What is social justice, anyway?

Michael Novak defines how we have historically understood what has become a politically loaded term.

“For its proponents, “social justice” is usually undefined. Originally a Catholic term, first used about 1840 for a new kind of virtue (or habit) necessary for post-agrarian societies, the term has been bent by secular “progressive” thinkers to mean uniform state distribution of society’s advantages and disadvantages. Social justice is really the capacity to organize with others to accomplish ends that benefit the whole community. If people are to live free of state control, they must possess this new virtue of cooperation and association. This is one of the great skills of Americans and, ultimately, the best defense against statism.”

However, a new age has taken over the language and its connotations.

And Novak achieves both an exhaustive and succinct analysis of what social justice is believed to be culturally and politcally, and what it was originally perceived to be by the church.

His piece is long, but here’s a condensed version:

“The first law of democracy, [Alexis de] Tocqueville wrote, is the law of association. If you want to free people, for them not to be swallowed up by the state, you have to develop in them the virtue of cooperation and association. It’s not an easy virtue to learn at first, but it soon becomes a vast social phenomenon.

“It’s not at all uncommon for 30 college students to show up for a presidential campaign in, say, New Hampshire and organize the whole state for their candidate. They’ve never done that before, but they know how to use a Rolodex, and they can very soon organize an entire state. It’s a skill they learned. It’s one of the great skills of Americans.

“In America, we mostly go to meetings. Parenthood, you discover, is essentially a transportation service. Your kids go to so many meetings in a day that you need a sign on the refrigerator telling you which times everybody is scheduled for what and where they have to be. Americans are good at going to meetings, and that’s a tremendous skill to have. You can send a group of Americans in the Peace Corps, even a dozen of them, and they’ll figure out what they need to do and organize themselves how to do it. You don’t have to write detailed orders from headquarters. Association is a tremendous skill to have, but it’s essential for democracy.

“And that’s what, in a word, social justice is–a virtue, a habit that people internalize and learn, a capacity. It’s a capacity that has two sides: first, a capacity to organize with others to accomplish particular ends and, second, ends that are extra-familial. They’re for the good of the neighborhood, or the village, or the town, or the state, or the country, or the world. To send money or clothes or to travel to other parts of the world in order to help out–that’s what social justice is: the new order of the ages, Rerum Novarum.”

Catholics know that to be the title of a papal encyclical on the subject, a powerful one.

Now this is a key point:

“Finally, it’s important to note that this notion of social justice is ideologically neutral. It’s as common to people on the Left to organize and form associations, to cooperate in many social projects, as it is to people on the Right. This is not a loaded political definition, but it does avoid the pitfall (on the Left) of thinking that social justice means distribution, égalité, the common good only as determined by state authority, and so forth. It also avoids the pitfall (on the Right) of thinking of the individual as unencumbered, closed-up, self-contained, self-sufficient.”

Here’s another take….mine. These days, Christians tend to draw a line between ‘the peace and social justice crowd’ and ‘the pro-life crowd’, as if it’s an either/or proposition. It’s both/and. So those bumper stickers that say ‘If you want peace, work for justice’ imply (whether the car owners know it or not) that they’re speaking for universal human rights, no exclusions.