Recently someone posted a rather insightful comment on
Facebook to the effect that society will only change (for the better) when
people are motivated by good will, and that the best way to build this good
will is prayer, fasting, and love. Those
are all very good things — properly understood and implemented. The problem is that they are not, in and of
themselves, sufficient to get the job done.
As Pope Pius XI explained — and not just to Catholics and
other Christians, but to everyone of good will — you need three essential
elements to change the social order. If
any one of the three is missing, there may be some success, but ultimately the
effort will fail:
1) A change of heart by at least two people — to begin with. Man being a “political animal,” effective
social action begins with, obviously, a social act: organizing for the common
good. Before you can do that, however,
you need at least two people who come together on the basis of shared values
and goals.
This is where the prayer, fasting, and love come in. Even to want to organize with others you need
to be oriented in the right direction, and this comes from a change of heart,
an “aha!” moment, similar in some cases to getting knocked off your horse while
riding to Damascus. A change of heart is
not, however, an end in itself, politically speaking. (It may be all that’s needed for an
individual, but we are talking social change, not individual reform.)
2) Acts of social justice to change specific institutions of
the social order. This is (sort of) what
the great English constitutional scholar A. V. Dicey talked about in his book
with the less-than-snappy title, Lectures
on the Relations Between Law and Public Opinion in England in the Nineteenth
Century (1905).
Despite the title, it is a very profound book. Dicey pointed out that, unless what he called
“public opinion” (much more than we understand by the term) was behind a law,
the law would, in general, either have no effect, or would have an entirely
different effect than what was intended.
Only by chance or coercion would an “unpopular” (again, a
loaded term with a different meaning) law have the intended effect. Acts of social justice are directed toward
institutions by members of that institution who have undergone a change of
heart, to restructure that institution so that it complies with its original
intent and the demands of the common good, what we can think of as the social
manifestation of the natural law.
Virtues are habits of doing good. “Good” is whatever is in conformity with
nature, the “natural law.” Institutions
are “social habits,” i.e., ways of
doing things. Depending on how they are
structured, they may either be vicious or virtuous.
Above all, the system within which the institutions subsist
must encourage virtuous action. The
system cannot coerce virtue, or (obviously) it wouldn’t be true virtue. If, however, the system does not encourage
virtue, or even actively encourages vice, then it is not doing the job the
system was set up to do: help everyone
within the system to become more fully human.
3) Only when “the public” is prepared to accept a new law on
the intended terms and also accept the fundamental premise(s) behind the law
will a law be effective, i.e., have
the intended effect. This is why, for
instance, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was the most widely disobeyed law in
American history until Prohibition. The
people affected by the law simply did not accept the basic assumption
underlying the law: that some people could own other people as private property.
Thus, if we want a law abolishing slavery, alcohol, or
anything else to be effective, first we must change people’s “opinion” that
there is something wrong with what we are abolishing.
The second step is to address the institutions that make slavery
or alcohol seem necessary or desirable. The
third step is to empower people, economically and politically.
The chief and best way of doing this is through widespread capital ownership because
“power naturally and necessarily follows property.”
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