Yesterday
we talked about the nature of truth. That’s just a starting point, however. Nowhere is the problem of truth, and the
application of truth, more evident today than in the question, “What is virtue?”
What
many people seem to want these days is the feeling
of virtue without the trouble of having to be
virtuous, and of having their own subjective opinions validated as right even
in the face of objective knowledge to the contrary.
This
necessarily involves an attack on truth itself or (more often) an attack on
those who attempt to stand by the truth.
There is no easier way to feel virtuous without actually having to
acquire and develop virtue than to find fault with others — especially when
those others are somehow perceived as having more, or being better, than you.
In
this way envy is transformed from the ugliest of the Seven Deadly Sins into the
highest virtue. This pseudo virtue usually
goes by the name of “social justice.”
Is
that what “social justice” really is, however?
Of course not.
Social
justice is the virtue directed to the common good. It involves removing barriers through
organized effort that inhibit or prevent full participation in the institutions
of the common good, such institutions being the social aids to the acquisition
and development of virtue.
Social
envy (to coin a term), however, is concerned with pointing out and attacking
the presumed sins or flaws of others that are allegedly causing the decay of
society. It is always the other guy who
is the problem, never the complainer.
Social
envy gives an enormous feeling of virtue to activists by convincing them that
they are not evil people and sinners such as those against whom they demonstrate
and protest. It justifies the extremely
aggressive pacifism we see in many of today’s movements for something they seem
to think is peace and justice:
“Two men went up into the temple
to pray: the one a Pharisee and the
other a publican. The Pharisee standing,
prayed thus with himself: O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest
of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, as also is this publican. I fast twice in a week: I give tithes of all
that I possess.” (Luke 18:10-12)
As
CESJ co-founder Father William Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., described this sort of
pseudo social justice, and, incidentally, the importance of the product the
media are selling in pandering to this sort of thing,
“The favorite ‘social technique’
of our own time is the ‘peaceful’ demonstration, especially when media coverage
is likely or can be arranged. Subsidiary aspects of the demonstration are
boycotts, sit-ins, organized lobbying pressures, single-issue ‘advocacy’ and
then — crossing an invisible line which is hard to define and harder still to
hold — civil disobedience, violent demonstrations, and, ultimately, terrorism!
“Despite the social intent of all such techniques, and
their almost universal arrogation to themselves of the terms ‘Social Justice’
or ‘Justice and Peace,’ these techniques are all radically individualistic. There are several criteria which can be applied to
test this:
“1) They are directed immediately to some specific solution already determined in the mind
of the ‘activist’; they are never a willingness to dialogue with other and
differing opinions on what the problem
really is.
“2) They are always intensely concerned with the methodologies
of pressure, not with those of competence in the matter in question.
“3) They all require ‘time out’ from the day-to-day social intercourse of life, and raise the question of how many
objects one can juggle at any one time without dropping some or all.
“4) Any ‘demonstration’ is by definition a demand on someone else to do something. It takes for granted that whatever is wrong is the
personal work of someone else, not
the common agony of all; and it always knows exactly who and where the someone is.
“All this can be summed up in the observation that the ‘social
activist’ as we have seen them so far, is an earnest amateur by profession.
“This is not to say that such ‘professional amateurism’
is always wrong. It is wrong as a normal
methodology. If it obeys the same principals which would permit a just war, or
the insurrection against an entrenched tyrant, more power to it! But it is a
hopeless and hence unjust substitute for the patient and full-time organization
of every aspect of life which we have seen in the necessary implementation of
Social Justice.”
According
to natural law scholars and papal social teachings, the source of the massive
disruption we see in the social order and the root cause of many of the
problems we see afflicting people and nations is the shift from certain
knowledge (reason) as the basis of the social order, to subjective opinion
(faith). This is the case whether we’re
talking about religious faith in God, or secular faith in the State.
