Terms in context

Through and since the last election, we have increasingly heard terms used in campaigns and press conferences that resonated because they were familiar. But they’re being applied in an oddly uncomfortable way, so there’s growing dissonance between what we hear, and what those familiar words now mean.

Michael Novak breaks this down in a talk he gave last month on “The Summons of Freedom”, which First Things has turned into a three-part summary clarifying these terms.

First, Social Justice.

To which genus does social justice belong? Is it a virtue? Is it a vision of a perfectly just society? Is it an ideal set of government policies? Is it a theory? Is it a practice?

Is social justice a secular, nonreligious concept? Many secular sociologists and political philosophers use the term that way, trying to tie it down as closely as they can to the term equality in the French sense, in which the word égalité also means the mathematical equal sign.

Or is social justice a religious term, evangelical in inspiration? Has social justice become an ideological marker that favors (in the American context) progressives over conservatives, Democrats over Republicans, and social workers over corporate executives?

And which writer was the first to use the term? In what context was he writing, and in connection with what social crisis?

Aha, I love great sleuthing. Especially when it involves words and how they’re used.

Novak historically traces two radically opposed social ideals: socialism and radical individualism. And the third way (or new response) Pope Leo XIII called for in his encyclical Rerum Novarum.

The pope noted that because the family has always been the most central and intimate institution for handing down the faith, the new fractures and stresses in the family demanded that the Church enter into the battle for the shape of the future. Leo XIII saw that new institutions and new virtues among individuals would be required for the new times. For specific reasons that he carefully spelled out, he feared the socialist state. He also feared the radical individualism that, he predicted, eventually would drive the undefended individual into the custodianship of the state.

Good time to revisit this. Novak’s conclusion:

Social justice is practiced both by those on the left and those on the right. There is, after all, more than one way to imagine the future good of society; and humans of all persuasions do well to master the new social virtue that assists them in defining and working with others toward their own visions of that good.

The “Common Good”, which is the subject of the second part.

Not only Leninism and Stalinism but also fascism and Nazism exalted the collective good over the good of the individual and coerced the sacrifice of individual purpose for the sake of the communist, fascist, or Nazi collective future…

An important point lies embedded here. We often use the words individual and person interchangeably, but there is a distinction to be made. Statist ideologies have set out to diminish the individual in the name of the common good; the Church affirms the dignity of the person.

Continuing on the Church’s view of the person…

In 1961 it was Karol Wojtyla, the young bishop of Krakow, who, in two long letters to the preparatory commission for Vatican II, suggested that these two themes, the person and the common good, ought to undergird all the work of the council. Later, as pope, he described the common good as “not simply the sum total of particular interests; rather it involves an assessment and integration of those interests on the basis of a balanced hierarchy of values; ultimately, it demands a correct understanding of the dignity and the rights of the person” (Centesimus Annus, 47).

But, as Novak points out, achieving the common good is a moving target.

Naturally, when questions of practical wisdom are directed to pluralistic peoples, there arise not only many competing ways of identifying the temporal, earthly common good, but also many competing ways of discovering how best to achieve it. In these matters, therefore, to assert that “X” is the common good is not to close the question but to submit it to the competition of ideas, which is essential to a free society.

That requires an openness to the exchange of differing ideas.

This is why the achievement of the temporal common good—That “sum,” in the words of Gaudium et Spes, “of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment” —requires full measures of civility, of humility, and of the willingness to admit mistakes and learn from them. It is through such acts of self-government, in fact, that we achieve true personal liberty…

Which is the subject of part three in this clarification of terms.

“By its liberty, the human person transcends the stars and all the world of nature,” Jacques Maritain once wrote. No one has reflected more deeply on the phenomenology of the human person than Karol Wojtyla—John Paul II. The person, in his view, is an originating source of creative action in the world. The human person is able to reflect on his or her own past, find it wanting, repent, and change direction. He or she is able to reflect on possible courses of action in the future, to deliberate among them, and to choose to commit to—and take responsibility for—one among those courses.

Only the human person is free to choose which among his or her many impulses to follow. An animal’s freedom is to do what simple instinct impels. A human’s freedom is to discern a higher, more complex, and more demanding rationality in the field of action. A human person is free to become a gentle master of all his or her instincts, so as to choose appropriately among them. He or she is free, in short, to do what a person ought to do.

But personal liberty has been redefined in the language of ‘rights’.

In our time, alas, many people have come to think of human liberty as the ability to flow with their instincts, let go of restraint, and do what they feel like doing. Such people like to invoke animal images of their dream of liberty: They are “born free” like a lioness on the African plains or “free as a bird.” They look on animal nature as innocent and unrestrained, separated from social customs, traditions, mores, and moral rules imposed from outside the animals’ own instincts, urgings, and longings…

Another way of describing this difference is to say that animal freedom is given to us with our instincts. But human freedom must be wrested from our instincts—cultivated, learned by practice, gained slowly by trial and error. For the most part, human freedom is taught to us by spiritual guides, by favorite teachers, by historical narratives, and by the moral example of our parents or loved ones. Animal freedom, with its contradictory impulses, often generates war within the breast. Human freedom derives slowly as we learn to find, within a large number of instincts, the most fruitful inner order that brings not only peace, but also wisdom.

We need this wisdom to resist the latest efforts to restrain human freedom in the name of the common good.

Personal liberty is a fragile achievement, and a single generation can decide to turn out the lights, surrender, and walk away from it.

It is by this fragile and precious liberty that (in the words of Jacques Maritain) “the human person transcends the stars and all the world of nature.”

Don’t surrender.