelli worried that the traditional language of “legal justice” – i.e., plain old justice, according to most people – might reinforce the erroneous and dangerous idea that the only society that exists is the one that people call the State, constraining the autonomy and spiritual authority of, among other things, the Church. Recall that later Mussolini would define fascism as “everything within the state, nothing outside the state” – a view that earned the condemnation of the Church for “statolotry,” or the sinful worship of the state.
To remedy this misunderstanding, Taparelli introduced the phrase “social justice” as a way to emphasize that much of the important stuff lay outside the realm of the State. It had nothing to do with redistributing wealth (never mind fighting for gender equity). Taparelli thought of and employed social justice in a completely different way than almost everyone, Catholic and otherwise, does in contemporary society.”[4]
Taparelli’s views are like those expressed in my previous post “An Archetype for Society?”. Recall that in the creation account, the family unit is the only social construct upon which God placed His stamp of approval. The genius of the American experiment is that it attempted to protect these other social constructs which Taparelli talks about including the family and free-market economic transactions while limiting its own power. “Well, Doctor, what have we go, a republic or a monarchy?” asked Mrs. Power of Philadelphia. “A republic, if you can keep it,” replied Benjamin Franklin. But there are those who wish to turn social justice into a power grab for totalitarian ends and would like to tear down those limits on power.
Totalitarians love the State with its monopoly on violence and threat of imprisonment. As noted elsewhere, political power is addictive – as addictive as cocaine or heroin, and once seduced, an addict will do anything to feed their addiction. Including turning the phrase “social justice” on its head to get their next fix. It is amazing how successful they’ve been at convincing college students, the mainstream media, popular culture, and the vast majority of people in society today that their use of the term “social justice” is a good thing. The phrase “a passion for social justice” should be viewed as noble and something to be admired.
But “social justice” is an overloaded term which should be used with caution IMO.
Political elites want to be the ones in charge of determining who gets what piece of the economic, social, and political pies. Note that there’s no notion of political equality on the Left’s agenda. Political opponents must be silenced. Free speech is no longer universal because … social justice!
In Genesis 3 we read of the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve in the garden. Like God, they became aware of good and evil – but I think those words might be a bit understated. They became aware of their own vulnerability. But they also became aware of their ability to use fear to manipulate and control others. In that sense, if they are willing to wield fear over others, they get to decide what is good and what is evil in peoples’ lives. Whatever the ruling class believes to be imperative is social justice. In Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago the arrest and torture of innocent citizens became the imperative whenever Stalin and his cronies decided they needed more fear in peoples’ hearts and minds. But there is no fear and coercion in the Kingdom of Heaven. Earthly kingdoms will fail us because they are all run by corruptible human beings. But we look forward to the day of Christ’s return when the government will rest on His shoulders.
[1] Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (NY, Penguin Group, 2012), p.135.
[2] https://www.dineshdsouza.com/news/progressives-dangerous-view-america/, downloaded 7/28/2019
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice, downloaded 7/28/2019
[4] Goldberg, p. 137-138