Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is. Paul Adams
itself from the rules of Obamacare that it legislated for ordinary people. Down the ages, humans have easily relaxed into soft living, free bread and circuses, and the “soft tyranny” of allowing higher powers to pay their way for them. The government is like the Greyhound bus driver: Leave the driving to us!
Besides, experience shows more and more that in attempting to produce happy lives for the public—good housing, good health, safe neighborhoods, good pay, good jobs, long-term financial security, good dental care, and so on—government lacks the concrete and detailed intelligence to manage all possible contingencies, personal failings, and fluctuating economic conditions. Big government is too gigantesque to be an adequate nanny. It cannot even pay its own debts. It can seldom be honest with those who must pay for its largesse. In due course, it runs out of money before it fulfills all its ever-expanding list of promises. Many who claim to be pursuing “social justice” (spending more government money) are not paying for their vaunted generosity out of their own money; they are spending the money of generations yet to come. Some generosity! Some social justice!
Worse still, big government and big business are tremendously encouraged to collude in going outside the law in order to profit both. It is a major disgrace to business that there exists such a thing as “crony capitalism,” or “crapitalism.” This thing may look like capitalism on the surface, and it certainly includes real (and even some famous) businesses. But it is really corruption and abuse of the system. Government officials—presidents, governors, and legislators—want at least some powerful allies in the business world to support their major initiatives, and they also want political contributions for their campaigns. Some companies want competitive advantages for themselves; some, exceptions in the law; some, special protections or shields against costs (taxes owed or otherwise). So some political leaders and some business leaders buy each other off; they trade advantages; they scratch each other’s backs. Such conduct is against the rules and violates the fundamental commitments of each—principles of both government and business. It violates the rules of the separation of systems, and also the checks and balances of the American founding. It even violates the rules of the free market (which Adam Smith noted that business people are often prone to do, when it is to their advantage, and when they are not checked by competition). To call this “crony capitalism” is not damning enough.
To correct such abuses, in which government is also involved, the fundamental democratic remedy has always been for citizens to organize themselves, protest, and campaign for a change in the laws. In this way, the virtue of social justice is prior to actual change in the law. Put otherwise, behind every change in the laws lies the practice of social justice among many individuals. Rightly understood, social justice is a social virtue learned in painstaking practice by individuals—a social virtue both in its method and in its purposes. It is a noble habit truly worthy of the name “virtue.” It is the living energy of the practice of democracy in America. It stands among the “habits of the heart” that Tocqueville so highly praised. It is, in fact, the habit that Tocqueville singles out as the “first law of democracy”: the habit of forming associations in order to attend to the public needs of a democratic people.7 It is a distinctly new and modern habit, made possible—and made frequent in daily practice—only by the new institutions of liberty in politics and economics.
This new political economy aims at creating wealth in every part of the population. Adam Smith defined its goal as “universal opulence.”8 It also creates political space for the widespread practice of virtues of association, invention, cooperative work, and personal creativity. Mobs drift together as lonely and unconnected individuals, Tocqueville pointed out. Their habits are not reasoned, ordered, or cooperative. Their passions easily and often turn destructive. It is through habits of association, Tocqueville shrewdly noted, that a “mob” is shaped into “a people.” The habits and practices of social justice transform unattached individuals into community-minded individuals. Social justice so understood fuels the human dynamism of a creative economy, a thriving civil society, and the inner form of a democratic republic.
Since a numerical majority left to itself is easily stirred into a mob, one of the gravest dangers to a peaceful democratic republic is the tyranny of a majority. To constrain such tyranny by the rule of law, and to check and balance the factions latent in a majority, the form of government the American founders sought is better described as a “republic” than as a (purely majoritarian) “democracy.”9 A republic embodies checks against the majoritarian rule of an irrational mob. The principle of association is thus essential to the new political economy, both to its political part and to its economic part. The American founders had the conceit to think of their new system as a model never seen before on earth, a new form of political economy bound to be imitated around the world, properly thought of as the “new order of the ages,” the Novus Ordo Seclorum. This was a huge conceit on the part of the founders of a fragile nation of fewer than 4 million citizens. For the next fourteen years, the Americans were barely able to hold their new nation together, and barely able to pay its debts. What chutzpah they showed in calling theirs a “model [without precedent] on the face of the globe.”10
It took more than a hundred years before the Holy See began to take notice of the new lessons being taught to Europe by the American experiment. Leo XIII was delighted to study an ornamented copy of the U.S. Constitution presented him by Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, and Pius XII, in the face of the dire circumstances of Europe at Christmas of 1944, commended the practice of democracy as the best check on tyranny and best protector of human rights.11 In Centesimus Annus and elsewhere, John Paul II made abundant use of concepts such as the consent of the governed, checks and balances, the separation of powers, free associations, the cause of the wealth of nations as knowledge or know-how, and other forms of human capital. More than once—in Denver, in Baltimore, and at his reception of a U.S. ambassador to the Holy See—John Paul II stated the moral purposes and achievements of the American republic in eloquent terms.12 Benedict XVI urged Europeans to study the model of religious liberty achieved by the United States, in contrast to the increasing secularization of European society.13
IT IS IN THE CONTEXT of the twenty-first century, both for the Catholic Church universal and for the United States, that Paul Adams and I begin our inquiry. We begin with a peek at how the secular elites who run our media, our universities, and our courts use the term “social justice” nowadays. Then we lay out the case put by the severest critic of the term “social justice,” Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek. After that, in chapter four, we add an ironic observation: At first, Hayek had derided “social justice” wrongly understood, but then he turned around and put into practice what might be called “social justice rightly understood.” A delicious irony in intellectual history!
From there, we turn to the sixteen principles articulated by Catholic social thought in the teachings of the preceding 125 years of social-justice popes.
Six Secular Uses of “Social Justice” Six Secular Uses of “Social Justice”
SO NOW LET US EXAMINE THE TERM “SOCIAL JUSTICE” AS IT IS currently used in the contemporary secular academy and media. I count at least six different connotations or meanings, while recognizing that each spills over into the others in greater or lesser degree.
It is striking how little reference is made to the Catholic role in introducing “social justice” into contemporary economic debates. It is also striking that little attention is paid to the question of why a secular-atheistic world, born of chance and moral insignificance, should care about the poor and the vulnerable (at least some of the most vulnerable) in the first place. And why it should imagine that a moral scheme such as “equality” has some structural and ethical bearing on human affairs. The notion