Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  (Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, §18.)

  God is caritas, that is, the deepest and originating kind of love: God’s own love,3 the love (as Dante put it) that “moves the sun and all the stars.” This is the poet’s way of suggesting that all of creation, the whole known and unknown universe, was called into being at a point in time by a love so potent as to draw all things out of nothingness into existence, at their appointed times.

  The Creator might have done otherwise. But in fact he chose to call into being a contingent, changing, evolving universe, whose inner laws operate mostly by emerging probabilities. Aristotle saw that most natural beings act by laws only “for the most part.”4 As modern science has discerned, most laws of nature work not by necessity but by probabilities. As some possibilities are made real, they change the probabilities of later evolution.

  Schemes of probabilities—not fixed, rigid principles—seem a better model for the inner workings of our cosmos and most things in it. In that sense, the universe is imperfect, never flawless. It is this characteristic of the universe that favors the emergence at some point in time of fallible human agents, able to reflect and choose, armed with liberty to accept or to reject the path laid out by God for their own flourishing. As Thomas Jefferson once put it, “The god who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.”5 It is this feature of the universe that allows humans to live free to act or not, to accept or to reject the friendship into which their Creator invited them. He did not have to do that. But he did.

  The God who created us, according to the human story that both Judaism and Christianity have presented to us, plunged deep into our nature its most dynamic thrust: toward the free choice either to love God and our fellow humans or to reject such love. The first impulse (and law of our being) that the Creator placed into our hearts is to love God, who in his generosity gave us life, along with liberty and the responsibility for our own destiny. As Jacques Maritain wrote, “By its liberty, the human person transcends the stars and all the world of nature.”6 The second law God gave us is a call to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. These are very high targets for the human race. They are the ground of our unique dignity, and immortal beauty, among all other creatures.

  It is true that very early in the Jewish/Christian drama of Creation, the first brother, Cain, slew his brother Abel. In the evolving world, then, the love of brothers is radically threatened by enmity and strife, and all manner of human fratricide and mass destruction. The human story—human history—is not a simple morality play in which good always triumphs, and love, justice, and peace prevail. Often the human project has for long, long periods spiraled downward in moral decline, not upward in moral improvement. The commandment of love is plainly not an empirical description of the way things are.

  Christianity maintains that, nonetheless, each of us must love our enemies—we don’t have to like them or enjoy their presence, but we must at least recognize that the Creator called them into his friendship, just as he called us. We must strive to see what the Creator loved in them. But that can seem too much to swallow and, frankly, utterly beyond our emotional inclination.

  There are, of course, other narratives and story lines presented as models of how human history actually proceeds. There is the nihilist view: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.” There is also the narrative presented by those who call themselves secular humanists. Some of these present themselves as scientific humanists, others as humanists who love imagination and sympathy more deeply than science. (Compare the young A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic with Albert Camus’s The Rebel, or even more so, The Plague.)

  Each human must question, reflect, and choose which narrative of human living comports better with his or her own experience of life and evidence, and which better serves the future of the human race. To do so is to exercise the radical freedom built into our nature.

  It is in the nature of caritas to implant this liberty into our souls. In this implanting, many are led to see the potential images of caritas in themselves. That is the image of the civilization they try to build, the “City on the hill,” the City of God. It is a world that requires radical spiritual liberty if it is to be fulfilled. Caritas is uncoerced or not at all.

  Caritas is the propelling drive in which Catholic social doctrine begins, toward which it aims, and under whose searing judgment it falls short or, at times, does well. In the words of Saint Thomas Aquinas, “Charity is the form, mover, mother and root of all the virtues”; it is the inner fire of all the other habits infused in us by God.7 It is the obscure magnetism that guides us through the dark night of the soul.

  From this personal love that constitutes the inner being of God we can derive an acronym that ties all sixteen principles of Catholic social teaching together: CaRitaS—the five Cs, the five Rs, and the six Ss. It is fitting that the term caritas should tie together all sixteen principles, since the reality of caritas is their inner form.

  2. The Common Good

  Every day human interdependence grows more tightly drawn and spreads by degrees over the whole world. As a result the common good, that is, 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, today takes on an increasingly universal complexion and consequently involves rights and duties with respect to the whole human race. Every social group must take account of the needs and legitimate aspirations of other groups, and even of the general welfare of the entire human family.

  (Gaudium et Spes, §26.)

  The Good News brought by Christ is that the Creator of the universe is neither icily indifferent to us nor hostile. It is true that he chose to create a world of contingencies in which both heinous and holy acts could be chosen by men, and in which nature itself is full of hazards to all living creatures on earth. But the Creator asks us to trust him as a friend who walks with us. The Lord God Creator asks us to address him as “Our Father.”

  In the same spirit, he gives us to know that all the goods of this earth are intended by him for every single person on this earth. Intimate union with our Father is the highest common good of all who have ever lived or will yet live.

  But even on an earthly level and within history itself, our Father willed a share of the earth to every single human being. Not an equal share. To some he gave more talents than others. Some he placed in more favorable climes and locations richer with natural resources than others. (He gave all the nations of the Middle East huge deposits of oil, but not Israel. He promised Israel a land of milk and honey, but he said nothing about oil.) The people of Israel he blessed in other ways. He taught them the secrets of the human spirit, the human law, and the habits of creativity and inquiry. He implanted in them the seed of the idea of progress, and the intimation that God’s Kingdom to come was a place of truth, beauty, goodness, and compassion.

  Human advance is not always upward, but often in a long period of decline and decadence. Human history, for Jews and Christians, gives reason to trust in human betterment and a common learning of wisdom, and a steady openness to the wisdom hidden even in humble, sometimes low-born, people. One must approach wisdom humbly.

  All these teachings are more valuable than gold. Indeed, from them derive the methods that led to the discovery that black tar, oil, and shale have buried in them unsuspected riches, hidden for many ages. And even in the most humble, mean, and seemingly fruitless dry sand, there is silicon.

  The Lord God Creator intended all the goods of the earth for all his human family. He has called all into friendship with him. We are reflective, choosing, creative persons, responsible for our own destiny. In other words, he made us free.

  In this world, it is not so easy to pursue the common good. Except in the most abstract way, who knows what the common good actually is, in all its devilish detail? And how to make it work? And how to tame the sinfulness and self-destructiveness to which humans are demonstrably prone? Where is ther
e a woman or a man so wise as to discern what the common good is? It is a very weak and dubious answer to say “political leaders” or “public authorities” or, weaker still, “politicians.”

  Yet it is an imperative given us by the Lord God Creator that we must move the whole commons forward, including every human being without exception, no one left behind. The historical problem is to figure out methods by which smaller human communities can build toward this goal, one small platoon at a time, then in larger coagulations, until a worldwide community can be served, and each part serve the other. Many wandering trials and errors attend that painful journey.

  The common good is not for happy talk. Ways to get there are scarce and difficult to uncover, except by repeated efforts (or if I may use the distinctively American term, stick-to-itiveness). One must expect human duplicity, cruel manipulation, corruption, the naked will-to-power, and abundant self-destructiveness. We have already experienced all that. We have seen “the common good” used as a club against the personal dignity and personal liberty endowed in us by our Creator. In the Soviet Union, Soviet citizens who married foreign spouses were forbidden to join them, in the name of the common good; they owed their whole lives to socialism, and had a duty to serve it in return. The common good trumps individual choice. Such shortcuts to the common good end badly.

  3. The Cause of Wealth

  If incentives to ingenuity and skill in individual persons were to be abolished, the very fountains of wealth would necessarily dry up.

  (Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, §15.)

  The source of wealth lies principally in the human spirit—its wit, its disciplines, its creativity, its reliable habits. The cause of wealth is a certain kind of humanism, a humanism that includes special virtues and trained inclinations, put into practice through institutions supportive of personal responsibility.

  Many people ask the question: What are the causes of poverty? But that is a pointless question, a useless question, as one can instantly see by asking a follow-up question: What good would it do to learn the causes of poverty? Do we want to make more of it?

  No, the fruitful question is this: What are the causes of wealth? Learning the answer to that question would set us upon a creative path toward generating more wealth in a systematic way, by designing the most practical incentives that inspire all humans to create new wealth and share its fruits.

  For much of human history, agriculture was the main source of wealth, and wealth creation was dependent on good weather. Famines occurred in regular waves during long periods of drought (or flooding), under perduring freezes or relentlessly scorching summer days. Nature has not been overly friendly toward human beings. Through diseases and natural calamities (some of long duration) nature almost succeeded in making man extinct, as it did a very high proportion of all other formerly living species. Nature is not always a kindly presence.

  But once humans learned that wealth could be created by human invention and enterprise, the prospect of a world of universal affluence came into view—and came to be desired. In earlier times, whole peoples were subject to suffering bitter want. Most were reduced to passivity and weary patience. Once the causes of wealth were mastered, the human race could begin removing poverty—and with accelerating speed it began doing so.

  Once humans discerned a way to break the chains of poverty, a new moral obligation arose. Poverty shifted from being an irremediable condition to being steadily reducible. In more and more nations, majorities exited out of penury and poverty to better health, greater opportunity, and steadily higher education. Nations came to be labeled as “less developed,” “developing,” and “developed.” In many, this progress was achieved within twenty years. China and India, for example, witnessed the fastest mass movement ever, raising more than 500 million of their citizens out of poverty between 1980 and 2000. The rise of Europe from the ruins of 1945 to measurable affluence in 1965 was also rapid. And so was the vault between 1945 and 1970 of the four “Asian Tigers”: Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan.

  In a word, the cause of wealth has been uncovered during the past 200 years. That cause lies primarily in the creative habits of the human mind, in invention, know-how, and disciplined work with others. That discovery has generated a new moral imperative: All the world’s poor must be helped out of poverty. They must be helped in the most vital way: to make the discovery of the cause of wealth (their own human capital) in their own lives, so as to experience a freedom from penury never known before.

  4. Creativity

  The modern business economy has positive aspects. Its basis is human freedom exercised in the economic field, just as it is exercised in many other fields. Economic activity is indeed but one sector in a great variety of human activities, and like every other sector, it includes the right to freedom, as well as the duty of making responsible use of freedom. But it is important to note that there are specific differences between the trends of modern society and those of the past, even the recent past. Whereas at one time the decisive factor of production was the land, and later capital—understood as a total complex of the instruments of production—today the decisive factor is increasingly man himself, that is, his knowledge, especially his scientific knowledge, his capacity for interrelated and compact organization, as well as his ability to perceive the needs of others and to satisfy them.

  (John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, §32.)

  The Jewish/Christian narrative of the human project casts humans as images of God the Creator. Humans create not only beauty in the arts and goodness (with its own beauty) in their moral lives, but also new, never-before-seen wealth in their working world.

  Instead of following Marx’s lead in seeing value solely in human labor, this narrative also proclaims the values to be found in the human mind, in its inventiveness and creativity. It is not always the man who labors with more arduous physical efforts who adds most value even to his own labor, but often the one whose labor is infused with the most originality, creativity, efficiency, and organizational skill. There are certain qualities in labor that spring from the subjectivity of the human person, that is, the laborer himself. He puts part of his own self into his work, his own originality, his own hopes, his own touch.

  Another way of putting this is that the laborer who is creative adds a certain personal and human infusion from his own spirit into the work of his hands. To allow the fruit of his labor to rust outside in a yard—the iron girders fresh from his assigned furnace—is to injure something in him, his heart, his soul. He does not labor simply to produce useless waste, which nobody wants. He wants to contribute some good to the human community. A laborer is not simply an object, but also a subject, a being with imagination and creativity and zest of spirit.

  This line of reflection, reportedly passed on to the pope by Mirosław Dzielski, the great Krakow journalist and thinker known as the “Polish Hayek,” led Wojtyła to muse on the subjectivity of both labor and capital. Whereas in Laborem Exercens (1981) the pope spoke of capital as if it consisted just of material things, ten years later in Centesimus Annus he had come to grasp the human factor in capital. He saw the wealth enlocked in human capital, in the subjectivity of the laborer himself. The term “capital” is not well identified solely with things (iron, automobiles, even gold bars and bank accounts) but also points to treasures in the human mind and spirit (such as outstanding work habits, spiritedness, teamwork, education, expanded and refined tastes, and capacities for design).

  The scientists who isolated quinine, and the one who first produced penicillin, may have reduced more human pain and probabilities of imminent death than all the previous humanitarian efforts in history. As Abraham Lincoln pointed out in Wisconsin in 1858, the person who discovers a new way to produce five grains of wheat instead of the previous expectation of one or two has more than doubled the output of the same amount of physical labor. Such an inventor contributes to doubling the agricultural wealth of peoples everywhere who use that method. John Locke made a simi
lar observation about the new wealth produced by painstaking cultivation of a field of berries, compared with the low yields of uncultivated fields.8

  There is in each human laborer the potential of generating creative human capital, that is, learned skills of mind, heart, and hand. And it is a great thing for each nation to invest a great deal in building up this human capital within its citizens. Thus, John Paul II wrote:

  Indeed, besides the earth, man’s principal resource is man himself. His intelligence enables him to discover the earth’s productive potential and the many different ways in which human needs can be satisfied. It is his disciplined work in close collaboration with others that makes possible the creation of ever more extensive working communities which can be relied upon to transform man’s natural and human environments. Important virtues are involved in this process, such as diligence, industriousness, prudence in undertaking reasonable risks, reliability and fidelity in interpersonal relationships, as well as courage in carrying out decisions which are difficult and painful but necessary, both for the overall working of a business and in meeting possible set-backs.9

  5. Community of Work

  It is becoming clearer how a person’s work is naturally interrelated with the work of others. More than ever, work is work with others and work for others: it is a matter of doing something for someone else. Work becomes ever more fruitful and productive to the extent that people become more knowledgeable of the productive potentialities of the earth and more profoundly cognisant of the needs of those for whom their work is done.

  (John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, §31.)

  If you lift from your desktop a bright yellow schoolboy pencil, with a bit of alloyed metal holding tight to a pink eraser, you may gain an insight into how the “universal workbench” of a global economy works. Do you know where the lightweight wood of that pencil comes from—from what country on earth? And the graphite that provides the mark of your writing on paper? And the bronze-colored alloy that holds the eraser? And the gum of the eraser itself? There are not many of us who know whence all those things derive, and what is the most efficient way to procure and to process them. And, by the way, someone needs to know how to produce and process the lacquer that makes the pencil shiny and prevents tiny paint chips from flecking off when schoolchildren put their pencils in their mouths.