Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  It is not surprising, then, that other professions and disciplines such as medicine and law, philosophy and psychology, were drawn to the recovery of virtue-based ethics while social work ignored it.5 On the other hand, social work has had from its beginnings a focus on human flourishing and the well-being of individuals and communities. That is, it always has been concerned with suffering in individuals, families, and communities, and conversely, with happiness as understood in Christianity (and Greek philosophy)—something inseparable from the virtues which are both necessary for and partly constitutive of human flourishing.

  Jane Addams and the Settlement House residents, for example, both exercised and promoted the virtue of social justice. They built the capacity of working-class urban immigrants to fulfill their moral obligations by tapping into their own cultural resources in the new environment. (One enduring result was The Settlement House Cookbook.) They also worked as social reformers to remove obstacles to virtuous life in the cities, for example, opposing or promoting alternatives to the saloon, the spoils system, and the oppression of workers. They sought to join with others in the neighborhood to further the common good. Their work included political reform efforts, but the primary aim of their effort was to strengthen families and the associations, the intermediary groups of civil society—and not the state.

  An important theme in social work, sometimes explicit, sometimes submerged, has been the particular virtues required for and developed by social-work practice. In a profession where the character of the agent has long been understood as inseparable from the professional intervention, the virtues focus attention on the character of the practitioner and the professional use of self. Recovery of the virtues, and of social justice in particular, accords well with the growing body of research suggesting the importance of the client-practitioner relationship as distinct from the specific theories or methods the practitioner utilizes. Social workers practice the virtue of social justice and hold it up as an ideal without yet avowing it or internalizing it as virtue in their own self-consciousness. For the moment, practice runs ahead of theory. Both authors of the present inquiry see this theory as putting into words what many others already practice.

  The social-work example carries important lessons for how we frame social justice, the state, and civil society. In the cases of FGC and patch, we see that a too rigid dichotomy of state and civil society limits our thinking about how we can address social needs and problems. So, too, do hard dichotomies of professional and natural helping systems, of traditional prestate ways of repairing harm and those of the modern bureaucratic-professional state.

  In the case of FGC, we see how informal and traditional ways of repairing harm and protecting children, such as the Maori whanau hui or the Hawaiian ho’oponopono, can inform child welfare or youth justice without substituting state for civil society or vice versa. It can build the capacity of families and communities to care for their own without the state’s abdicating its responsibility to protect children or to protect the rights of due process. The strengths of formal and informal systems can be maximized while each constrains the weaknesses and potential abuses of the other.

  It is not only that a severe dichotomy between individualism and collectivism is inadequate—ignoring how they feed each other and together compress the space of civil society. It is also a mistake to dichotomize the state and civil society, as both liberals and conservatives are wont to do. We can see this if we shift scale and consider for a moment our largest social program in the United States, Social Security.

  Interpreting the demographic changes since 1935, when the program became law and when the full retirement age corresponded to the life expectancy of those who reached adulthood, lies beyond the scope of this book. But it is indisputable that the informal social security derived in earlier times from rearing children to productive adulthood and instilling in them a sense of filial obligation could not today adequately provide for all. For instance, those whose incomes cannot sustain them in old age, in disability, or in the death of the family breadwinner. It may be that Social Security itself plays a role in discouraging fertility, for it delinks fertility and economic security by diminishing the need for childrearing. Social Security leads each of us to depend on the childrearing of others. Meanwhile, the tax-equivalent contribution in kind that parents make to the system is not only unrecognized, but even penalized in the allocation of benefits, which now depends on one’s earnings, not one’s parenting.6

  There is much debate about the sources of major demographic changes in recent times, and about other economic and cultural changes that have made reliance on the federal tax system (and one’s own private pension and savings) more prudent than rearing one’s own children and depending on their filial piety.

  The important point here is that, while the enormous program of formal Social Security managed by the federal government has supplanted to a great extent the informal social security that preceded it, neither the family nor other institutions of civil society are up to the task of taking it back. Social justice can no longer get away without great government programs or without inspiring more self-helping and associating efforts. Social justice today requires not a substitution of civil society for the state (or vice versa), but more creative ways to marry the two, in order to escape the mistakes of the past. Social invention did not end in 1936. We should be able to do some of our own.

  Social work at its best has always understood that one does little good to clients—and perhaps great harm—by making them more dependent, less motivated, and less able to think through their own problems than they already were. This is as true for families and neighborhoods as for individuals. It is crucial to have great respect for their own subjectivity, to use John Paul II’s description of the singular and yet threefold capacities of the human person: to see into the failures in one’s own past, to see new alternatives in the future, and to determine to take control over one’s own identity. Helpers must respect with some delicacy those inner capacities that transform a person, a family, a community living as an “object,” merely acted upon by outside forces, into a “subject,” an active agent creating its own future.

  Social-work professionals now realize not just that they do harm by doing to or for others in ways that reduce them to passivity or dependency. They also see that their professional task requires a different relationship of helper and helped. It requires restraining the tendency to control, rescue, impose solutions, and instead enabling those involved in the problematic situation to tap into their own wisdom, knowledge, and resources, to build and support the intermediary groups that occupy the vast and vital space between the bureaucratic-professional state and the individual.

  In theological language, this inner transformation is a matter of grasping what it means to be “made as an image of God, the Creator.” It is to begin at last to become a creator of one’s own life story. A person, Karol Wojtyła wrote before he became John Paul II, is the creative agent (the subject) of his own decisions. A person is one who is responsible for who he or she becomes. But the same goes for the “subjectivity” of social groups, who through their own history develop their own resources, methods, and styles for assuming more and more responsibility over their own destiny. Think of the distinctive methods and styles brought into being in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, led so creatively by Martin Luther King, Jr. Or compare it to the equally distinctive methods and styles brought into being by the energy of Solidarnoć, the Polish labor union led so creatively by Lech Walesa and guided by the ideas of Pope John Paul II.

  There is a different language in social work and in psychology for describing this same transformation from object to subject. The transformation occurs when human beings at last begin to appropriate their personal responsibility for how they live and who they are. For many years after birth, children and adolescents are more “thrown” into life in the trajectory imparted to them by their parents. As they mature, each is expected to become self-dire
cted, not merely set on a path determined for them by others. They may in fact choose to appropriate the greatest of the strengths imparted to them by good parents. They may choose to correct inadequacies and weaknesses they come to recognize in their own growing body of social experience. More and more, they become the responsible ones, the ones responsible for making themselves what their native talents and acquired virtues now allow them to be.

  As we mature, we learn that our growth toward relative (and temporary) independence entails taking responsibility for others in our family, community, and nation. We do so in the full realization that “no man is an island.” We help others because we know how dependent on them we were when we were young. And we have now visited many hospital beds and assisted-living centers. We see ourselves as social creatures, almost totally dependent for some years after infancy, and soon enough to be dependent on others as we age and just plumb wear out. We are social beings. We are all—and not only the saintly exemplars of heroic virtue described by Brandon Vogt or the paid helpers discussed here who define their profession in terms of a principle of social justice—members of one body, members of each other. We are part of a chain of “reciprocal indebtedness,” as MacIntyre would say.

  In our adolescence some accustomed habits—of dependency, passivity, simply being taken care of by others—need to be outgrown. New inner resources need to be nurtured and brought to efficacy in daily living. The boy needs to become a man; the girl, a woman. These new inner resources are what the ancients called virtues, acquired habits ready to be drawn upon when needed in daily living.

  Social justice is one of these virtues. Its development and practice occur in between the unformed, unencumbered, and naked individual and the political state—a truly vast space. That space, in all the liberty it affords, allows for the growth of different cultures and sets of historical institutions. In modern history, the coming of a new age of democratic republics, an age dependent on voluntary, creative leadership, has called loudly for the virtue of social justice.

  A free society needs majorities with the habit of forming effective associations to accomplish tasks that improve the common good. This common good may be very modest and local (together digging a new well in a village), or it may be international (as in contributing microloans that might launch millions of new enterprises around the world, each of them employing five to ten persons). By these sorts of manifestations of social justice, world poverty has been cut in half in the last twenty-five years.

  Yet there is not only material poverty. Our natural human rights are not defended by parchment barriers, James Madison wrote, but by the habits and institutions of the American people. Think of it. The civil rights of formerly enslaved black Americans were written on parchment in the Declaration of Independence. But they were not fully defended, not even by the Emancipation Proclamation, until the rise of free associations that brought into being the new institutions of the Civil Rights movement. Thousands, then millions, learned the habit of noticing a social need, loathing the gap between rhetoric and reality, and joining together to change things. Habits and institutions, conceived of and directed by a people longing to achieve liberty—longing to be “Free at last! Free at last!”—achieved a great victory in the 1960s. It was a victory for the human conscience, for a new institutional order, for social justice.

  Social justice is an energy surging in humans everywhere, an energy that must not be allowed to freeze into a partisan ideology. Humans in all their factions and all their parties have different visions of how justice ought to be institutionalized. The more who compete for social justice in the public square, openly, honestly, and with respect for others, the more likely it will be that a nation will prosper in tolerable amity and friendship.

  Such amity is the worldly form of that ultimate, freely chosen City of God, that “City on the Hill” which so many diverse peoples have sought to establish. It is that concrete reality, however imperfect, properly called Caritapolis—the City of a special kind of love, proper only to the inner life of God. Caritas is diffusive of itself, outgoing, creative, generous, forgiving (and yet demanding). Above all, caritas gives us our knowledge that we are all one. Even atheists as different as Bertrand Russell and Richard Rorty have asserted that their own form of humanism is not like that of the pagans of old (who called those not of their city “barbarians”). Rather, Russell and Rorty, as they themselves openly confessed, adopted from Judaism and Christianity the vision of humanity as one, bound together by mutual duties of compassion.

  God shows us that the essence of our existence, and the inner existence of himself, is suffering love. Quite directly, the Lord tells us that we must also suffer—take up our cross, follow him, die to ourselves. This is how God made the world. To be like God, to be close to God, is to love even in suffering.

  Thus, in showing us all this, God shows that he too plays by the same rules. He too submits in his Son to die the death of suffering love, surrounded by insults, held in contempt, scorned. In short, all this is God explaining to us: “My children this is what caritas is. You will all live through it. Embrace it. Let me pass this caritas through you, continuing to show it to all humans, and to live now through you. If you will allow me.”

  Now, this is where Catholic social, political, and economic thought begins. In caritas—in giving us a symbol and moving narrative of what a Civilization of Love is, what the Caritapolis of the future is to be like: Love until death for one another. One human family of brothers and sisters, willing to give their lives for each other.

  Yet packed into this story are four important propositions. First, all human creatures form one family, each made in the image of God, each a unique image of God. Thus, “Go teach all nations” sends us far beyond boundaries of family, nation, language, race, or religion. It signifies a global, a universal, a catholic community (one that is worldwide, concrete, visible, as well as in its deepest part invisible).

  Second, this community is not yet. It is real, in its fallenness and failures; it is concrete and can be seen with one’s eyes. Yet there is also an inner war going on, in soul after soul in the invisible filament that girdles the earth, an intensely fought battle for the enduring commitment of each to each other, and thus to God. A battle between good and evil or, more exactly, between the living God and the not-god, between friendship with God and the turning away from God. This battle in the inalienable freedom of each soul is the ground of the Christian idea of progress. This epic battle is unending. It gives history its shape and its meaning. It distinguishes progress from decline.

  Third, God offers friendship, but it must be freely accepted or freely rejected. If friendship is to burn like a fire, freedom is its oxygen. As the Society of Friends put it: “If friendship, then liberty.” The Liberty Bell rings out that God does not want the coerced friendship of slaves. The deepest root of the idea of liberty lies here, in the freedom of free women and free men before God.

  Fourth, our Creator and Redeemer is a straight talker, not a deceiver. He does not promise us a rose garden. He promises us the cross. He sees that all the inner beauty of freedom and suffering love flares out only when we see the burnt-out ember “fall, gall itself, gash gold-vermillion.”7 Only in dying to their earlier life do all beauty, all bravery, all heroism, all true love “gash gold-vermillion.” That is the way the world was made. Therefore, beware of merely romantic love, beware of false promises, beware of utopias. Keep your eye on the points of suffering at the heart of things. Watch for concrete results, not sweet talk. Caritas is a teacher of realism, not soft-headedness; of fact, not sentiment; of suffering love, not illusory bliss. To think in a utopian way is a sin against Caritapolis.

  Truly, the full end of the pursuit to dwell in a city of friendship, free conversation, and mutual respect is never quite achieved on earth, but it is widely aspired to. Each generation has a great many evils to fight against, many motes in the eyes of each of our parties, and immense amounts to learn, if we are to answer the gre
at question put before humans everywhere:

  Who are we, under these stars, with the wind upon our faces? Who are we, and what may we hope to become?

  Seeing so much evil around us—even smelling its stench—it is easy to become afraid. Therefore the most important word of social justice may be: Do not be afraid. Humans are called upon to hope. To trust that our longings for justice and mercy are not in vain. To draw strength from the example of so many heroines and heroes who have gone before us, winning small victory after small victory, even in the spiritually darkest of times.

  Examining where we have come from in history, it would be foolhardy to deny that by our nature, humans aspire upward.

  Social justice certainly does.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1.Friedrich Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice, vol. 2 of Law, Legislation & Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

  2.Cf. Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2007); Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel, 2012).

  3.Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1969).

  4.For example, there are many “social justice Catholics” for whom the term’s papal pedigree provides convenient cover for narrowly partisan politics. This tendency was evident in the attacks on Senator Paul Ryan during the 2012 election campaign. See Robert P. George’s response, “The Catholic Left’s Unfair Attack on Paul Ryan,” First Things (October 12, 2012), available at: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2012/10/the-catholic-leftrsquos-unfair-attack-on-paul-ryan. Too late for discussion in this book, Anthony Esolen, Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching (Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Institute Press, 2014), analyzes all Leo XIII’s social teaching and refutes modern distortions of Church doctrine about marriage, family, and state. We agree wholeheartedly with this brilliant work.