Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  Pius XI, Nell-Breuning comments, was here thinking of large institutional matters: of “constitution and government administration, something that can be attained by properly formed legal and material institutions.”16 However, here the pope becomes cautious. He insists on the principle of subsidiarity—a principle that can be traced to Abraham Lincoln.17 The state is not an unlimited or totalitarian power. It is limited. According to Nell-Breuning:

  [The pope] puts his greatest and highest expectations on the state—not a state that intends to take care of everything, but a state strictly following the principle of subsidiarity. Therefore, while demanding security and protection for proper social order based on social justice, he also appeals to state authority to abstain from interference with all matters of minor importance, in order the better to solve the one great task which it is called to take care of.18

  Nell-Breuning seems to mean by this “one great task” something like what the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution identifies as “to promote the General Welfare.”

  In these central passages on social justice in his commentary, it is painfully obvious that Nell-Breuning begins by speaking of social justice both as a virtue and as a principle, but ends by treating it almost solely as a principle. Thus, he falls neatly into what we saw is Hayek’s trap (chapters three and four, above). If social justice is a regulative principle of social order, it is not a virtue. For if the subject of social justice is society, then it is not a person, and only persons can practice moral virtues. Social justice appears at best to be an institutional ideal—of indeterminate shape or location—against which concrete institutions are measured. Social justice seems to characterize no society that has yet been seen. Indeed, the use of the term is left slippery.

  Free modern societies are so complex that no one authority can possibly control their manifold outcomes, whether regarding supply and demand, prices, the distribution of income, or changeable family needs. The failures of socialism (so visible after 1989) make all this plain. The downfall of state-run systems is systemic ignorance. By comparison, market systems constantly reflect immense stores of information. Take a simple example: Every day, each new automobile sold in the United States is recorded, so that almost instantly automakers know how many units are moving, where, and in which models and colors and other consumer preferences. They also know whether the pricing of particular models is building up buyer resistance, and whether some models are selling in unexpectedly high quantities. By tomorrow morning they can change their production plans in view of this information. Day by day decisions are guided by virtually real-time information. Decisions are less made by long-range planners than by monitors of up-to-date flows of information. Decisions can be made much closer to the field of actual buying.

  No one brain or collection of brains has the necessary intelligence to grasp, let alone to put in order, all the changing needs of every family. The state does not have a large or detailed enough intelligence. A dinosaur, the joke goes, has a brain the size of a pea. So does the state. That is the essential flaw in the socialist concept of “order from above.” Alas, even Pius XI, though he resisted mightily, showed a tendency to wish that an intelligent order could flow down from above. Certain national cultures seem reluctant to recognize how much information arises upward from the daily work of markets—and how much order results from decisions based on that information. There is no magic in market systems, only very useful information about what is being bought, how much people are willing to pay, how changes in price affect volume, in what geographical areas specific items are selling least, and where demand is greatest. The preferences of buyers change often, and suppliers need to detect such changes quickly in order to organize their next efforts in advance of going to market. Markets are very sensitive to movements of human insight and will.

  Moreover, much of the actual order in human life arises from the convergence of the thoughts, feelings, and decisions of many different human beings acting for their own purposes. Men’s efforts are generally more fruitful if they take account of the decisions and consequences of the actions of others. Fishermen in Bangladesh may now use cell phones to call a number of nearby locations in search of the best price for that day. Women in Milan may watch prices of various brands very closely, in order to time their major fashion purchases. Wisdom in the use of markets requires keen market intelligence, acquired by multitudes of individuals not through orders from above but by close attention to the fluctuations of markets. To use a different example, paths are worn by hikers up and down a mountain over hundreds of years, based on hundreds of thousands of individual decisions. Consequently, say Hayek and other objectors, a great deal of human order necessary to the common good comes not from above but from attending closely to the timing and substance of market behaviors.

  Thus many of those who claim to be speaking from above for the “common good” or “social justice” often overlook vital social information. Often, they are not speaking for most people, much less most wise and good people. They are consulting only their own conceptions, their own preferences, their own practical (or impractical) sense of what is happening. No one knows enough to be certain what the common good is, only what she or he thinks it is. Those who claim to speak for social justice often misjudge arguments concerning means and ends by failing to take account of the multitudes of unintended consequences that commonly arise from crisscrossing social interactions. They fail to foresee the likely unintended consequences of the means and ends they favor. In brief, use of the term “social justice” can sometimes mask moral imperialism based on abstractions. One can argue that the common good is best defined by goals x, y, and z. But there can easily be many contrary yet plausible arguments in favor of a, b, and c—or even j, k, and l. Who is correct? And who knows the best concrete, practical steps to take next?

  It does not seem that Nell-Breuning escapes these limitations. His commentary, written during the early 1930s, lacks sufficient conceptual equipment. His animus against “liberal individualism” blinds him to the actual cooperative, associational, communitarian texture of nations beyond those of continental Europe. Like many in central Europe (Germany and Italy included), Nell-Breuning and Pius XI express a negative bias against the market and competition, and the unmistakable sense of order markets produce, an order often much more steady and reliable than the sometimes capricious decisions of unchecked authorities.

  Long ago, when I studied at the Gregorian University in Rome (from 1956 to 1958), I was quite surprised by the resentment expressed against Anglo-Saxon philosophical and economic cultures by a sizable number of the Mediterraneans and Latins. They had a wildly exaggerated view of Anglo-American “individualism”; they missed entirely the degree of associational and other-directed skills, even conformism. They missed the social orderliness of life in England (take, for example, manners in boarding a bus). The mote in their own eye was the extreme individualism of traffic patterns in Rome. Their images of “unfettered” markets seemed based on their own experience rather than on the internalized order and actual self-restraint of Anglo-American mores.

  AT LEAST, THOUGH, we might notice three things. First, the market is a social institution, rule-bound and guided by very old norms. For centuries individuals and groups have come together in markets, even in primitive forms in town squares, to meet their personal needs in fair exchange. To be sure, caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. Still, a market does not exist to favor only some individuals, but to draw all into it by familiar conventions and practices of fairness. Without trust, markets repulse rather than attract. Everybody in every community needs them and benefits by them.

  Second, the most successful way to break up dreaded monopolies (or cartels) is by increasing new entries into the markets, and by nourishing greater competition among them. Government does play a useful role in that encouragement, on behalf of both sellers and buyers, as the fruits of the U.S. Sherman Antitrust Act (made law the year before Rerum Novarum was promulgated) amply
show.19

  The influence of Weimar Germany is tangible on every page of Nell-Breuning’s commentary, in his references to cartelizations and the unchecked power of central banks, and in his underlying conceptual imagery. Many of his key terms were forged in the German discussions led by the great Heinrich Pesch, S.J., and in several other key centers of German social economic thought, such as Freiburg, Munich, and the Fribourg Union.20

  Still, if we go back to the need for social reorganization announced by Pius XI, an approach to social justice overlooked by Nell-Breuning becomes apparent. In free societies, citizens need to use their capacity for association to exercise responsibilities, and to act for social purposes. Suppose that we define social justice in this way: Social justice is a specific modern form of the ancient virtue of justice. Men and women exercise this specific social habit when they (a) join with others, in order (b) to change the institutions of society. The practice of social justice means activism, organizing, trying to make the system better. It does not necessarily mean enlarging the state; on the contrary, it means enlarging civil society. Father Ferree (whose work I have cited above and elsewhere) thinks that this is exactly Pius XI’s intention. I am less certain of that, but Ferree’s argument does seem plausible, given Pius XI’s premises and express warnings against excessive state power.

  In my own humble judgment, the pope laid down a few stripes on Mussolini’s back, under which Mussolini did in fact smart. Still, Pius XI tried to be evenhanded in his criticism of liberalism and socialism, though there is no question that the pope’s description of the tasks of the state as he desired them was more guarded, hesitant, and cautious than Mussolini’s approach to government rule allowed. Alas, portions of his language later caused much confusion, allowing many to conflate social justice with state action, and to see social justice as a form of the socialist project. It is beyond doubt that Pius XI intended to advance Leo XIII’s project of building civil societies and the power of associations. But the language cited above by Nell-Breuning did allow some room for a socialist and/or corporatist interpretation.21

  Aristotle himself thought that politics is the architectonic science: Everything else is protected or threatened by what happens in politics. The freedom to worship, the public availability of beauty, the freedom of and material support for science, the quality of education, economic dynamism, and much else depend on the workings of the polis. Aristotle also articulated that ethics is a branch of politics. In his youth he had experienced the conquest of a small city-state by a foreign culture, so he knew firsthand the immense pressure this conquest placed on individuals and families to change their mores, habits, and loyalties. Formerly honorable citizens were now obliged to follow new masters and new ways, often contrary to their own native ethic and moral ecology.

  Pope Pius XI knew that. But now he added two things to Aristotle: first, an emphasis on the citizen’s responsibility for shaping the polis; and, second, a call for voluntary organizations to empower individuals by bringing them out of isolation. The pope saw that free men and women in modern times can join together, organize, and make changes in the institutions in which they live. He witnessed this, for example, in the often quite heroic activities of Don Luigi Sturzo and his energetic Partito Popolare, a nascent political party in Italy and something new under the Italian sun: Catholic and lay and democratic. Fulfilling this social potential required of free persons vigilance, initiative, farsightedness, courage, realism, organizational skills, and perseverance. Without the exercise of such virtues, the principle of subsidiarity would have no power to check the state.

  Since the uses of social justice are plural, its definition must necessarily be general. But the concept is far from empty. The easiest way to understand it is to encounter its opposite. Visit a housing project in East Saint Louis where the apathetic, alienated, anomic residents seem unable or unwilling to organize themselves to meet the many problems that besiege them. Visit a Bolivian or Sicilian village in which family is the only recognized social reality, and outside the family no one is trusted, committees do not form, few organizations function, and armed thugs have a virtual free run of society. One can expect to see a capacity for social initiative only when citizens have a certain inner strength, a basic trust in others, and the skills and willingness to join together for common purposes.

  Certain spontaneous sentences indicate the presence of the virtue: “We’ve got to do something.” “Let’s do it.” “Divide up the responsibilities.” “Who’ll volunteer?” We take such sentiments for granted in America, so we may not recognize a habit that many among us possess in abundance. Children in playgrounds spontaneously “choose up” sides, arrange bases, establish boundaries. The art of association, as Tocqueville wrote, is the first law of democracy.

  After the horrific deaths of tens of millions in the Second World War, Pius XII (1939–58) led the Catholic Church, belatedly, to support the rebuilding of democracies as the best defense of human rights. Christian Democratic and Social Democratic parties rose up to defend those rights against communism. Leo XIII’s pioneering effort to root concepts of human rights in Christian soil was capped by Pope John XXIII’s proliferation of rights in Pacem in Terris (1963). Paul VI (1963–78), while avoiding the term “socialism,” began to speak of a necessary process of “socialization,” a euphemism that many interpreted as an endorsement of social democracy and the welfare state. Then, on October 16, 1978, the feast day of Saint Hedwig (patroness of reconciliation between neighboring states), the College of Cardinals electrified the world with the selection of the first non-Italian pope in more than four centuries, the Polish Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyła, who chose the name John Paul II, and became famous for leading the world’s huge “third wave” of building democracies and other institutions of human rights.

  In 1931, Pius XI launched a world-changing movement indeed. Popes did not vanquish Stalin and his successors by armored divisions. They had a strong wind of the Spirit behind them, and inspired a new humanism of social virtue, brave persons, and resolute free communities focused on self-government, civil society, and the common good.

  [CHAPTER 10]

  American Realities and Catholic Social Thought

  IN 1978, THE NEW POPE JOHN PAUL II—DRAMATIST, POET, athlete, polyglot—took as his mission the reconciliation not only of neighboring states but of the two great blocs, East and West, which from the first he insisted on calling “the two great branches of the one tree of Christian Europe.” Until then, Saint Benedict (480–547) had been properly recognized as the patron saint of Europe, and his image graced the Medal of Europe awarded annually to the greatest contemporary artists, since so many European cities had grown up around early Benedictine monasteries with their cathedral schools, libraries of manuscripts and copyists, and patronage of music and the arts. The first Slavic pope added Cyril and Methodius as copatrons of Europe. These two brothers from Byzantium had translated the New Testament into the core Slavonic tongue a thousand years earlier. This translation took place at Nitra in Slovakia, at the very center of a larger Europe, well-described as comprising “the lands from the Atlantic to the Urals.” Thus, both halves of Europe grew as branches from a single Christian trunk.

  A philosopher by training, the vigorous John Paul II made clear early on that he wished to impart to the Catholic body a deep and original philosophic stamp. “Ordered liberty” is the key concept with which he chose to begin, a liberty practiced by the human person as a free and creative agent of his or her own destiny. The pope’s emphasis on ordered liberty had special resonance behind the Iron Curtain, as well as among all those struggling under military dictatorships and national security states in the Third World. Having helped shape Dignitatis Humanae (1965), the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, John Paul II continued over the years to articulate his vision of religious liberty, the “first liberty.” Gradually, he built up the foundations of a fresh theory of the “second liberty,” economic li
berty. Here he stressed the creative subjectivity of the free man and woman at work. This was fresh material, indeed—and to it we now must turn.

  It is a curious matter that some of the key ideas which John Paul II was about to introduce into Catholic social teaching were voiced long before him, by a backwoodsman from Kentucky and Illinois, far out on the western American frontier during the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s, right around the same time Father Taparelli in Italy was writing the first known book on social justice. Europeans may be unlikely to think immediately of Lincoln as a forebear of later developments in Catholic social thought, but the connection is natural for an American.

  This link with Lincoln was reinforced in the post–Vatican II encyclopedia of Catholic thought, Sacramentum Mundi, which introduced its entry on “subsidiarity” by citing Lincoln.1 In his effort to end the slavery that was legal in the southern states, Lincoln was quite prescient in laying out the principles of federalism on the one hand, and encouraging local communities based on almost-universal land ownership (see the Homestead Act, for example) on the other. Near-universal land ownership prevented the growth of the large plantations necessary for the practical use of slaves, and in addition bred in citizens a strong taste for liberty and a revulsion against slavery. On this social reconstruction, most new territories chose to live as free states and soon greatly outnumbered the older slave states.