Social Justice: In the Vast Social Space between the Person and the StateSocial Justice: In the Vast Social Space between the Person and the State
IN THIS WHOLE INQUIRY WE HAVE COME ROUND AGAIN AND again to this thesis: Social justice is first of all a virtue, that is, a habit or disposition making it easier to perform certain social actions well, as if by second nature. In fact, Aristotle notes that a good test of how well a habit has become second nature is how one reacts when surprised and when an immediate response is called for. For there are times, not least in battle, when instantaneous action is essential, when a warrior has no time for hesitation. In a contemporary example, an enemy hurls a live grenade into a foxhole and one man instantly throws his body over it to protect his buddies. Such a man has been honing himself for bravery, to a keen edge.
Usually, we have seen, such a habit is learned through dogged repetition, in order to get control of one’s passions. Sometimes one must practice again and again, with sheer determination, to get certain actions right, so that when summoned they are done quickly as well as right, and done so habitually—that is, done in the right way, at the right time, in the right spirit, reliably, and on the ready. Football players run through plays again and again, for months, to ready themselves for spontaneous action under varied circumstances. And George Washington, as we mentioned above in chapter two, took years to master his temper. When he at first failed to control it, he kept trying to do better. In these struggles, he often needed patience with himself—and persistence—until he got it right.
But some lucky humans seem to be born with gifts of social leadership, with an ability to inspire and direct others. Still others are born quite willing to follow good leaders and to cooperate easily with teammates, each one seeing what needs to be done and each adjusting without command to common purposes. Persons of such gifts help groups get things done quickly and effectively. They are precious collaborators.
Some people are born with certain social virtues, even social graces. They are natural team players. These are a joy to work with. A few others seem born to be, in all sorts of situations, a pain in the neck. Often such players need to be tolerated, and a shrewd leader looks for a special role, out of the way from others, to assign them. Every talent is useful somewhere.
Now, in social justice, the specific actions one needs to have a habit of doing well have two characteristics. The first is calling into being free associations and giving them direction, purpose, scope, and inner drive. The second is acting with others to improve the common good of families, a local neighborhood, a city, a whole nation, the whole world. Usually, this means “to improve the common good” in some particular aspect. It is rare to be able to improve the common good in toto, even in one small department of society. Yet even a little improvement often goes a long way. It gives hope for further improvements, one step at a time.
Social justice, then, is a virtue. It is a qualitative improvement in the character of a person. It adds to that person’s social capital. It widens that person’s range of action. It infuses a new energy into the social mass.
Moreover, social justice is the preeminent virtue of free societies. It is the inner energy that engenders free societies. It puts in place an alternative to statism and to “excessive” individualism (the two greatest worries of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI).1
Some societies already have the social capital from which citizens know how to organize themselves for a multitude of social purposes. That social capital is constituted by good habits and dispositions already interiorized by many of its citizens. Where this social capital is missing, societies are demoralized, unable to stir themselves. Where it is present, societies show common will, drive, and adaptability to one another. People see what to do and start organizing right away to do it.
One favorite example of this is the response of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, within hours of the dam burst in 1889 that hit the trapped city with a cascading wall of water and debris higher than its homes. Some 600 more lives were lost in Johnstown during four hours that day than in all of Mississippi and Louisiana combined during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The next morning, Johnstown’s leading citizens and crews of workmen got together at the flood’s edge, elected an emergency government, designated certain standing structures as morgues, and sent all willing hands to dig dead bodies out of the wreckage. They also sent out word to others—not only in Johnstown but in the whole geographical area—to work feverishly to ship in 2,000 coffins. They fought off despair by beginning immediately to put up the most necessary shops, stores, and homes. The rubble piled up everywhere included train locomotives, giant trees, and smashed wooden houses, and lay thirty feet deep in the streets. The widespread habits of self-organization, insight into what to do next and in what order, and agreeable cooperation in dire need—such social capital, such a fund of social virtues—helped Johnstown to come back from three major floods: in 1889, 1936, and 1977.
Social justice, then, is the virtue that empowers individual persons (and whole peoples) to act for themselves, to exercise their inborn social creativity. This habit of building free associations is “the first law of democracy,” according to Tocqueville. It is the social habit rooted in individuals and demanded by the “new things” (the rerum novarum) of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is no wonder that this virtue could arise only late in human history, in the age of democracies, freely formed enterprises, free and independent unions, cooperatives, and social initiatives of all sorts (from town and village concerts to the worldwide Red Cross). In order for it to appear, there needed to be developed whole legions of joiners, organizers, and teams of willing volunteers to work together to achieve the social good—first in their own local, regional, and national communities, and then in the world as a whole.
Through the leadership of the popes, social justice slowly became a Christian alternative to atheist socialism and secular statism. The popes have insisted (while relying on the thinking of devoted public intellectuals of many faiths) that there is a humanism that rejects collectivism. The popes also remind intellectuals that there is a humanism which rejects a vicious form of individualism.
The vicious form of individualism, often enough visible both on the right and the left, loves the idea that there is no objective standard, only subjective truth, based upon the relativism of individual feelings and appetites. Some praise the denial of any truth except “my truth,” that is, the subjective desires of each individual. They seem not to see how this vision atomizes them, and renders them naked against tyranny. They do not recognize that their relativism robs them of any intellectual defense against thugs and torturers. Any protest they might make is simply an expression of their own tastes. If there is no truth, there can be no injustice. If there is no truth, there can be no speaking truth to power. That is why tyrants and totalitarians are relativists, love relativism, and engorge themselves on it so rapidly and without resistance.
Relativism is an invisible gas that seeps into the soul’s hunger for truth and its longing for justice, and renders them inert.
Some humans seem so terrified of being held accountable to anything beyond themselves that they cannot stomach the idea of God or truth or more-than-subjective reason. They do not want to be judged in any way, shape, or form. They do not grasp that to be human is to have the ability to judge—to judge true from false, good from evil, noble from ignoble. They expend huge efforts trying to convince themselves that to be a human is to be no more than a chimp or wolf or other animal. They boast of having ancestors who swung in trees. One can understand why some would convince themselves of this. But, as Alice von Hildebrand asked, why would anyone boast of it?
The fact is, no other species of animal but ours has banded together to build laboratories, universities, international institutions, worldwide commercial enterprises, bureaus of patents and copyrights, hospitals, orphanages, and schools for the poor. No other species seems to have social workers with high moral standards. In a word, the virtue of social justice teaches each generation to form associations, to be inventive, to be proactive, to move their society forward. That special virtue seems to be a main component of what gives humans special advantages over any other animal. Each human is personally responsible. Each is part of many communities.
We are lucky to live in an age when the virtue of social justice has captured the attention of the world. It is a virtue that was not well recognized in any age before our own. As an alternative to the immensely destructive, wasteful, anti-ecological collectivisms of the twentieth century, it is today the indispensable virtue. No society can be a free society without the widespread practice of social justice.
Bound professionally to work on the front lines, as it were, in places where social justice is barely or not at all practiced, social workers have come to recognize all too well, in the population at large, whole areas in which the lack of basic social virtues is apparent. Although social workers may not usually use the word “virtue,” they do diagnose speedily enough its many absences.
The Power of Virtues in Social Work
A virtuous doctor is one who applies her knowledge and skills with such virtues as prudence, compassion and caring, courage, intellectual honesty, humility, and trustworthiness. Pellegrino and Thomasma have proposed such a list for the medical profession, and a similar list could be developed for the virtuous social worker, a list that would add equanimity and social justice as well as charity.2 Social work, in MacIntyre’s term, is a virtue-driven profession.3 Its practice requires and develops such virtues.
Like medicine and law, social work as a profession serves many other goods important for human flourishing.4 For social work, social justice is a key virtue. Viewing persons in their social environment, social workers practice and promote the virtue of joining with others to improve life. They further the common good at several levels from family to community, to nation, and beyond.
Nonetheless, as we found in the discussion of patch and Family Group Conferencing in chapter eighteen, even those practices most requiring and promoting the virtue of social justice are seldom discussed in terms of that virtue, or any virtue at all. Yet social work has been a virtue-based profession from its beginnings, and social justice from its beginnings has been a key virtue of its practitioners. There is certainly a temptation in social work to see the world either in individualist or in collectivist terms, emphasizing individual psychotherapy in isolation from family and community, on the one hand, or making ever larger demands on the state in the name of “social justice” on the other hand. Or both, as in demands for state-enforced claims against civil society.
At its best, though, social work is neither individualist nor collectivist. Never subordinating the individual to the collective (or vice versa), it emphasizes the scope for working with others involved in a social situation as often the best way to resolve or ameliorate it. Social justice is one of the most important of these social-work virtues, and it is essential for good practice. It informs and directs the other virtues to enable people to work with others to further the common good. One of the first questions a practitioner asks is “who else is involved?” Social workers do so explicitly in the patch approach to community-centered practice, in practices like Family Group Conferencing (FGC) that find their rationale in restorative justice, and in asset-based community development. Social workers commonly understand the practitioner-client relationship as one part of a larger ecosystem of relationships, involving family, neighbors, and key local helping figures, voluntary associations, churches, schools, as well as other formal and informal agencies of care and control. In poor and disorganized neighborhoods like the one in which the Iowa patch team worked, the informal helping systems may be weak and the formal intervention of state agents, police, and professional helpers, correspondingly strong. In the Iowa patch area in Cedar Rapids, there was little housing stability (residents came and went rather than putting down roots), many single mothers and small children, few fathers or men of any kind, few churches that had stayed in place as their parishioners had moved away, low employment and low work-force participation, and few voluntary associations or informal networks. It was a neighborhood with little social capital.
The social-work task in such circumstances is not to substitute professional expertise for the care and control missing from a community that lacks in norms, networks, and relations. It is both to work with those involved to address the immediate issue in a particular family (such as child neglect) and, in the very process of doing so, to find and strengthen the caring and self-regulating capacity of the family and community. It is to address those structures and systems, formal and informal, that frustrate the ability of those involved to fulfill their moral obligations and live virtuous lives. Society will not be just until individuals are virtuous—that is, until they habitually, reliably act well toward one another. Social, legal, and cultural structures and patterns may make it harder or easier to achieve that end. Social work at its best is particularly attuned to these connections between individual and social life.
Social-work intervention, then, aims to reverse the pattern that elicited it. It aims to leave the family and community stronger, more capable of caring for, protecting, and regulating their own. In exercising the virtue of social justice, practitioners build and develop that one virtue in particular in those with whom they work: the virtue of joining with them and helping them to develop the skills and habits required to join with others to achieve common purposes.
Such a virtue-based understanding of professional helping more commonly occurs, it is true, in implicit knowledge than in formal theory or method. For reasons we explored in chapter nineteen on charity and justice, social work became uncomfortable with its origins in charity. From its early efforts to render charitable practice better organized and more scientific, social work came to professionalize practice and emphasize psychotherapy, rather than religious views of life or even the Athenian virtues of Aristotle.
In the 1960s, in reaction to this clinical emphasis and in response to the movements of the times, an activist tendency came to the fore, focusing on social change and “social justice” (understood in partisan and utopian terms). In more recent times, there has been an emphasis on what actually works in achieving the aimed-for results, on evidence-based practice and specific interventions (for example, cognitive-behavioral therapy) that are effective, brief, and inexpensive. In all these developments, the virtues had no explicit place, so talk of them became exiguous to the point of nullity. Nevertheless, the virtue of social justice did not disappear; it found expression in concepts like empowerment, partnership practice, asset-based community development, restorative justice, and social capital.
It is not surprising, then, that other professions and disciplines such as medicine and law, philosophy and psychology, were drawn to the recovery of virtue-based ethics while social work ignored it.5 On the other hand, social work has had from its beginnings a focus on human flourishing and the well-being of individuals and communities. That is, it always has been concerned with suffering in individuals, families, and communities, and conversely, with happiness as understood in Christianity (and Greek philosophy)—something inseparable from the virtues which are both necessary for and partly constitutive of human flourishing.
Jane Addams and the Settlement House residents, for example, both exercised and promoted the virtue of social justice. They built the capacity of working-class urban immigrants to fulfill their moral obligations by tapping into their own cultural resources in the new environment. (One enduring result was The Settlement House Cookbook.) They also worked as social reformers to remove obstacles to virtuous life in the cities, for example, opposing or promoting alternatives to the saloon, the spoils system, and the oppression of workers. They sought to join with others in the neighborhood to further the common good. Their work included political reform efforts, but the primary aim of their effort was to strengthen families and the associations, the intermediary groups of civil society—and not the state.
An important theme in social work, sometimes explicit, sometimes submerged, has been the particular virtues required for and developed by social-work practice. In a profession where the character of the agent has long been understood as inseparable from the professional intervention, the virtues focus attention on the character of the practitioner and the professional use of self. Recovery of the virtues, and of social justice in particular, accords well with the growing body of research suggesting the importance of the client-practitioner relationship as distinct from the specific theories or methods the practitioner utilizes. Social workers practice the virtue of social justice and hold it up as an ideal without yet avowing it or internalizing it as virtue in their own self-consciousness. For the moment, practice runs ahead of theory. Both authors of the present inquiry see this theory as putting into words what many others already practice.
The social-work example carries important lessons for how we frame social justice, the state, and civil society. In the cases of FGC and patch, we see that a too rigid dichotomy of state and civil society limits our thinking about how we can address social needs and problems. So, too, do hard dichotomies of professional and natural helping systems, of traditional prestate ways of repairing harm and those of the modern bureaucratic-professional state.
In the case of FGC, we see how informal and traditional ways of repairing harm and protecting children, such as the Maori whanau hui or the Hawaiian ho’oponopono, can inform child welfare or youth justice without substituting state for civil society or vice versa. It can build the capacity of families and communities to care for their own without the state’s abdicating its responsibility to protect children or to protect the rights of due process. The strengths of formal and informal systems can be maximized while each constrains the weaknesses and potential abuses of the other.
It is not only that a severe dichotomy between individualism and collectivism is inadequate—ignoring how they feed each other and together compress the space of civil society. It is also a mistake to dichotomize the state and civil society, as both liberals and conservatives are wont to do. We can see this if we shift scale and consider for a moment our largest social program in the United States, Social Security.
Interpreting the demographic changes since 1935, when the program became law and when the full retirement age corresponded to the life expectancy of those who reached adulthood, lies beyond the scope of this book. But it is indisputable that the informal social security derived in earlier times from rearing children to productive adulthood and instilling in them a sense of filial obligation could not today adequately provide for all. For instance, those whose incomes cannot sustain them in old age, in disability, or in the death of the family breadwinner. It may be that Social Security itself plays a role in discouraging fertility, for it delinks fertility and economic security by diminishing the need for childrearing. Social Security leads each of us to depend on the childrearing of others. Meanwhile, the tax-equivalent contribution in kind that parents make to the system is not only unrecognized, but even penalized in the allocation of benefits, which now depends on one’s earnings, not one’s parenting.6
There is much debate about the sources of major demographic changes in recent times, and about other economic and cultural changes that have made reliance on the federal tax system (and one’s own private pension and savings) more prudent than rearing one’s own children and depending on their filial piety.
The important point here is that, while the enormous program of formal Social Security managed by the federal government has supplanted to a great extent the informal social security that preceded it, neither the family nor other institutions of civil society are up to the task of taking it back. Social justice can no longer get away without great government programs or without inspiring more self-helping and associating efforts. Social justice today requires not a substitution of civil society for the state (or vice versa), but more creative ways to marry the two, in order to escape the mistakes of the past. Social invention did not end in 1936. We should be able to do some of our own.
Social work at its best has always understood that one does little good to clients—and perhaps great harm—by making them more dependent, less motivated, and less able to think through their own problems than they already were. This is as true for families and neighborhoods as for individuals. It is crucial to have great respect for their own subjectivity, to use John Paul II’s description of the singular and yet threefold capacities of the human person: to see into the failures in one’s own past, to see new alternatives in the future, and to determine to take control over one’s own identity. Helpers must respect with some delicacy those inner capacities that transform a person, a family, a community living as an “object,” merely acted upon by outside forces, into a “subject,” an active agent creating its own future.
Social-work professionals now realize not just that they do harm by doing to or for others in ways that reduce them to passivity or dependency. They also see that their professional task requires a different relationship of helper and helped. It requires restraining the tendency to control, rescue, impose solutions, and instead enabling those involved in the problematic situation to tap into their own wisdom, knowledge, and resources, to build and support the intermediary groups that occupy the vast and vital space between the bureaucratic-professional state and the individual.
In theological language, this inner transformation is a matter of grasping what it means to be “made as an image of God, the Creator.” It is to begin at last to become a creator of one’s own life story. A person, Karol Wojtyła wrote before he became John Paul II, is the creative agent (the subject) of his own decisions. A person is one who is responsible for who he or she becomes. But the same goes for the “subjectivity” of social groups, who through their own history develop their own resources, methods, and styles for assuming more and more responsibility over their own destiny. Think of the distinctive methods and styles brought into being in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, led so creatively by Martin Luther King, Jr. Or compare it to the equally distinctive methods and styles brought into being by the energy of Solidarno
ć, the Polish labor union led so creatively by Lech Walesa and guided by the ideas of Pope John Paul II.
There is a different language in social work and in psychology for describing this same transformation from object to subject. The transformation occurs when human beings at last begin to appropriate their personal responsibility for how they live and who they are. For many years after birth, children and adolescents are more “thrown” into life in the trajectory imparted to them by their parents. As they mature, each is expected to become self-directed, not merely set on a path determined for them by others. They may in fact choose to appropriate the greatest of the strengths imparted to them by good parents. They may choose to correct inadequacies and weaknesses they come to recognize in their own growing body of social experience. More and more, they become the responsible ones, the ones responsible for making themselves what their native talents and acquired virtues now allow them to be.
As we mature, we learn that our growth toward relative (and temporary) independence entails taking responsibility for others in our family, community, and nation. We do so in the full realization that “no man is an island.” We help others because we know how dependent on them we were when we were young. And we have now visited many hospital beds and assisted-living centers. We see ourselves as social creatures, almost totally dependent for some years after infancy, and soon enough to be dependent on others as we age and just plumb wear out. We are social beings. We are all—and not only the saintly exemplars of heroic virtue described by Brandon Vogt or the paid helpers discussed here who define their profession in terms of a principle of social justice—members of one body, members of each other. We are part of a chain of “reciprocal indebtedness,” as MacIntyre would say.
In our adolescence some accustomed habits—of dependency, passivity, simply being taken care of by others—need to be outgrown. New inner resources need to be nurtured and brought to efficacy in daily living. The boy needs to become a man; the girl, a woman. These new inner resources are what the ancients called virtues, acquired habits ready to be drawn upon when needed in daily living.
Social justice is one of these virtues. Its development and practice occur in between the unformed, unencumbered, and naked individual and the political state—a truly vast space. That space, in all the liberty it affords, allows for the growth of different cultures and sets of historical institutions. In modern history, the coming of a new age of democratic republics, an age dependent on voluntary, creative leadership, has called loudly for the virtue of social justice.
A free society needs majorities with the habit of forming effective associations to accomplish tasks that improve the common good. This common good may be very modest and local (together digging a new well in a village), or it may be international (as in contributing microloans that might launch millions of new enterprises around the world, each of them employing five to ten persons). By these sorts of manifestations of social justice, world poverty has been cut in half in the last twenty-five years.
Yet there is not only material poverty. Our natural human rights are not defended by parchment barriers, James Madison wrote, but by the habits and institutions of the American people. Think of it. The civil rights of formerly enslaved black Americans were written on parchment in the Declaration of Independence. But they were not fully defended, not even by the Emancipation Proclamation, until the rise of free associations that brought into being the new institutions of the Civil Rights movement. Thousands, then millions, learned the habit of noticing a social need, loathing the gap between rhetoric and reality, and joining together to change things. Habits and institutions, conceived of and directed by a people longing to achieve liberty—longing to be “Free at last! Free at last!”—achieved a great victory in the 1960s. It was a victory for the human conscience, for a new institutional order, for social justice.
Social justice is an energy surging in humans everywhere, an energy that must not be allowed to freeze into a partisan ideology. Humans in all their factions and all their parties have different visions of how justice ought to be institutionalized. The more who compete for social justice in the public square, openly, honestly, and with respect for others, the more likely it will be that a nation will prosper in tolerable amity and friendship.
Such amity is the worldly form of that ultimate, freely chosen City of God, that “City on the Hill” which so many diverse peoples have sought to establish. It is that concrete reality, however imperfect, properly called Caritapolis—the City of a special kind of love, proper only to the inner life of God. Caritas is diffusive of itself, outgoing, creative, generous, forgiving (and yet demanding). Above all, caritas gives us our knowledge that we are all one. Even atheists as different as Bertrand Russell and Richard Rorty have asserted that their own form of humanism is not like that of the pagans of old (who called those not of their city “barbarians”). Rather, Russell and Rorty, as they themselves openly confessed, adopted from Judaism and Christianity the vision of humanity as one, bound together by mutual duties of compassion.
God shows us that the essence of our existence, and the inner existence of himself, is suffering love. Quite directly, the Lord tells us that we must also suffer—take up our cross, follow him, die to ourselves. This is how God made the world. To be like God, to be close to God, is to love even in suffering.
Thus, in showing us all this, God shows that he too plays by the same rules. He too submits in his Son to die the death of suffering love, surrounded by insults, held in contempt, scorned. In short, all this is God explaining to us: “My children this is what caritas is. You will all live through it. Embrace it. Let me pass this caritas through you, continuing to show it to all humans, and to live now through you. If you will allow me.”
Now, this is where Catholic social, political, and economic thought begins. In caritas—in giving us a symbol and moving narrative of what a Civilization of Love is, what the Caritapolis of the future is to be like: Love until death for one another. One human family of brothers and sisters, willing to give their lives for each other.
Yet packed into this story are four important propositions. First, all human creatures form one family, each made in the image of God, each a unique image of God. Thus, “Go teach all nations” sends us far beyond boundaries of family, nation, language, race, or religion. It signifies a global, a universal, a catholic community (one that is worldwide, concrete, visible, as well as in its deepest part invisible).
Second, this community is not yet. It is real, in its fallenness and failures; it is concrete and can be seen with one’s eyes. Yet there is also an inner war going on, in soul after soul in the invisible filament that girdles the earth, an intensely fought battle for the enduring commitment of each to each other, and thus to God. A battle between good and evil or, more exactly, between the living God and the not-god, between friendship with God and the turning away from God. This battle in the inalienable freedom of each soul is the ground of the Christian idea of progress. This epic battle is unending. It gives history its shape and its meaning. It distinguishes progress from decline.
Third, God offers friendship, but it must be freely accepted or freely rejected. If friendship is to burn like a fire, freedom is its oxygen. As the Society of Friends put it: “If friendship, then liberty.” The Liberty Bell rings out that God does not want the coerced friendship of slaves. The deepest root of the idea of liberty lies here, in the freedom of free women and free men before God.
Fourth, our Creator and Redeemer is a straight talker, not a deceiver. He does not promise us a rose garden. He promises us the cross. He sees that all the inner beauty of freedom and suffering love flares out only when we see the burnt-out ember “fall, gall itself, gash gold-vermillion.”7 Only in dying to their earlier life do all beauty, all bravery, all heroism, all true love “gash gold-vermillion.” That is the way the world was made. Therefore, beware of merely romantic love, beware of false promises, beware of utopias. Keep your eye on the points of suffering at the heart of things. Watch for concrete results, not sweet talk. Caritas is a teacher of realism, not soft-headedness; of fact, not sentiment; of suffering love, not illusory bliss. To think in a utopian way is a sin against Caritapolis.
Truly, the full end of the pursuit to dwell in a city of friendship, free conversation, and mutual respect is never quite achieved on earth, but it is widely aspired to. Each generation has a great many evils to fight against, many motes in the eyes of each of our parties, and immense amounts to learn, if we are to answer the great question put before humans everywhere:
Who are we, under these stars, with the wind upon our faces? Who are we, and what may we hope to become?
Seeing so much evil around us—even smelling its stench—it is easy to become afraid. Therefore the most important word of social justice may be: Do not be afraid. Humans are called upon to hope. To trust that our longings for justice and mercy are not in vain. To draw strength from the example of so many heroines and heroes who have gone before us, winning small victory after small victory, even in the spiritually darkest of times.
Examining where we have come from in history, it would be foolhardy to deny that by our nature, humans aspire upward.
Social justice certainly does.