Social Justice: A Nice Idea That Destroys Humanity

Social Justice is an attempt to insert Christian charity into the concept of justice so that justice is then understood to include both the traditional Aristotelian-Biblical notion of justice and the Biblical notion of charity (love) within itself. To strive for social justice, then, is to strive for a society in which love has been institutionalized, which is to say, removed from the sphere of personal moral decision and incorporated into the impersonal, automatic functioning of the social system. If a woman loses her husband, she does not need neighbours or the local church to rally around because a welfare cheque automatically arrives in her mailbox from the government. What was once occasional, haphazard and personal has been rendered perpetual, organized and institutional.

This transference of the necessity of private charity into the realm of bureaucratic institutions is an attempt to implement a Utopia in which the social system is so good that no individual need be good. What goes naturally with such a society is the release of the individual for hedonistic satisfaction of the impulses of the lower nature – immediate gratification of the sexual urge being the primary form this lifestyle takes. Sex has been disassociated from family, economics, honour and duty and thus has been animalized. As the nanny state grows we observe that first the family becomes unnecessary and then, finally, the church becomes irrelevant. The all-powerful, provident, parental State now presents itself as the source of all goods and the provider of all needs. When the mask finally falls off, the tyrannous, ravenous Beast is revealed as the Idol which demands worship and stands in the place of God.

Social justice can have a perfectly innocuous and respectable meaning, which is totally different from that meaning described above. It can simply mean justice applied to social relations, as opposed to justice applied to the individual qua individual. It such cases it is basically redundant because justice is justice whether applied to the individual as individual or to the individual as a member of society. The traditional Aristotelian and Biblical notion of justice is “giving to each one what he is owed.” In fact, one can see from this definition that since there is a person who owes and a person who is owed, all justice is actually social. Prefixing the adjective “social” to the noun “justice” thus effects nothing except a redundancy unless the point is subtly to change the meaning of justice from “what one is owed” to “the right to be loved.”

No one has a “right” to be loved because to love is a free moral choice and to say that Person A has a right to be loved is to say that someone has the duty to love him. If Person A has the right to be married, then some person has the duty to marry him. But marriage is an act of persons who freely contract with one another and, in fact, one partner contracting out of duty or coercion actually annuls and makes invalid the marriage contract. So no one could possibly have the “duty” to marry anybody and, therefore, no one could possibly have the “right” to be married. Just so, no one has the “right” to be loved. Love is personal, free and the very opposite of a duty.

If love can be combined with justice in the way that those who promote the idea of social justice advocate, then either love will be reduced to justice, which will result in a hard and rough set of social relations or else justice will be reduced to love, which will result in justice being turned into sentimentality. Sentiment is meant to temper and supplement justice, not define it. And love must pick up where justice leaves off if society is to be leavened by personal relationships based on charity.

In literature, the best depiction of a society in which the idea of social justice has completely triumphed is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. There is no crime, no poverty, no sickness, no unemployment, nothing to fear and nothing to live for except mindless, sensual pleasures. It is far more horrifying than the “hard totalitarianisms” of the twentieth century. It is dehumanizing and animalistic. Social justice sounds nice, but turns out to be the destruction of our true humanity. “There is a way that seems right to man, but the end thereof is destruction.”

Loving the Sinner and Hating the Sin

Christians are supposed to love the sinner and hate the sin.

But to many of our contemporaries this sounds like a concession to weakness. They consider hate itself to be wrong and evil. If we had a perfect moral character we would be completely free of hate. The passion of hatred itself is in itself evil and to be struggled against and, if possible, overcome completely. Hate is bad; thus we have "hate speech" and "hate crimes." An action that it bad in itself becomes even worse if it is motivated by hate. The passion of hatred is the basic problem.

But what if loving the sinner requires hating the sin? Is not the Christian calling to love what God loves and hate what God hates? The prophet Amos urges: "Hate evil, love good. Maintain justice in the courts" and the Apostle Paul echos the thought in Rom. 12:9 when he says: "Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good." To fail to hate the sin may be to fail to love the sinner because not to hate the injustice perpetrated against the person (or by the person) is to fail to love the person.

Liberal society is based on a weak form of tolerance, rather than on love. We are urged to tolerate one another. Thus Christians who speak out against abortion, same-sex "marriage" or assisted suicide are condemned as "hateful." But it would appear that what is wanted by those committed to contemporary liberalism is not love, but simply an absence of hatred that is indistinguishable from indifference.

Should we be indifferent to our fellow men? Should we, as Christians view the very passion of hatred itself as the problem because it leads to involvement, advocacy and pleading with others to refrain from doing evil? Our conundrum is that if we cultivate indifference, we short circut love. Should the Church accept direction from contemporary society at this point and refuse to love or to hate in the name of a tolerant indifference to the sin around us?

It would seem that we can err equally in two ways; either by failing to love actively (and thus becoming indifferent to the plight of those in need) or by failing to hate sin passionately (and thus becoming indifferent to the plight of those in need).

Our contemporaries would tell us that hating the sin is the last remnant of a judgmental, non-loving attitude and that, even though it is not as bad as hating the sinner, it also should be abandoned if we will to achieve liberal perfection. But our goal as Christians cannot be a state of total indifference to sin. Our goal is to love sinners as Jesus Christ has loved sinners. And to do that we must hate the sin every bit as much as we love the sinner.

Stop Watching, Start Loving

Here is an excellent article by Mark Shiffman from Front Porch Republic on "Why We Do Not Own a Television." He tells the story of his own journey and quotes one of my favorite writers: Simone Weil. Here is a snippet in which Shiffman summarizes and applies Weil's insights:

"In my own effort to make sense of my intuitive reservations about the medium, however, it has helped me to turn to one of my favorite writers, Simone Weil. One important thing she points out is the vital connection between love and attention.

The quality of our life depends to a great extent on the quality of our love. The quality of our love depends on the attention we give to other human beings and to our natural surroundings. Attention is not only a sign or expression of love. In an important way, it is the very substance of love, a central part of the very practice of loving. By receptive attention, we make space in ourselves for the presence of something or someone else. If we do not do this, we do not love.

What does television do to our habits of attention? It habituates us to see less, to see it less completely, and to engage it less actively and imaginatively. Our attention is strung along moment by moment, from one thing to the next. What we pay attention to is managed, packaged, enclosed in a frame according to someone else’s priorities for what we should see. We are encouraged to be passive and impatient at the same time.

- snip -

By habituating us to follow along impatiently and passively, to filter and frame the world before we’ve had the chance to see anything, television damages our capacity to love well, to love others and the natural world for what they are rather than for what they can do for us. Television is, after all, one of the great tools and purveyors of consumer culture. The culture of consumption and exploitation has every interest in encouraging our self-centered and unreflective egoism and our oblivion to the loveliness of the natural world. Why should we be surprised if the medium that is its most powerful tool encourages the same vices?"

We have never had cable and we have never had a TV that worked very well all through our married life. But I have not watched anything but Hockey Night in Canada (maybe 20 times per year) for the past five years. There is always reading I don't have time to do - so why bother?. But the strongest argument against TV is undoubtedly the harm it does to our ability to love, as expressed above. This seems to me to be a classic case of technology making our lives worse.

Procreation and the Sexual Revolution

In his book, Love and Responsibility, published in Polish in 1960, Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, provided a critique of the main ideas of the sexual revolution and re-stated in modern, philosophical terms, the rationale for the Christian vision of love and marriage. I will try to re-state it as clearly as possible.

In Chapter 1 of this great work, he does some rather technical work that establishes a terminology with which he can undertake his constructive work later in the book. First, he distinguishes between two usages of the verb "to use." The first meaning of "to use" is the straightforward case in which one person employs another person as a means to an end. Wojtyla agrees with Kant that to a person must always be an end and never merely a means. Persons must always be subjects and never be reduced to the level of objects. So when a man seduces a woman gains sexual pleasure from the use of her body only to drop her as soon as the conquest is over, he is using her. This is what often happens in the casual sexual encounters of today's "hook-up culture."

The second meaning of the vert "to use" is more complicated. It occurs when two people decide it is in their mutual interest to allow the other use of their bodies for the purpose of each individual gaining sexual pleasure from the other. In such a case, each uses the other as a means to his or her own end. The fact that there is consent and reciprocity does not change the fact that the relationship is based on a utilitarian ethic and so never rises to the level of a personal act. The two persons do not treat each other as persons for each is merely a means to the other's end. The relationship is based on what each gets out of it; it is ultimately selfish and inherently unstable. As soon as one decides that his or her "needs" are no longer being met, the relationship is in danger of being ended.

Another reason why the relationship is not really personal is that the two persons give themselves to the other with reservation and are not really ontollogically changed by the giving and receiving of the gift of the self. The fact that the focus is on what I get out of it means that I remain in charge of myself even though I give my body to the other person. This kind of relationship is what we call "affectionate sex" as opposed to "casual sex" and characterizes the boyfriend-girlfriend relationship in which people mistake mutual use for real love. But many marriages never rise above this level either.

For Wojtyla, the truely conjugal act is a personal act when it occurs in a relationship ordered by the "personalistic norm." For this to occur the two people must treat each other as persons, rather than as mere means to selfish ends. How can this happen? To get at Wojtyla's answer, I find it helpful to think about Aristotle's definition of friendship. Friends have common objects of love and interest. To be a friend is to share a common goal or concern or value. In such a case, one is not using the other for one's own selfish interest; rather, both share the same goal and work toward it. St. Augustine uses this idea of "common objects of love" to define the difference between the city of man and the city of God.

Wojtyla suggests that a man and a woman enter into marriage with the common goal of procreation and this is what draws them together into a common work. Procreation here must be understood broadly as the conception, birth, raising, educating and nurturing of children in a Christian home so that they eventually embrace a personal and mature Christian faith and themselves establish Christian families of their own. Such a work is inter-generational, life-long work and involves being immersed into a web of relationships that henceforth define one's identity; one becomes not only wife or husband, but also father or mother, uncle or aunt, grand father or grandmother etc. One's vocation is deterimined in large measure by this common goal and one's life is lost in the pursuit of it.

When a husband and wife make procreation in this sense their common goal, certain occasions require that one of them submit him or herself to the other, while other occasions demand that both submit themselves to the common goal. But even when the husband is called upon to submit himself to his wife it is for the sake of their common goal, and the same is true when she is called to submit herself to him. Neither uses the other for his or her own selfish ends; rather the two are joined together in working for a common end. Ironically, this kind of relationship is far more "egalitarian" than relationships that remain stuck at the second level. (Jesus apparently was right that it is only by losing our lives that we really find them, which is a paradox those stuck at the level of utilitarianism can never grasp.)

In order for the standards of the personalistic norm to be met, the common goal must be (1) objective, (2) good and (3) freely chosen. Procreation, the transmission of life, is an objective good and it is freely chosen when people enter into the covenant of marriage. Procreation, therefore, is the common goal that raises the marriage relationship to the personal level. It is what allows the husband and wife to engage in sexual relations without using one another and so it is what allows them to relate to each other as persons. It is only when this happens that Wojtyla is willing to call the relationship love. To reduce love to the level of the utilitarian use of another's body for the fleeting pleasures of physical and emotional intimacy is to reduce love to a sub-personal level and love must be personal to be itself.

This is why procreation must be integral to and central in the marriage relationship. True love is fruitful and open, not sterile and closed in upon itself. True love is not pleasure; pleasure can never be more than a by-product of true love. The sexual revolution is the attempt to de-couple sex from reproduction, love from procreation, pleasure from the context of a personal relationship. Fornication, cohabitation, adultery, divorce, "same sex marriage," "trial marriage, "open marriage," serial monogamy, polyamory, and prostitution are all ways of separating procreation from sex and none of them makes sense except in the context of the contraceptive mentality.

Contraception, it seems, is the crucial factor in training us to conceive of sex as non-procreative and therfore the point at which we begin to conceptualize sub-personal sex as a good, rather than a temptation. It is, of course, only an illusion of the good and not a real good. But the fact that people today conceptualize sub-personal sex as a good goes a long way toward explaining why chastity and the Christian vision for marriage are so hated - and why modern society is so enamoured with artificial contraception.