Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  Here it must be pointed out first that, in practice, the use of the term “common good” often hinges on a prior question: “In this particular situation, who decides what the common good is?” In ancient societies, often the wisest and strongest person was the ruler, and it was he who made the important decisions, such as where to camp at night or near which source of water to build the village. The person with the greatest strategic and tactical sense of what was safe, and the greatest ecological sense for which site would make for better community life, would make these decisions.

  But in more recent times, that responsibility gradually shifted (under the influence of democracy) to all citizens. Over time, though, as government slipped from the ideal of “limited government,” democracy got tied down like Gulliver in the wire cords of the bureaucratic state. Decisions have been made more and more by extensive staffs and committees, and sometimes by committees of committees. Very seldom today is one person (like the leader of old) held accountable for these decisions. And the beautiful notion of the common good is tied down like Gulliver, too.

  For example, a fundamental misuse of the term “common good” came clear to me for the first time when, at the Helsinki Commission in Bern in 1985, I was prodding the Soviet delegation to recognize the right of spouses from different nations to share residence in whichever spouse’s nation they chose. The Soviets stoutly resisted. The Soviet Union, they insisted, had invested much effort and great sums of money in giving an education to each Soviet citizen. The common good, they said, demands that these citizens now make commensurate pay-back. Therefore, the Soviet partner could not emigrate. Individual aspirations must bow to the common good of all. This is the opposite of the Vatican II definition.

  The common good was the excuse on which communist totalitarianism was built. Also, in the United States these days, the “common good” is often used as a battle cry for more state spending. “Do not cut spending for the poor! Current disparities of income are unjust. More state money for the poor!” A clear translation of this slogan is: “Let Uncle Sam pay for it! And with other people’s money, not mine.” In this rhetorical field, the “common good” is often yoked to “social justice,” essentially to furnish an excuse for more government power, spending, and domination—at the expense of anyone but the activists shouting the slogans.

  It is the natural tendency of political power to expand and grow, and of progressives in power to become ever more skillful at making decisions for formerly free citizens. They do this under the delusion that those citizens do not know what is good for them, but that government officials, who are not only more knowledgeable but more moral, do know, and should intervene for the good of the people. In God in the Dock (1948), C. S. Lewis described this delusion quite deliciously:

  Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven, yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be cured against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.3

  Many steps announced as necessary for the common good are on a downward slope to serfdom.

  Old timers in America have often warned new immigrants from their own ethnic background: “Stay away from the welfare honey trap.” The honey trap gives you the sweet taste of cost-free benefits. But you must give up your own adult responsibility, your sound habits from the old country, the daily exercise of your own abilities. You will lose your self-respect. You will lose the happiness that flows from personal achievement. You will live more like a domestic animal than like a man.

  As a result, there are many occasions today when one must argue sternly for individual rights and against the so-called common good. This is especially true when the eyes of many are blinded by the mere sound of the words. When people hear the “common good,” many think of something noble and shiny and good, something motherly. But they do not think carefully enough about who is determining what the common good is, whether they are speaking truly, empirically, and whether they have a good track record of success. We should ask ourselves: Who decides what the common good is, and who enforces this common good? And what does it do to those who receive it, to their skills and their sense of accomplishment and personal happiness?

  The Progressive Agenda. In America, many of our elites describe themselves as progressives. But what do they mean? Watch what they do, what they advocate for, and you will most often see that these are activists on behalf of larger government and more spending for their favorite causes: the poor, Planned Parenthood, solar and wind power, restrictions on the use of fossil fuels, and two of their most passionately held causes, abortion and gay marriage. Such progressives are not necessarily anticapitalist. Many of those funding progressive causes are, in fact, very wealthy capitalists themselves, or their heirs and foundations. George Soros, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates are household names. But many other lesser known people with very deep pockets have much social and political influence, people like software entrepreneur Tim Gill, retired hedge-fund executive Tom Steyer, and green-technology investor David Gelbaum.4

  Many progressives talk and act as though the trouble with the American people is that they do not know what is good for them. They have to be told, herded, regulated, fined, and forced into the right course of action. Nanny, nanny, everywhere the nanny state. Progressives now play the role that Puritans used to play in saying no. No smoking, no ozone, no gun-ownership, no this, that, and the other thing. Some of these may be admirable ideas; it is the relentless nagging in the progressive character that is new and troubling.

  More than progressives recognize in themselves, they suffer from an inner passion for bossing other people around. They desire to do this for the good of the ones bossed. One of the more humble, but often annoying, of these impositions was the automatic safety belt that used to be in many cars, which closed around you whether you wanted it to or not. One of the more outrageous is the automatic cancellation of the health-insurance policy you have long experience with, chose for yourself, and like, in order to be fitted into a government plan you don’t like or want.

  Almost always, the rationale offered for coercing you into something you don’t want is that it’s for your own good. It is surprising how often the terms “social justice” and “common good” are pounded into our heads to make us do something we wouldn’t otherwise choose to do. And that is probably why progressives turn to big government. Otherwise, they could not coerce us into seeing things their way.

  New “Civil Rights”: Gender, Sex, Reproduction. When I first went to the United Nations Human Rights Commission meetings in Geneva in 1981, two different delegates from opposite sides of the world (Norway and India) told me that the most hopeful signs they had seen in their lifetimes was the much delayed shift in the United States in favor of institutional support for the rights of black Americans. To change habits of mind so inveterate and so entrenched gives hope to the rest of humanity, they said. The calling of the Second Vatican Council by the old Pope John XXIII and the election of the handsome young President John F. Kennedy and his “New Frontiersmen” gave hope that the old thick ice was breaking up.

  It is no wonder that nearly every new impulse and new social movement in the United States (and elsewhere) since that time has styled itself in the image of that first great civil-rights movement of American blacks and their allies.

  In recent decades, for instance, a brand new element of the progressive agenda has taken shape under the rubric of social justice: �
�reproductive rights.” As one writer 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.5

  This is how the thinking goes: The privileged of this world have a chance to control the number of children they have, but the poor don’t have this chance, and that’s not fair. So, in the name of the poor, progressives introduced a concept of reproductive rights, by which they primarily mean the right to abortion. It’s not so hard to get birth control anywhere in the world; that transformation has by and large already happened. What the issue really comes down to is abortion: How can you be for social justice and against reproductive rights?

  The situation is the same in the case of gay rights, another element of the progressive agenda promoted as a matter of social justice. Consider the following statement from an administrator of the Anglican Church in New Zealand: “How can the 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?”6

  Compassion. All these newly invented demands increasingly fly under the flag of “social justice.” And there is one more new word (or honorable old word, used in a new way) by which to understand many today who talk about social justice. There used to be a Tammany Hall saying: “Th’ fella’ what said that patriotism is th’ last refuge of scoundrels, underestimated th’ possibilities of compassion.” In addition to equality and the common good, another term that came to be used in association with social justice is “compassion.”

  That Tammany Hall saying wittily reminds us of the contemporary sins committed in the name of compassion. We must never again allow that beautiful term “compassion” to become a blinding light, in whose name totalitarians seize power for “the people,” and then practice the utmost cruelty. Abortion, for instance, the daily use of scissors to slice spinal cords and other medical tools to crush little skulls—this is compassion for women? It is a ruse to cover this with the name “choice.” The question is: What is the choice, and how much do you want to look at it with your own eyes, in order to take full responsibility for it?

  Compassion comes in true forms and in false forms. The American War on Poverty unintentionally ushered in a period of rapidly rising numbers of births out of wedlock and the relative decline in the number of married couples among the poor. This dramatic change in family composition was accompanied by a sharp increase in poverty among never-married women with children. By 1986, the fastest growing segment of the poor was found in this cohort of never-married women with children.7

  To be fair, the War on Poverty did work very well for the elderly in the United States, whose condition in 1985 was far better than it had been in 1965. It was still better in 2005.

  But here too we are up against the law of unintended consequences. The original premise of Social Security arrangements was that there would be seven workers for every receiver of benefits. Today, however, we are no longer having the numbers of children required to support such a program. We’re getting to the point where by 2030 there will be only 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 over social-democratic Europe.

  [CHAPTER 3]

  A Mirage?

  FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE, FRIEDRICH HAYEK SEEMED CONTENT to be known as an economist, and in 1974 the Nobel Prize was awarded him for his originality in economics. At crucial points, however, the principles in whose light Hayek proceeded included extra-economic principles; for instance, principles of law and representation on the one side, and on the other, principles of morality, truth, and justice. Thus, although he is most widely known for his originality in rediscovering and creatively advancing the theory of the free economy, some of his most important work regards the constitution of liberty and matters of law and legislation.1 Beyond that, having fought manfully in the war of ideas across most of the breadth of the human experience, in history, philosophy, religion, and social thought, Hayek was also a fierce warrior in the realm of cultural liberty.

  Although born in a deeply Catholic culture and ever sympathetic to the religious impulse in human nature, Hayek reluctantly called himself an atheist. He wished he had an “ear” for God, he said, as most people do for music; but he didn’t. He felt it as a lack in himself.

  In the heavily ideological post–World War II era, Hayek was keenly aware of the urgent need all around the world to bring together the two parties of liberty, secular and religious. No one party, he thought, could plausibly win the intellectual battle for liberty by itself. Liberty suffered not by too many supporters, but by too few. Hayek correctly foresaw the crucial role religion would play in the defeat of Communism many years later.

  Hayek is famous for his sustained and animated criticism of most of the usages of “social justice” to be found in public speech during the middle of the twentieth century. He ripped to tatters the concept as it is usually deployed.2 Indeed, he stressed its fundamental contradiction: Most authors claim to use the term to designate a virtue (a moral virtue, by their account). But, then, most of the descriptions they attach to it appertain to impersonal states of affairs: “High unemployment,” they say, for instance, or “inequality of incomes” or “lack of a living wage,” is a “social injustice.” They expect the economic system to attain every utopian goal, as though all such goals are easily within reach and mutually compatible. They imagine that all social systems are under the command of identifiable persons, or should be, and they intend to find those persons and hold them responsible for outcomes of which they do not approve. Their main concern is to indict an entire system and its central institutions.3 For decades many of them seemed to hold that socialism was a superior economic system, toward which history was moving. Their diagnosis, methods, and remedies belong to diverse intellectual traditions: socialist, social democratic, or Catholic.4 They seem not to analyze the failures of the systems they prefer.

  Hayek’s critique laid out a multitude of objections to then-prevailing modes of thought. But his main thrust went to the heart of the matter: Social justice is either a virtue or it is not. Most of those who use the term do not ascribe it to individual virtue but to states of affairs, as when they assert that this or that state of affairs—unemployment, low wages, deplorable working conditions—is “socially unjust.” Social-justice advocates seldom attempt to change minds and hearts one by one. Instead, they use political muscle to change the laws and to coerce mass compliance. In this respect, they are using the term “social justice” as a regulative principle of order, not a virtue, and by their own lights this is an illegitimate use. They are not appealing to “virtue” but to coercion. Thus “social justice” is a term used to incite political action for the sake of gaining political power. In Hayek’s words:

  What I hope to have made clear is that the phrase “social justice” is not, as most people probably feel, an innocent expression of good will towards the less fortunate, but it has become a dishonest insinuation that one ought to agree to a demand of some special interest which can give no real reason for it. If political discussion is to become honest it is necessary that people should recognize that the term is intellectually disreputable, the mark of demagogy or cheap journalism which responsible thinkers ought to be ashamed to use because, once the vacuity is recognized, its use is dishonest.5

  Social justice! How many sufferings have bee
n heaped on the world’s poor under that banner! How malevolently it rolled off the presses of Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler. It is no wonder Hayek loathed it so.

  Hayek alludes to a second defect of twentieth-century theories of social justice. Whole books and treatises have been written about social justice without ever offering a definition thereof.6 The term is allowed to float in the air as if everyone will recognize an instance when he sees it. This vagueness seems both studied and indispensable. For the minute one begins to define social justice—as a virtue, for instance, related to the classical Aristotelian virtue of justice—one runs into embarrassing intellectual difficulties. For most of those who use the term do not intend to raise the worldwide quotient of virtue. They employ “social justice” as a term of art, whose operational meaning is “we need a law against that.” They employ it, that is, as an instrument of ideological intimidation, for the purpose of gaining the power of legal coercion.