Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  Social engagement is not an alternative or in opposition to a life committed to prayer, participation in the liturgical life of the Church, and love of God. As the experience of exemplars of charity like Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, Saint Damien of Molokai, or the religious sisters of South Sudan indicates, love and service of God powers and sustains love and service of those most in need of care, “even these least.”26

  These saintly people committed themselves to the true good of the other as other, without sentimentalizing or romanticizing their work among the most poor and oppressed members of society. Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day both warned their enthusiastic young helpers that, as Day put it, the poor are ungrateful and they smell.27 Their love was unconditional, expecting no return or personal gratification, and concrete in its practical expression. At the same time, they made no separation between their sacramental and spiritual lives on one hand and their practical work among the poor on the other. On the contrary, their spirituality and participation in the liturgical life of the Church powered and sustained their social engagement.

  Day’s diaries, The Duty of Delight, instructive as well as inspiring, are invaluable for social workers.28 The book chronicles and reflects on a life of selfless love and commitment to social justice and is at the same time a great spiritual classic. It offers an incomparable account of how to integrate deep faith and the Christian virtue of love or charity into day-to-day practice. The diaries show that in the midst of the extraordinary challenges of leading and sustaining the Catholic Worker movement, Day herself was sustained by daily worship at Mass, the sacraments, and the Divine Office or liturgy of the hours (the Church’s cycle of prayers, psalms, gospel readings, and meditations for each part of each day).

  Day also drew nourishment for her work by reading and following the practice of great spiritual masters. Among these were two Jesuit priests, the order’s founder, Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), and Jean-Pierre de Cassaude (1675–1751), with their emphasis on the spirituality of the present moment and on equanimity—doing our part and leaving the rest to God.29

  As Day drew consolation, energy, and encouragement from such spiritual sources, modern social workers also draw on Day’s own diaries and other writings. Most social workers, of course, practice in agencies very different from the settings in which Day and the rest exercised the virtue of charity. Secularism, bureaucracy, and state funding do not conduce to a practice that is both professional and also rooted in a Christian charity that Tertullian, Bishops Cyprian and Dionysius, Saint Damien, or Mother Teresa might recognize. But as the Church reminds us, the call to be saints, the call to love God and neighbor, is for all, not only those recognized for their heroic virtue or martyrdom.30 The “beacons of many generations” discussed here, like exemplars of the other virtues, help us understand what charity is and what it requires of us.31 They show how loving, personal concern and effective helping require and build the other virtues of justice (especially social justice), prudence, and courage. They offer inspiration and guidance for growth in the virtue of charity as they challenge us to apply it consistently, in our personal and professional lives.

  [EPILOGUE]

  Social Justice: In the Vast Social Space between the Person and the State

  IN THIS WHOLE INQUIRY WE HAVE COME ROUND AGAIN AND again to this thesis: Social justice is first of all a virtue, that is, a habit or disposition making it easier to perform certain social actions well, as if by second nature. In fact, Aristotle notes that a good test of how well a habit has become second nature is how one reacts when surprised and when an immediate response is called for. For there are times, not least in battle, when instantaneous action is essential, when a warrior has no time for hesitation. In a contemporary example, an enemy hurls a live grenade into a foxhole and one man instantly throws his body over it to protect his buddies. Such a man has been honing himself for bravery, to a keen edge.

  Usually, we have seen, such a habit is learned through dogged repetition, in order to get control of one’s passions. Sometimes one must practice again and again, with sheer determination, to get certain actions right, so that when summoned they are done quickly as well as right, and done so habitually—that is, done in the right way, at the right time, in the right spirit, reliably, and on the ready. Football players run through plays again and again, for months, to ready themselves for spontaneous action under varied circumstances. And George Washington, as we mentioned above in chapter two, took years to master his temper. When he at first failed to control it, he kept trying to do better. In these struggles, he often needed patience with himself—and persistence—until he got it right.

  But some lucky humans seem to be born with gifts of social leadership, with an ability to inspire and direct others. Still others are born quite willing to follow good leaders and to cooperate easily with teammates, each one seeing what needs to be done and each adjusting without command to common purposes. Persons of such gifts help groups get things done quickly and effectively. They are precious collaborators.

  Some people are born with certain social virtues, even social graces. They are natural team players. These are a joy to work with. A few others seem born to be, in all sorts of situations, a pain in the neck. Often such players need to be tolerated, and a shrewd leader looks for a special role, out of the way from others, to assign them. Every talent is useful somewhere.

  Now, in social justice, the specific actions one needs to have a habit of doing well have two characteristics. The first is calling into being free associations and giving them direction, purpose, scope, and inner drive. The second is acting with others to improve the common good of families, a local neighborhood, a city, a whole nation, the whole world. Usually, this means “to improve the common good” in some particular aspect. It is rare to be able to improve the common good in toto, even in one small department of society. Yet even a little improvement often goes a long way. It gives hope for further improvements, one step at a time.

  Social justice, then, is a virtue. It is a qualitative improvement in the character of a person. It adds to that person’s social capital. It widens that person’s range of action. It infuses a new energy into the social mass.

  Moreover, social justice is the preeminent virtue of free societies. It is the inner energy that engenders free societies. It puts in place an alternative to statism and to “excessive” individualism (the two greatest worries of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI).1

  Some societies already have the social capital from which citizens know how to organize themselves for a multitude of social purposes. That social capital is constituted by good habits and dispositions already interiorized by many of its citizens. Where this social capital is missing, societies are demoralized, unable to stir themselves. Where it is present, societies show common will, drive, and adaptability to one another. People see what to do and start organizing right away to do it.

  One favorite example of this is the response of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, within hours of the dam burst in 1889 that hit the trapped city with a cascading wall of water and debris higher than its homes. Some 600 more lives were lost in Johnstown during four hours that day than in all of Mississippi and Louisiana combined during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

  The next morning, Johnstown’s leading citizens and crews of workmen got together at the flood’s edge, elected an emergency government, designated certain standing structures as morgues, and sent all willing hands to dig dead bodies out of the wreckage. They also sent out word to others—not only in Johnstown but in the whole geographical area—to work feverishly to ship in 2,000 coffins. They fought off despair by beginning immediately to put up the most necessary shops, stores, and homes. The rubble piled up everywhere included train locomotives, giant trees, and smashed wooden houses, and lay thirty feet deep in the streets. The widespread habits of self-organization, insight into what to do next and in what order, and agreeable cooperation in dire need—such social capital, such a fund of social virtues—helped Johnst
own to come back from three major floods: in 1889, 1936, and 1977.

  Social justice, then, is the virtue that empowers individual persons (and whole peoples) to act for themselves, to exercise their inborn social creativity. This habit of building free associations is “the first law of democracy,” according to Tocqueville. It is the social habit rooted in individuals and demanded by the “new things” (the rerum novarum) of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is no wonder that this virtue could arise only late in human history, in the age of democracies, freely formed enterprises, free and independent unions, cooperatives, and social initiatives of all sorts (from town and village concerts to the worldwide Red Cross). In order for it to appear, there needed to be developed whole legions of joiners, organizers, and teams of willing volunteers to work together to achieve the social good—first in their own local, regional, and national communities, and then in the world as a whole.

  Through the leadership of the popes, social justice slowly became a Christian alternative to atheist socialism and secular statism. The popes have insisted (while relying on the thinking of devoted public intellectuals of many faiths) that there is a humanism that rejects collectivism. The popes also remind intellectuals that there is a humanism which rejects a vicious form of individualism.

  The vicious form of individualism, often enough visible both on the right and the left, loves the idea that there is no objective standard, only subjective truth, based upon the relativism of individual feelings and appetites. Some praise the denial of any truth except “my truth,” that is, the subjective desires of each individual. They seem not to see how this vision atomizes them, and renders them naked against tyranny. They do not recognize that their relativism robs them of any intellectual defense against thugs and torturers. Any protest they might make is simply an expression of their own tastes. If there is no truth, there can be no injustice. If there is no truth, there can be no speaking truth to power. That is why tyrants and totalitarians are relativists, love relativism, and engorge themselves on it so rapidly and without resistance.

  Relativism is an invisible gas that seeps into the soul’s hunger for truth and its longing for justice, and renders them inert.

  Some humans seem so terrified of being held accountable to anything beyond themselves that they cannot stomach the idea of God or truth or more-than-subjective reason. They do not want to be judged in any way, shape, or form. They do not grasp that to be human is to have the ability to judge—to judge true from false, good from evil, noble from ignoble. They expend huge efforts trying to convince themselves that to be a human is to be no more than a chimp or wolf or other animal. They boast of having ancestors who swung in trees. One can understand why some would convince themselves of this. But, as Alice von Hildebrand asked, why would anyone boast of it?

  The fact is, no other species of animal but ours has banded together to build laboratories, universities, international institutions, worldwide commercial enterprises, bureaus of patents and copyrights, hospitals, orphanages, and schools for the poor. No other species seems to have social workers with high moral standards. In a word, the virtue of social justice teaches each generation to form associations, to be inventive, to be proactive, to move their society forward. That special virtue seems to be a main component of what gives humans special advantages over any other animal. Each human is personally responsible. Each is part of many communities.

  We are lucky to live in an age when the virtue of social justice has captured the attention of the world. It is a virtue that was not well recognized in any age before our own. As an alternative to the immensely destructive, wasteful, anti-ecological collectivisms of the twentieth century, it is today the indispensable virtue. No society can be a free society without the widespread practice of social justice.

  Bound professionally to work on the front lines, as it were, in places where social justice is barely or not at all practiced, social workers have come to recognize all too well, in the population at large, whole areas in which the lack of basic social virtues is apparent. Although social workers may not usually use the word “virtue,” they do diagnose speedily enough its many absences.

  The Power of Virtues in Social Work

  A virtuous doctor is one who applies her knowledge and skills with such virtues as prudence, compassion and caring, courage, intellectual honesty, humility, and trustworthiness. Pellegrino and Thomasma have proposed such a list for the medical profession, and a similar list could be developed for the virtuous social worker, a list that would add equanimity and social justice as well as charity.2 Social work, in MacIntyre’s term, is a virtue-driven profession.3 Its practice requires and develops such virtues.

  Like medicine and law, social work as a profession serves many other goods important for human flourishing.4 For social work, social justice is a key virtue. Viewing persons in their social environment, social workers practice and promote the virtue of joining with others to improve life. They further the common good at several levels from family to community, to nation, and beyond.

  Nonetheless, as we found in the discussion of patch and Family Group Conferencing in chapter eighteen, even those practices most requiring and promoting the virtue of social justice are seldom discussed in terms of that virtue, or any virtue at all. Yet social work has been a virtue-based profession from its beginnings, and social justice from its beginnings has been a key virtue of its practitioners. There is certainly a temptation in social work to see the world either in individualist or in collectivist terms, emphasizing individual psychotherapy in isolation from family and community, on the one hand, or making ever larger demands on the state in the name of “social justice” on the other hand. Or both, as in demands for state-enforced claims against civil society.

  At its best, though, social work is neither individualist nor collectivist. Never subordinating the individual to the collective (or vice versa), it emphasizes the scope for working with others involved in a social situation as often the best way to resolve or ameliorate it. Social justice is one of the most important of these social-work virtues, and it is essential for good practice. It informs and directs the other virtues to enable people to work with others to further the common good. One of the first questions a practitioner asks is “who else is involved?” Social workers do so explicitly in the patch approach to community-centered practice, in practices like Family Group Conferencing (FGC) that find their rationale in restorative justice, and in asset-based community development. Social workers commonly understand the practitioner-client relationship as one part of a larger ecosystem of relationships, involving family, neighbors, and key local helping figures, voluntary associations, churches, schools, as well as other formal and informal agencies of care and control. In poor and disorganized neighborhoods like the one in which the Iowa patch team worked, the informal helping systems may be weak and the formal intervention of state agents, police, and professional helpers, correspondingly strong. In the Iowa patch area in Cedar Rapids, there was little housing stability (residents came and went rather than putting down roots), many single mothers and small children, few fathers or men of any kind, few churches that had stayed in place as their parishioners had moved away, low employment and low work-force participation, and few voluntary associations or informal networks. It was a neighborhood with little social capital.

  The social-work task in such circumstances is not to substitute professional expertise for the care and control missing from a community that lacks in norms, networks, and relations. It is both to work with those involved to address the immediate issue in a particular family (such as child neglect) and, in the very process of doing so, to find and strengthen the caring and self-regulating capacity of the family and community. It is to address those structures and systems, formal and informal, that frustrate the ability of those involved to fulfill their moral obligations and live virtuous lives. Society will not be just until individuals are virtuous—that is, until they habitually, reliably act well toward one anot
her. Social, legal, and cultural structures and patterns may make it harder or easier to achieve that end. Social work at its best is particularly attuned to these connections between individual and social life.

  Social-work intervention, then, aims to reverse the pattern that elicited it. It aims to leave the family and community stronger, more capable of caring for, protecting, and regulating their own. In exercising the virtue of social justice, practitioners build and develop that one virtue in particular in those with whom they work: the virtue of joining with them and helping them to develop the skills and habits required to join with others to achieve common purposes.

  Such a virtue-based understanding of professional helping more commonly occurs, it is true, in implicit knowledge than in formal theory or method. For reasons we explored in chapter nineteen on charity and justice, social work became uncomfortable with its origins in charity. From its early efforts to render charitable practice better organized and more scientific, social work came to professionalize practice and emphasize psychotherapy, rather than religious views of life or even the Athenian virtues of Aristotle.

  In the 1960s, in reaction to this clinical emphasis and in response to the movements of the times, an activist tendency came to the fore, focusing on social change and “social justice” (understood in partisan and utopian terms). In more recent times, there has been an emphasis on what actually works in achieving the aimed-for results, on evidence-based practice and specific interventions (for example, cognitive-behavioral therapy) that are effective, brief, and inexpensive. In all these developments, the virtues had no explicit place, so talk of them became exiguous to the point of nullity. Nevertheless, the virtue of social justice did not disappear; it found expression in concepts like empowerment, partnership practice, asset-based community development, restorative justice, and social capital.