In
the last few postings (with time out for Christmas, New Year’s, and the
year-end news roundup), we’ve been going over Pope Francis’s Urbi et Orbi (“The City and the World”)
Christmas message. Although brief, there
was a great deal of substance. In our
opinion, however, there was not enough — His Holiness highlighted some serious
problems, but gave no more than a hint of a possible solution, and that inadequate
(again, in our opinion).
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| Orestes A. Brownson |
Putting together
what Pope Francis said and the extract from Father Ferree’s pamphlet, Introduction to Social Justice, however,
the picture starts to become much clearer and in focus. It becomes obvious that there is no single “one
step” or “one size fits all” solution to any social problem. This is because “man being by nature a
political animal” (Aristotle), any viable solution must have both individual
and social aspects.
The art of
politics, after all, is to balance the individual and social aspects of human
nature without one taking over the other.
Thus, as Orestes Brownson noted with respect to the United States,
The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is
chosen of God for the realization of a great idea. . . . Its idea is liberty,
indeed, but liberty with law, and law with liberty. Yet its mission is not so
much the realization of liberty as the realization of the true idea of the
State, which secures at once the authority of the public and
the freedom of the individual — the sovereignty of the people without social
despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy. In other words, its mission
is to bring out in its life the dialectic union of authority and liberty, of
the natural rights of man and those of society. The Greek and Roman republics
asserted the State to the detriment
of individual freedom; modern republics either do the same, or assert
individual freedom to the detriment of the State. The American republic has been instituted by
Providence to realize the freedom of each with advantage to the other. (Orestes
A. Brownson, The American Republic: Its
Constitution, Tendencies and Destiny.
Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2003, 3.)
Understanding man
as a political animal, we realize that what we regard as social problems are really political problems, that is, problems
having both an individual and a social aspect.
If we forget that, we tend to focus either on particular individuals to
the detriment of the common good (usually understood as the collective), or on
the collective and ignore individuals.
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| Jeremy Bentham |
Of course, the “error
within the error” here is that the common good is neither an amorphous
collective good, e.g., the Benthamite
“greatest good for the greatest number,” nor the aggregate of individual
goods. It is, rather, that vast network
of institutions within which human beings as political animals exercise their
natural rights and acquire and develop virtue — “pursue happiness” — the “medium”
of life, or environment within which human beings as political animals realize
their individual goods; the common good is not itself an individual good
(obviously, or it would not be the common
good).
Consequently,
every political problem — what is
usually understood as every social
problem — necessarily has a two-part or a two-step solution. There is an individual part or step, and a
social part or step.
As we might
expect, the individual aspect of a political problem, being the most immediate
and coherent, is the more easily grasped and consequently where most people
stop. Obviously, if people are hungry, you
feed them. If they are naked, you clothe
them. And so on.
That, however, is
not social justice, but individual justice and (more often) charity fulfilling
— not replacing — justice. Yes, many
people are absolutely convinced that the practice of what the Catholic Church
calls “the corporal works of mercy” is “social justice,” and that individual
charity has been redefined as “distributive” or “social” justice, but they are
wrong, sometimes disastrously and tragically so.
Why “disastrous”
and “tragic”? Isn’t doing good a good
thing? Isn’t the fundamental precept of
the law to do good and avoid evil?
Yes, but it is how one does good that is the proper
matter of social justice. Just as human
beings have individual habits of doing good and doing evil that we call virtues
and vices, respectively, we also have social habits that we call “institutions”
— and the common good is made up of the vast network of social habits
(institutions) wherein we either grow in virtue, or degenerate into vice — the
system.
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| Fr. Ferree: "Social problems require social solutions." |
Thus, just as we
make ourselves better individuals by practicing individual virtues and
performing (among other things) the corporal works of mercy directed at
individual good, we become better members of society by performing acts of
social virtue directed at the common good.
If we are “broken” and in need of reform, we work on ourselves. If the social order is broken and in need of
reform (restructuring), we organize and work on our institutions.
Understanding
this, the proper course of action when confronted with a “political” problem, i.e., one affecting individuals as a
result of flaws in the institutions of the social order, becomes clear. First address the immediate individual needs
and relieve human suffering as far as you are able. Then, you attack “the problem behind the
problem,” whatever institutional flaws caused the problem you want to
ameliorate.
For example, if
people are starving, giving them food for the day solves the immediate,
individual problem: hunger. It does not,
however, solve the underlying problem that, if it remains unresolved, will mean
that you have to keep feeding people every day.
You must therefore ask yourself why
people are starving — and avoid the simplistic “Because they have no food.” That much is obvious, and gets you nowhere.
On looking into
the matter, we find — for example — that people are starving because they
cannot afford to buy food. They cannot
afford to buy food because they have no money.
They have no money because they are not productive. They are not productive because they do not
own the means of production.
Since most
production of marketable goods and services in the modern work is carried out
by capital (land or technology), and human labor is being replaced by advancing
technology at an accelerating rate, the obvious systemic solution is to put as
many as possible of the people in the position of becoming and remaining
capital owners.
We necessarily
conclude that to stop with individual measures such as the corporal works of
mercy, however essential they may be in the present state of society, is a
serious error. We must also organize and
work to solve the underlying, institutional problems that are causing the
individual problems, or we have done nothing.
As it says in the Bible, “[W]hen you shall have done all these things
that are commanded you, say: We are
unprofitable servants; we have done [only] that which we ought to do.” (Luke 17:10)
So what,
specifically, should we do in the fact of “political” problems?
That is what we
will look at tomorrow.
#30#
