Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  No one person needs to know all the steps in finding, producing, and assembling these elements of the pencil. But some one person or small group does need to know where to find teams of people who know how to produce each element most efficiently and at high quality standards, and maybe another team to assemble them all together, and yet another team to market and to transport them to wholesalers and retailers. A simple yellow pencil may require a global workbench. The workers in Sri Lanka, Chile, and other nations who may have supplied one part or another will never get to speak with or even see the schoolchildren who end up using those pencils. Nonetheless, these workers serve those distant children well. If they do their work, providing good service to their fellow humans, this very ordinary form of love will accompany the pencils to the unknown, unseen hands that use them.

  It is not a wasted idea for anyone who uses a pencil to say a word of thanks to the faraway people who produced it. In this way, there is not only a universal workbench, but also an invisible filament of mutual service racing around the earth, encircling the hearts of the whole world as one. Do not think that commerce means only a material bond. Do not think that globalization lacks all soul.

  [CHAPTER 6]

  The Five Rs

  THE SECOND SET OF BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CATHOLIC SOCIAL doctrine can be remembered as the five Rs. These designate the five rights that Catholic social teaching has recognized throughout history, through close observation of necessities for human flourishing. Declarations of human rights long antedate the contemporary world.

  1. The Right to Give to Caesar What Is Caesar’s, But to God the Things That Are God’s

  “Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” When they heard it, they marveled. And they left him and went away.

  (Matthew 22:17–22.)

  The State may not impose religion, yet it must guarantee religious freedom and harmony between the followers of different religions. For her part, the Church, as the social expression of Christian faith, has a proper independence and is structured on the basis of her faith as a community which the State must recognize. The two spheres are distinct, yet always interrelated.

  (Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, §28.)

  Natan Sharansky calls the principle about Caesar and God the “anti-totalitarian principle,” for it lays out in such stark and simple terms the reality that some things do not belong to Caesar. No government has the right to claim total power. All government is limited, by right. One very large realm of human life (among others) from which Caesar is shut out is the life of the human spirit, the human mind, the human soul. The relentless questioning of science is by right free from the control of the state. So is the life of the arts. Even more so is the free inquiry and reporting of the press, both electronic and print. The same applies to the right to free public speech.

  Yet more emphatic than any of these is the right of the human conscience to respond freely and without governmental restraint or burden to the internal calling of the Lord God Creator. It is self-evident that the difference in power, intellect, and love between the Creator and the conscious and reflective creature imposes a duty of awe, even a trace of what Kierkegaard called “fear and trembling,” in the face-to-face of God and humans. Furthermore, the alert human feels, perhaps, a surge of gratitude. And if a duty toward the Creator is evident, then an individual has a right to respond unimpeded by any lesser power. The same freedom, based on an inalienable duty, has been felt by religious communities around the world throughout history. Most of the most important things in life do not come under the rule of Caesar.

  That is why the freedom to exercise one’s own religious conscience is the first freedom, from which all others descend. It is called the first freedom because it most brilliantly spotlights the transcendence of each human person. Each alone must choose to accept—or to reject—the friendship offered by the Lord God Creator. No other freedom goes so deep. No other freedom is so deeply inalienable.

  Woe to the human who dares to block, or to meddle with, the interior personal encounter between the Creator and his free, responsible creature.

  Atheists, too, share in this liberty. No human may be compelled either to believe in God or to consent to serve God. For atheists, the problem is to discover how to establish this right on atheist grounds. Tom Paine did not believe this could be done, and sailed to France to dissuade the leaders of the Revolution of 1789 from turning atheistic. He held that they would thus undermine the very argument that grounded their own rights. They would turn their rights into preferences, a reality of a very different order indeed. For if rights do not come from God, but only from human preference, what security shall believers find in “rights,” and what security will atheists find in changeable and often fickle human preferences?

  2. The Right to Worship God and Practice One’s Faith

  Also among man’s rights is that of being able to worship God in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience, and to profess his religion both in private and in public. According to the clear teaching of Lactantius, “this is the very condition of our birth, that we render to the God who made us that just homage which is His due; that we acknowledge Him alone as God, and follow Him. It is from this ligature of piety, which binds us and joins us to God, that religion derives its name.”

  (John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, §14.)

  In all his activity a man is bound to follow his conscience in order that he may come to God, the end and purpose of life. It follows that he is not to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his conscience. Nor, on the other hand, is he to be restrained from acting in accordance with his conscience, especially in matters religious. The reason is that the exercise of religion, of its very nature, consists before all else in those internal, voluntary and free acts whereby man sets the course of his life directly toward God.

  (Dignitatis Humanae, §3.)

  Thank God, for us Americans this right is enshrined within our Constitution, in the most prominent place in the First Amendment. Among those who argued most forcefully for the state’s public recognition of this right were Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, George Mason, and John Adams. Suffice it here simply to quote from James Madison, whose hand and political leadership were most responsible for achieving the final wording of the First Amendment, and then its ratification by the Congress and still later by the people:

  Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, “that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.1

  From the beginning, then, Christianity has been a religion marked by its adherence to an inner life of conscience, in which God must be recognized in spirit and in truth, in a way no others of that time except Jews felt bound to act. When a Roman philosopher was asked to bow or burn incense before the gods, he felt no special inner conflict. All that was required of him was to go through the external motions; he did not have to believe a word of it. That option is not open to a Jew or a Christian, however. For a Jew or a Christian, what his body does, his soul must do likewise. He cannot in good conscience bow or burn incense before a false god. The First Commandment itself forbids that: “I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt not place false gods before me.” And so it has been from that time to this. Deuteronomy tells us: “Worship your God in spirit and in truth.”

  Thus, the worship of God takes place in the spirit. But it is not confined to the spi
rit. It must be expressed in actions in the world where they will be seen, and it must at times be expressed in public. Religion is not solely a private affair, an affair of the heart. It is the inner and outward life, in the world at large, and in the eyes of other humans. Anything less would be hypocrisy. Some say, “My religion is my own private affair.” Yes and no. More than that, religion is the inner and outward life of an entire people—a people larger and more universally placed than in any one state. For Jews and for Christians, true religion is both a conviction of heart and mind, and also a transformative inspirer of public practices, whole cultures, and a distinctive (but in principle universal, freely chosen) civilization.

  The whole principle of freedom of conscience and worship is a child of Judaism and Christianity as it is of no other religion or secular community. As the historian of liberty Lord Acton (1834–1902) observed, moreover, the record shows that the history of liberty is coincident with the history of Judaism and Christianity. One need not be a Jew or Christian to benefit by this liberty, to live by it, and to adopt it as one’s own. But Judaism and Christianity were the first and most enduring intellectual forces to recognize its necessity, to elucidate its grounds philosophically, and to think through the practical principles that would institutionalize it, not only in minds but also in polities.

  While the principles of religious liberty are ancient, their institutionalization in the political world of the West is relatively recent. The practice of religious liberty is not yet universal. But the aspiration for it is universal, and will increasingly become acute, if only because the immense sufferings now being inflicted upon humans for the choices of their religious conscience are unbearable. Religions that countenance such barbarity disgrace themselves. By the via negativa of unbearable suffering, the cause of freedom of conscience is being written indelibly in worldwide human experience.

  3. The Right of Association

  In all social matters, the companionship of others is of great advantage. “A brother that is helped by his brother is like a strong city,” says Solomon (Prov. xviii. 19). “It is better, therefore, that two should be together than one: for they have the advantage of their society” (Eccles. iv. 9). . . . Again, any person who is competent to perform some special function has a right to be admitted to the society of those who are selected for the exercise of that function. For, an association means the union of men, gathered together for the accomplishment of some specific work.

  (Aquinas, Liber Contra Impugnantes Dei Cultum et Religionem, ch. 2.)

  Private societies, then, although they exist within the body politic, and are severally part of the commonwealth, cannot nevertheless be absolutely, and as such, prohibited by public authority. For, to enter into a “society” of this kind is the natural right of man; and the State has for its office to protect natural rights, not to destroy them.

  (Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, §51.)

  In the middle of the thirteenth century, some of the faculties at the University of Paris became aware of the unusual brilliance and growing fame of the new bright lights of the orders of Franciscans and Dominicans who were flocking to teach there. The University of Paris was only then emerging on the world stage, becoming competitive with universities in Bologna (founded 1088), Oxford (1096), Cambridge (1209), and elsewhere. Alas, the secular faculties jealous of their new eminence tried to ban the Franciscans and Dominicans from the university. Naturally, these religious orders appealed their case to the pope. They thought it unjust that persons of talent could be barred from the university simply because they belonged to a religious association. Their protest, written by Thomas Aquinas, is one of the first known defenses of the natural right of association.

  The argument was, as usual for Saint Thomas, brief, commonsensical, and logically set out. Human beings are not only rational animals but also social animals. For human flourishing, many associations are necessary and highly useful. For this reason, the law of association is deep in our nature. Even more praiseworthy are free associations which individuals join for common purposes. If individuals have rights, then for even better reasons do their free associations have rights, which well serve the common good. For evidence, examine the growing number of schools, clinics, and other service organizations staffed by the Franciscans, Dominicans, and others. Free associations of individuals are natural to humans; it is a natural right to form them and to work through them. Free associations are well fitted to contribute substantially to the common good. Q.E.D.

  To put this in more contemporary terms: No man is an island unto himself. For human survival, prospering, and progress, we depend on others with whom we associate. This is true for progress in knowledge and beauty, in truth and goodness. But it is also clearly true in economic development and the building of cities and republics. Most important, the primary communities in which we associate are not states. Communities such as the family are much more deeply rooted in our nature than are states. Others of these primordial associations are our communities of worship, community building, and work. There are also our political associations, and our associations for mirth and play and cultural expression. Human life has always been thick with associations, but never with as many associations as in the days following the birth of democratic societies with free economies, bursting with new opportunities for social initiatives.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Leo XIII dreaded the rise of the omnipotent total state. He saw the first threat of it in the materialism promoted by Engels and Marx, which left no room for the life of the human spirit or for human transcendence and personal liberty. He could think of only one opposing force to throw against the gigantic state: the thicket of free associations of every sort, and in every department of human life. Social life in associations is prior to social life in states. It is prior in time and prior in right. Thus, Leo and later popes began to stress the creative and associative powers of free adults, their capacity for initiative and for responsibility, and their ability to better human life from the ground up. The free labor unions were just one group of these associations that were dear to Leo.

  A century later, Pope John Paul II called the peoples of the world, beginning in Europe, to become subjects of their own destiny, not the objects of government will. Through their associations (such as Solidarity in Poland), human persons are capable of self-determination, taking responsibility for their own destiny, becoming provident for their own flourishing, generating immense energy for change from local communities, upward and outward, to circle the earth.

  The popes’ increasing reliance on associations led to their grasp of the importance of subsidiarity, and also the social need for freely willed solidarity in moral witness, concrete assistance, and mutual reliance on one another—in medical care (for example, Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross) and in every other human sphere. The power of voluntary associations for bringing good into every corner of the world is immense. And those who participate in voluntary care worldwide have no problem in sharing love with all the others they meet, for it is love that moves them all.

  Solidarity is a new name for caritas in a globalizing world of rapid air transport, electronic communications, and worldwide media. A massive explosion of nongovernmental associations has occurred in our time. This is what Leo XIII dreamed of.

  4. The Right to Private Property

  Property should be in a certain sense common, but, as a general rule, private; for, when every one has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because every one will be attending to his own business.

  (Aristotle, Politics 1263a25.)

  Every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own. This is one of the chief points of distinction between man and the animal creation. . . . And on this very account—that man alone among the animal creation is endowed with reason—it must be within his right to possess things not merely for temporary and momentary use, as other living things do, but to have and to hold them
in stable and permanent possession; he must have not only things that perish in the use, but those also which, though they have been reduced into use, continue for further use in after time.

  (Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, §6.)

  When the ‘sacredness of property’ is talked of, it should always be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust. . . . Even in the case of cultivated land, a man whom, though only one among millions, the law permits to hold thousands of acres as his single share, is not entitled to think that all this is given to him to use and abuse, and deal with as if it concerned nobody but himself. . . . The rents or profits which he can obtain for it are at his sole disposal; but with regard to the land, in everything which he does with it, and everything which he abstains from doing, he is morally bound, and should, whenever the case admits, be legally compelled to make his interest and pleasure consistent with the public good.

  (John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy.)

  Although it seems to many of today’s progressives that the best way to create wealth and bring poor people out of poverty is socialism implemented through a network of government programs, human experience from ancient times until today has not borne this out. To the contrary, experience shows that personal responsibility for private property actually raises the common prosperity. It especially raises the well-being of the poor more reliably than collective ownership does. Experiments in socialism since the first winter at Plymouth in America have always come aground on the tendency of many to exert themselves no more than is necessary, especially when others exert themselves less. Socialism breeds free riders on the harder and smarter labor of others.