Last week we looked at the “laws” of social justice. Today we look at the characteristics of
social justice. Of course, instead of
reading this blog, you could always just go to the CESJ website and download a
free copy of Father Ferree’s pamphlet, Introduction
to Social Justice to read at your leisure. But if you insist —
First Characteristic: Only By Members of Groups
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| Social justice can only be done by members of groups. |
The first mark
of social justice is that it cannot be performed by individuals as individuals,
but only by individuals as members of groups.
That is
extremely important, because virtually everyone misunderstands it. The “efficient cause” (the “actor” or “agent”
who carries out the act) of all
social virtue is the individual as a member of a group, not an individual on his own ticket. Father Ferree considered this so important
that he spent four full pages in a brief pamphlet on getting the idea across.
As a college
professor for more than forty years, he found that this was the single largest
hurdle to understanding the natural law applied in Catholic social
teaching. It is not collectivism, nor is it any individual act of virtue carried
out with a vague intention to benefit the common good indirectly.
Second Characteristic: It Takes Time
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| Social justice takes time. |
Social justice
moves slowly and gradually. It requires
organization, consensus building, more organization, solidarity, attention to
the principle of subsidiarity — all the troublesome little details of working
with actual human beings rather than abstract concepts.
Personally, I
have found that this characteristic causes the most frustration to people,
particularly those activists who demand immediate results. It is easy to argue that society is unjustly
structured, and instant results are not only desired, but absolutely
necessary. The temptation in the face of
social injustice is to demand that “they” (usually the State or a power elite
of any institution) Do Something — and Do It Now!
One problem with
this approach is obvious. The activist
is absolved from all responsibility!
Once he has condemned those in power and everybody else in the immediate
vicinity for failing to correct the situation, his job is done. He can go home and comfort himself with a
feeling of enormous virtue. He has
“raised consciousness,” and can leave the dirty, tiresome and frustrating work
of actually reforming the system to Somebody Else.
There is another
problem. Those in power are comfortable
with the operational habits of the status
quo, and those not in power are powerless by definition. The former have a built-in resistance to
change, while the latter do not think it can help matters.
The problem is
that the State (among other forms of government — all “organization” requires
governance) is the quasi-efficient
cause (“quasi” because the State, as an artificial and not a natural person,
cannot be the efficient cause of anything) not of social justice, but of legal
justice. Legal justice is not a
particular virtue like social justice, and thus is not our direct
responsibility. As the State cannot
“act” (in a philosophical sense) directly on anything, it becomes pure chance
whether the desired results will be obtained by passing laws — unless the passage of laws has been
preceded by acts of social justice — which is our responsibility, not the State’s.
Third Characteristic: Nothing is Impossible
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| In social justice, everything possible becomes possible. |
In social
justice there is never any such thing as
helplessness. As Father Ferree stated, “No problem is ever too big or too
complex, no field is ever too vast, for the methods of this social
justice. Problems that were agonizing in
the past and were simply dodged, even by serious and virtuous people, can now
be solved with ease by any school child.”
Fourth Characteristic: Eternal Vigilance
The work of
social justice is never
finished. This is not the same as saying
that social justice takes a long time!
It refers to what Pius XI called “the radical instability of
society.” This means that human beings
change, conditions change, and our institutions — our human response to the
task of being what Aristotle called “political animals” — must be restructured
and reformed to meet the new conditions. This change is always happening, therefore the work of social justice is
continuous.
Fifth Characteristic: Effectiveness
Work for the
common good — the material cause of social justice — must be effective. You cannot just do something and hope it
works, or go about chanting that it would
work if only people were more (or less) than human. A mere “good intention” that the common good
be benefited is simply not good enough.
Sixth Characteristic: You Can’t “Take it or Leave It Alone”
As Father Ferree
stated, “Another corollary of this characteristic of social justice (that it is
never finished) is that it embraces a rigid
obligation.” That means that each of
us is directly and individually responsible for the common good — and we must
organize with others for the common good.
In conclusion,
as Father Ferree noted,
“The completed
doctrine of Social Justice places in our hands instruments of such power as to
be inconceivable to former generations.
“But let us be
clear about what is new and what is old.
None of the elements of this theory are new. Institutions, and
institutional action, the idea of the common good, the relationship of
individual to common good, — all these things are as old as the human race
itself. There is nothing more new in
those things than in the school boy’s discovery that what he has been speaking
is prose; nor must we ever believe that God made man a two-legged creature, and
then waited for Aristotle to make him rational. Moreover, much of the actual application of these principles to practical
life is to be found in older writers under the heading “political prudence.”
“When all that is
admitted, there is still something tremendously different and tremendously
important in this “new” understanding of social virtue in general, and social
justice in particular. The power that we
have now to change any institution of life, the grip that we have on the social
order as a whole, was always there
but we did not know it and we did not
know how to use it.
“Now we know.
“That is the
difference.”
And it all
starts with the goal of empowering people with ownership of capital so that
they have the power to become not only personally virtuous, but to restructure
the whole of the social order to conform to the precepts of the natural law.
#30#
