Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  So, given that marriage is a key protective factor, and as such of key importance for the lives of young people, what do we teach them? In particular, what do we teach students of social work and related fields, those who seek to help those negatively affected by marriage’s decline? The Institute for American Values published a report under the direction of the late sociologist of the family, Norval Glenn, entitled “Closed Hearts, Closed Minds: The Textbook Story of Marriage.”7 Glenn analyzes twenty textbooks used in some 8,000 courses across the country to teach hundreds of thousands of young people. He explains: “The college instructors who are training the next generation of counselors, nurses, therapists, social workers, and teachers often rely on precisely these books for their own understanding of the scientific consensus on family matters.” 8 But the books are riddled with errors. They show little interest in the effects of marital disruption or single parenting on children, devoting an average of only 3.5 pages to this topic. Three times as much space is devoted to adult relations, without regard to how they affect children. Current textbooks convey a pessimistic view of marriage. These books repeatedly suggest that marriage is more a problem than a solution. The potential costs of marriage to adults receive exaggerated treatment, while the benefits of marriage, both to individuals and society, are downplayed.

  Mary Eberstadt, in Adam and Eve after the Pill, describes the widespread “will to disbelieve” the empirical evidence on the negative impact of the sexual revolution.9 There is a similar reluctance to admit the benefits of marriage and monogamy for children and adults, including those in disadvantaged families. The blindness to evidence she describes perpetuated in classrooms and textbooks across the country a view of marriage that had long been disproved by research. A big gap opened up between research and researchers on one hand and textbooks and teachers on the other. It was the latter that shaped the ideology in which social workers and other helping professionals were trained for decades.

  Among those living in poor communities, it is not the case that they no longer aspire to marriage. They do, but it has ceased to be the path to “settling down,” devoting oneself to another and to the children who result from the union of husband and wife. Instead, marriage has become for them, not a path to achievement of such stability, but a reward. Marriage is viewed as a dream and a luxury. Children are seen as more important—and more attainable—than marriage and so precede it, even though the children themselves suffer from the instability and complexity of the new system. Given the disappearance of the “shotgun marriage”—marriage as an obligation and expectation for men who father children outside it—and the ubiquity of cohabitation, divorce, and single parenthood in poor communities, marriage is no longer the institution that structures and stabilizes relations between the sexes. Instead, it has become a practically unattainable ideal.10

  For social workers, who deal with populations where marriage has largely fallen apart, the tendency rightly has been to focus on helping those who suffer most from the collapse. These include abandoned mothers and their children, “blended” families, single parents, children in chaotic homes living without emotional or economic security, and so on. But, as with welfare policy, this approach raises a dilemma. Do the policy interventions supported by social workers help promote marriage and prevent its breakdown? Do they support policies that incentivize marriage and encourage the virtues and norms on which its success depends? Or do they promote and reinforce the sexual revolution and its effects in the name of celebrating family diversity—or in the name of destigmatizing, or of being nonjudgmental, or of providing income to those in need?

  A virtue-based understanding of social justice may help us toward a different, more empowering orientation that helps us build and sustain a culture of marriage, one that makes it easier for individuals to develop the virtues needed for marriage, even while helping those in problematic (to themselves) nonmarital situations.

  Social Justice as a Virtue

  J. Brian Benestad, in his outstanding introduction to Catholic social doctrine, says:

  The contemporary concern for social justice leads primarily to a stress on public-policy initiatives, to a reorganization of “the system,” and to social reform. In addition, there is a tendency to regard social justice as a principle of rights against society rather than as a virtue inclining a person to fulfill duties toward society. There is a stress on the demand for just treatment for others rather than the duty to act justly oneself.11

  I do not discount the injustices resulting in a state of affairs in which marriage has largely collapsed for a large part of the population, or deny the need for public-policy initiatives. Instead, I want to suggest how a virtue-based understanding of social justice offers a fuller, more complete understanding of the challenge that social workers, other helping professionals, and we as a society currently face. An approach to social justice that looks primarily or exclusively to asserting claims on the state by or on behalf of others rests on an impoverished understanding of the human person, tends toward utopian statism and authoritarianism, and contradicts the best, most empowering traditions of social work.

  Society will not be just unless individuals are virtuous. Political and economic structures in themselves cannot produce individual virtue. Nor can they provide the love and support that humans, as naturally social, “reciprocally indebted,” “dependent rational animals” need and for which the human heart longs.12 This is the claim of the whole of the central Christian tradition, from Augustine and Aquinas to the present. Its roots lie in the Christian understanding of human dignity as derived from our creation in the image and likeness of God. It draws on the ancient Greek understanding of the cardinal virtue of justice. In this classical Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, justice is rooted in natural law and what is objectively necessary for humans to flourish as they order their lives together.

  In this tradition, justice and natural rights are, as Edward Feser says,

  Safeguards of our ability to fulfill our moral obligations and realize our natural end. It follows that anything which tends to frustrate our ability to fulfill those obligations and realize those ends violates our rights and amounts to an injustice.13

  So justice is the cardinal virtue by which, as a matter of habit and will, we give others what is due them. Aquinas defines justice, following Aristotle and Cicero, as “the habit whereby an individual renders to each one his due (ius) by a constant and habitual will.”14 If we frustrate the ability of another to fulfill her moral obligations—say to worship God (which implies the right to religious freedom, as the American founders argued) or to preserve her life or that of her child—we act unjustly.

  How do we get from this classical concept of the virtue of justice to social justice as a virtue? Feser continues:

  And if that which frustrates this ability [to fulfill our moral obligations] is not merely the actions of a particular individual or group of individuals, but something inherent in the very structure of a society—in its legal code, its cultural institutions, or the tenor of its public life—then what we have can meaningfully be described as a social injustice. In particular, any society whose legal framework fails to protect the lives of its weakest members, whose popular culture is shot through and through with a spirit of contempt for and ridicule of the demands of the natural law, or whose economic structure makes it effectively impossible for a worker to support himself and his family with his wages, is to that extent an unjust society, a socially unjust society.15

  Social justice can be defined as the virtue that inclines individuals to work with others for the common good. It is justice in directing the virtues to giving others their due, and social, as Novak argues, in a double sense.16 First, it aims at the common good rather than at what is due another individual (as in the commutative justice that inclines one to equitable exchanges between individuals). Second, it involves joining with others to achieve a common purpose that individuals cannot achieve on their own. It is the virtue of association,
the virtue par excellence of civil society.

  Marriage Does Not Just Happen

  The collapse of marriage is perhaps the cardinal social injustice of our time. As we saw and as research clearly documents, most injustices that social workers confront in their daily work at any level hinge in some way on this one. What would it take to sustain an environment or ecosystem in which marriage and marriage-based families could thrive?

  Philosopher Michael Pakaluk has offered what even those who disagree with his vision might consider as a thought experiment. In a brief essay, he offers an opportunity to open oneself, at least temporarily and with tentative sympathy, to a traditional view of marriage. He writes:

  Here is marriage, considered in context. A young man and woman remain chaste, and they have the virtue of “purity” (an old-fashioned word, but it is real). As a result, they have joy, and an ideal of the complete gift of self is readily understandable to them. They fall in love but do not “date” so much as “court” with reverence, each viewing the other as an almost divine gift.

  They don’t have the baggage that comes with sleeping around. They don’t cohabit. They don’t think that oral sex is a sign of love, or even that it’s sex.

  The death to self and complete binding of each to the other which they gleefully accept on their wedding day makes it also easy for them to accept their complete and total binding to a child for life, who incarnates their love into a single being. That is to say, they are “open to life.” They so cherish their bond that they have no private good except what comes through their union, and they place the safeguarding of that bond so high that it is a priority, for them, equivalent to faith, honor, religion, worship, and life itself.17

  What Pakaluk describes here is not a utopian ideal made out of whole cloth in the imagination of a social reformer. It is, as he says, “in Shakespeare and other classical authors and, in Christendom, it used to be something like the ordinary experience of (how can I put it?) people who were well brought up. (Think: Song of Songs.)” It rests implicitly on an understanding of man’s nature and destiny as the creature whom God, who is love, created out of love, for love, who “cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”18

  The point here is not to look back with nostalgia on an imagined golden age when there was no fornication, adultery, or other sexual vice. It is to remind us how completely the possibilities and understandings of marriage depicted by Shakespeare in As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing, or in the novels of Jane Austen, have ceased to be socially available. What Pakaluk describes “is lived today, is even attainable, by only a handful of persons.” Yet, he continues, “anyone who understands historic Christianity, and is well read, must hold (I think) that it would be desirable for culture once again to make such a way of life generally attainable.”

  What Pakaluk diagnoses is a grave social injustice in the sense defined by Feser, “something inherent in the very structure of society—in its legal code, its cultural institutions, or the tenor of its public life—that tends to frustrate our ability to fulfill our moral obligations and realize our natural end.” The kind of life-affirming marriage and marriage-based family culture Pakaluk describes has been swept away, above all for the lower socioeconomic strata, by the cultural and legal changes of the past half-century.

  So how is such a marriage, one consonant with our nature and destiny and corresponding to our deepest longings, possible today? Pakaluk goes on:

  But a culture cannot be created or sustained by a single person; it can barely be kept alive by a family; and it certainly cannot be created or transmitted without sound education. So, the immediate path forward for marriage, regardless of the Supreme Court, is the creation and fostering of institutions where modesty and purity are practiced with full confidence and self-knowledge.19

  Is Marriage Possible?

  There are two main responses to the current state of affairs. One is to normalize and even to celebrate the collapse of marriage in the name of diversity of family forms. We talk not of the family, but of families. The aim is to offset the negative effects of this social breakdown on children and women. This has been done both by the destigmatization of nonmarital births, divorce, sex that is delinked from marriage and children, and also by using government programs to meet the needs of low-income women and children.

  Another response is to seek, by policy incentives or personal influence, to change the behavior of “target populations.” Welfare reform, with its marriage promotion measures and time limits, did this in 1996.

  The first approach offers direct relief, but at the risk of legitimating behavior and situations that harm children, society, and the institution of marriage. It maintains the poor in their poverty and reinforces the very cultural forces in the structure of society that undermine marriage and the marriage-based family. These forces celebrate the unencumbered autonomous self and the claims of adults at the expense of their obligations to children.

  The second approach runs the risk of dividing society into sinners and saints, those whose behavior needs to change and those who want to bring about the change . . . in others. One approach calls evil good and good evil (Is 5:20); the other inclines to moral superiority.

  Is a both/and approach possible, one that recognizes the need for immediate help for those plunged into or maintained in poverty by the collapse of marriage, while at the same time strengthens and rebuilds a culture of marriage rather than assuming and even incentivizing its breakdown? In one way, this is the perennial problem of social policy and social work, and indeed helping in general—the problem that the English Poor Law reformers of the 1830s wrestled with. A social-justice perspective, with its emphasis on the personal virtues and on the associations or mediating structures of civil society, offers a different way of looking at the problem.

  Social justice cannot be reduced either to redistribution or to reform of government policies or institutions, though it does not exclude either. It requires virtue on the part of each individual in society so that all can contribute to the common good. In joining with others in civil society, citizens can support the institution of marriage while remedying those social injustices in law, culture, and the tenor of public life that put a healthy marriage beyond reach for many.

  A social-justice perspective takes sin seriously, seeing, as Solzhenitsyn put it, the dividing line between good and evil not as running between social groups or political parties, but as going through the human heart. It begins, not with priggish finger wagging, but with the recognition that we are all sinners and affected by sin, not least sins associated with the breakdown of marriage and its effects on children.

  In his provocative and startling essay “The Moral Structure of Pedophilia,” Anthony Esolen draws our attention to the moral harm caused by the shift away from a child-centered view of marriage and the marriage-based family.20 In his view, marriage provides the optimum setting for bearing and raising children. In its place, our society upholds an adult-centered view of marriage as being about adult relationships, an intense form of friendship. Esolen shows how our failure to give children their due penetrates far more deeply and pervasively than the most obvious and appalling cases. The obvious cases are the ones in which the claims of children are subordinated to the desires of adults. We have failed children systemically in ways that permeate our cultural institutions, laws, and public life.

  Esolen shows this failure by posing the question: How does pedophilia differ in our minds from other kinds of sexual expression? Its moral structure, he says, “is simply this: the welfare of children is subordinate to the sexual gratification of adults.” Lack of consent cannot in itself be morally decisive when we compel children to do all kinds of things to which they do not consent:

  If we altered the question, and asked not how many people have done sexually abusive things with children, but how many people have done sexual things that redounded to the suffering of children, then we might confess that the only thing that sep
arates millions of people from Jerry Sandusky is inclination. Everything that was once considered a sexual evil and that is now winked at or cheered, everything without exception, has served to hurt children, and badly.

  Divorce is a case in point:

  Unless it is necessary to remove oneself and one’s children from physical danger and moral corruption, the old wisdom regarding divorce should hold, if children themselves have anything to say about it. Parents will say, “My children can never be happy unless I am happy,” but they should not lay that narcissistic unction to their souls. Children need parents who love them, not parents who are happy; they are too young to be asked to lay down their lives for someone else. It is not the job of the child to suffer for the parent, but the job of the parent to endure, to make the best of a poor situation, to swallow his pride, to bend her knees, for the sake of the child.

  The same applies to births out of wedlock:

  The child has a right to enter more than a little nursery decorated with presents from a baby shower. He should enter a human world, a story, a people. He should be born of a mother and a father among uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents, stretching into the distant past, with all their interrelated histories, with his very being reflected in all those mirrors of relation, not to mention his eyes and his hair, the talents in his fingers and the cleverness in his mind. This belonging to a big and dependable world can be secured only in the context of the permanent love of his mother and father, declared by a vow before the community and before the One in whom there is no shadow of alteration.