In America, the new immigrants formed athletic clubs for the young; for men, social clubs to play checkers, cards, or horseshoes; for women, associations to tend to the needs of neighbors. In Catholic neighborhoods, they began Saturday night bingo games (how my mother enjoyed them!) to raise funds to pay off the church mortgage or to build a school. Immigrants formed insurance societies and other associations of mutual help to care for one another in case of injury or premature death.
But this new virtue is called “social” for a second reason. Not only is its end social, but so also are its constitutive practices. The practice of the virtue of social justice consists in learning three new skills: the art of forming associations, willingness to take leadership of small groups, and the habit and instinct of cooperation with others. All three are needed in order to accomplish ends that no one individual can achieve on his or her own. At one pole this new virtue is a social protection against atomistic individualism, while at the other pole it protects considerable civic space from the direct custodianship of the state.
In the absence of the art of association, the practice of modern citizenship is almost impossible. Without it, there is only the state, the Leviathan. Without it, civil society has no energy, the public square is empty, and citizens huddle in solitary privacy. Tocqueville observed this phenomenon in the prerevolutionary France of the ancien régime in the eighteenth century. Between the naked and solitary individual and l’état there were no mediating institutions. French citizens lacked the social protections and powers that networks of associations would have afforded them. At the time of the French Revolution, he opined, there were not ten men in France capable of starting an association.
Again, it should be noted that this new definition of social justice is practiced by both those on the left and those on the right. There is more than one way to imagine the future good of society. Humans of all persuasions do well to master the new social virtue that assists them in defining, and in working with others toward, their own vision of that good. Competition between left and right, and among factions of each, can be healthy.
Here we are seeking a completely open and nonideological definition of social justice. But not all who claim to be acting for social justice actually further the work of justice. Their motives may be suspect, and so may their grasp of important facts, their moral analysis, or their methods. We would not count “skinheads” or neo-Nazis as those doing the work of social justice. So it is with all claims to be practicing a virtue: Those claims must be examined in greater detail. In order to be just, an act must be correct in every aspect—manner, timing, motive, accuracy of perception, and all the other qualities of good actions. Otherwise, it is defective. Thus, to show someone that what he or she claims to be a virtue actually falls short of some of the demands of true virtue is to affirm the ideal of social justice as a standard of moral judgment.
Conclusion: Social Justice Is a Habit of the Heart
And so we arrive at this conclusion: Social justice is not what most people think it is, a building up of state bureaucracies which are impersonal, inefficient, and expensive far beyond their own original forecasts. True enough, government programs often do real good. But the programs very quickly reach a point of diminishing returns, and begin to suffer multitudes of new and unforeseen problems. If you add up all the money Congress has designated for the relief of the poor since 1965, the total money spent is far more than would be required simply to have given each poor family some $30,000 in cash per year.
But clearly, not every poor family in the United States is receiving that $30,000 per year. For that would put every poor family of four in America comfortably above the 2010 Federal Poverty Level of $22,350 per year, and poverty would have been eradicated, as a statistical matter, years ago.
Government bureaucracies consume most of the money, and relatively little of it passes through to the hands of the poor; in effect, the poor get the droppings.
By contrast, social justice is a virtue whose specific character is social in two ways: the skill in forming associations, and the aim of benefiting the human community, whether local, national, or international. Thus the virtue of forming associations, while turning to government as little as possible, is an immensely powerful way to build a better world. Without the practice of this truly effective social virtue, merely “feeling compassion” is ineffectual.
Dramatically important too: The practice of the virtue of social justice combats the widespread surrender to ever-larger governments. Big governments are too inefficient for their own humane intentions. They are too blind, too out-of-touch with the millions of individual wills at play in society, too domineering, too preachy. They waste too much money, stifle individual initiative, and starve out intermediate associations, hard work, and civic activities.
Of course, a strong government is necessary for a small number of important tasks, such as national defense, protecting the value of the national currency, and providing morally sound, not corrupted, public services such as waterways, airports, harbors, public roads and bridges, maintaining the legal framework required for a free economy, and other projects. Still, it is important to keep a tight grip on the growth of government. For when government grows too large, its people lose their freedoms. Checks and balances and vigilant oversight shrink in power, while coercive regulation knows fewer and fewer bounds. Gradually, too, the creative impulse atrophies.
To protect its own turf, big government tends to place obstacles in the way of individual initiatives; it wants no rivals in the field. By overregulation, insurance requirements, expensive licensing, and many other snares, it cripples free associations. Besides, human beings are always tempted to let others bear their expenses and do the heavy lifting, while exempting themselves from personal responsibility. Thus, in 2013 the U.S. Congress could not resist exempting itself from the rules of Obamacare that it legislated for ordinary people. Down the ages, humans have easily relaxed into soft living, free bread and circuses, and the “soft tyranny” of allowing higher powers to pay their way for them. The government is like the Greyhound bus driver: Leave the driving to us!
Besides, experience shows more and more that in attempting to produce happy lives for the public—good housing, good health, safe neighborhoods, good pay, good jobs, long-term financial security, good dental care, and so on—government lacks the concrete and detailed intelligence to manage all possible contingencies, personal failings, and fluctuating economic conditions. Big government is too gigantesque to be an adequate nanny. It cannot even pay its own debts. It can seldom be honest with those who must pay for its largesse. In due course, it runs out of money before it fulfills all its ever-expanding list of promises. Many who claim to be pursuing “social justice” (spending more government money) are not paying for their vaunted generosity out of their own money; they are spending the money of generations yet to come. Some generosity! Some social justice!
Worse still, big government and big business are tremendously encouraged to collude in going outside the law in order to profit both. It is a major disgrace to business that there exists such a thing as “crony capitalism,” or “crapitalism.” This thing may look like capitalism on the surface, and it certainly includes real (and even some famous) businesses. But it is really corruption and abuse of the system. Government officials—presidents, governors, and legislators—want at least some powerful allies in the business world to support their major initiatives, and they also want political contributions for their campaigns. Some companies want competitive advantages for themselves; some, exceptions in the law; some, special protections or shields against costs (taxes owed or otherwise). So some political leaders and some business leaders buy each other off; they trade advantages; they scratch each other’s backs. Such conduct is against the rules and violates the fundamental commitments of each—principles of both government and business. It violates the rules of the separation of systems, and also the checks and balances of the American founding. It even viol
ates the rules of the free market (which Adam Smith noted that business people are often prone to do, when it is to their advantage, and when they are not checked by competition). To call this “crony capitalism” is not damning enough.
To correct such abuses, in which government is also involved, the fundamental democratic remedy has always been for citizens to organize themselves, protest, and campaign for a change in the laws. In this way, the virtue of social justice is prior to actual change in the law. Put otherwise, behind every change in the laws lies the practice of social justice among many individuals. Rightly understood, social justice is a social virtue learned in painstaking practice by individuals—a social virtue both in its method and in its purposes. It is a noble habit truly worthy of the name “virtue.” It is the living energy of the practice of democracy in America. It stands among the “habits of the heart” that Tocqueville so highly praised. It is, in fact, the habit that Tocqueville singles out as the “first law of democracy”: the habit of forming associations in order to attend to the public needs of a democratic people.7 It is a distinctly new and modern habit, made possible—and made frequent in daily practice—only by the new institutions of liberty in politics and economics.
This new political economy aims at creating wealth in every part of the population. Adam Smith defined its goal as “universal opulence.”8 It also creates political space for the widespread practice of virtues of association, invention, cooperative work, and personal creativity. Mobs drift together as lonely and unconnected individuals, Tocqueville pointed out. Their habits are not reasoned, ordered, or cooperative. Their passions easily and often turn destructive. It is through habits of association, Tocqueville shrewdly noted, that a “mob” is shaped into “a people.” The habits and practices of social justice transform unattached individuals into community-minded individuals. Social justice so understood fuels the human dynamism of a creative economy, a thriving civil society, and the inner form of a democratic republic.
Since a numerical majority left to itself is easily stirred into a mob, one of the gravest dangers to a peaceful democratic republic is the tyranny of a majority. To constrain such tyranny by the rule of law, and to check and balance the factions latent in a majority, the form of government the American founders sought is better described as a “republic” than as a (purely majoritarian) “democracy.”9 A republic embodies checks against the majoritarian rule of an irrational mob. The principle of association is thus essential to the new political economy, both to its political part and to its economic part. The American founders had the conceit to think of their new system as a model never seen before on earth, a new form of political economy bound to be imitated around the world, properly thought of as the “new order of the ages,” the Novus Ordo Seclorum. This was a huge conceit on the part of the founders of a fragile nation of fewer than 4 million citizens. For the next fourteen years, the Americans were barely able to hold their new nation together, and barely able to pay its debts. What chutzpah they showed in calling theirs a “model [without precedent] on the face of the globe.”10
It took more than a hundred years before the Holy See began to take notice of the new lessons being taught to Europe by the American experiment. Leo XIII was delighted to study an ornamented copy of the U.S. Constitution presented him by Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, and Pius XII, in the face of the dire circumstances of Europe at Christmas of 1944, commended the practice of democracy as the best check on tyranny and best protector of human rights.11 In Centesimus Annus and elsewhere, John Paul II made abundant use of concepts such as the consent of the governed, checks and balances, the separation of powers, free associations, the cause of the wealth of nations as knowledge or know-how, and other forms of human capital. More than once—in Denver, in Baltimore, and at his reception of a U.S. ambassador to the Holy See—John Paul II stated the moral purposes and achievements of the American republic in eloquent terms.12 Benedict XVI urged Europeans to study the model of religious liberty achieved by the United States, in contrast to the increasing secularization of European society.13
IT IS IN THE CONTEXT of the twenty-first century, both for the Catholic Church universal and for the United States, that Paul Adams and I begin our inquiry. We begin with a peek at how the secular elites who run our media, our universities, and our courts use the term “social justice” nowadays. Then we lay out the case put by the severest critic of the term “social justice,” Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek. After that, in chapter four, we add an ironic observation: At first, Hayek had derided “social justice” wrongly understood, but then he turned around and put into practice what might be called “social justice rightly understood.” A delicious irony in intellectual history!
From there, we turn to the sixteen principles articulated by Catholic social thought in the teachings of the preceding 125 years of social-justice popes.
[CHAPTER 2]
Six Secular Uses of “Social Justice”
SO NOW LET US EXAMINE THE TERM “SOCIAL JUSTICE” AS IT IS currently used in the contemporary secular academy and media. I count at least six different connotations or meanings, while recognizing that each spills over into the others in greater or lesser degree.
It is striking how little reference is made to the Catholic role in introducing “social justice” into contemporary economic debates. It is also striking that little attention is paid to the question of why a secular-atheistic world, born of chance and moral insignificance, should care about the poor and the vulnerable (at least some of the most vulnerable) in the first place. And why it should imagine that a moral scheme such as “equality” has some structural and ethical bearing on human affairs. The notion that humans are in some respects “equal in the eyes of God” cannot be a tenable secular argument. History surely does not afford many (if any) examples of equality among peoples on earth. So whence comes that ideal?
Among secular thinkers, Bertrand Russell, Richard Rorty, and Jürgen Habermas have had the intellectual honesty to note that the idea of equality (as well as the idea of compassion for the poor) entered the world through the teachings of Jesus Christ and his Jewish predecessors, not through Aristotle, Plato, or any earlier moral teacher. These secular thinkers, and others like them, took their moral leads where they found them, and if in Socrates or Goethe, why not in any other master poet or teacher? It is striking to note that contemporary secular thinkers simply employ the criteria for social justice, without grounding them philosophically or theologically. Herewith, in any case, the meanings attached to “social justice” among such thinkers.
Distribution. Most people’s sense of social justice is generic, amounting to little more than what we find in an internet search of the term “social justice”: “The fair distribution of advantages and disadvantages in society.” Now, notice that this standard definition introduces a new key term, not “virtue,” but “distribution.” This newly added term also suggests that some extra-human force, some very visible hand, that is, some powerful agency—the state—should do the distribution. And do it fairly. But I, for one, do not trust politicians to neglect their own self-interest (“Where will I pick up the most votes?”) in their considerations of distribution.
Equality. Furthermore, the expression “advantages and disadvantages” supposes a norm of “equality” by which to measure. Consider this professorial definition:
Although it is difficult to agree on the precise meaning of ‘social justice’ I take it that to most of us it implies, among other things, equality of the burdens, the advantages, and the opportunities of citizenship. Indeed, I take [it] 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 sense of the term expresses a whole ideology: “Equality” is good and ought to be enforced. But also note what has happened here to the word “equality.” In English, equality can be taken to suggest fairness, equity, or what is equitable. But what is equitable often requi
res that each receive not exactly the same portions but rather what is proportionate to each, given different efforts and different needs. In many recent writings on social justice, however, equality is taken to mean something more like equality-as-uniformity. That conception of equality calls for some great power to sweep in and enforce on a society its strict measure of equality, and to restrict freedom accordingly. To maintain strict equality, such a great power must measure out by its own judgment the freedom and initiative allowed all individuals, families, associations, and communities.
God did not make individuals equal in talents or in the will to succeed. Nor did he force all families into the same mold of family traditions, disciplines, and inner character. Given the way any free world works, it is highly unlikely that all individuals and families would attain the same levels in human skills, ambition, and daily habits. Egalitarians scarcely attend to this reality, which is immediately observable in daily life (among students, for example, and even among one’s own siblings and children). The radical and undeniable human inequality, as we shall see, was very important to Pope Leo XIII. Not grasping its reality was a major pitfall for what he called “liberalism.”
Common Good. Social justice is typically associated with some notion of the “common good,” a wonderful term that goes back to Aristotle. The Catholic tradition is very fond of this term, but does not mean by it exactly what the American founders meant by the “public good” or the “public interest.” The precise meaning given to the “common good” by the Second Vatican Council was this: “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.”2 As one can see, this definition avoids speaking of “equality of condition” or “collective equality,” in favor of emphasizing the opportunity for each unique individual to develop his or her talents to their full potential. In any case, the common good is an important master concept among Catholic social principles, one that tries to do justice to both the communitarian nature of humans and their unique personal endowments. We shall see in chapters five and seven that the common good and social justice are intimately related concepts of Catholic social teaching.
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