Book Review: What is Social Justice?

What is Social Justice

By George J. Marlin on The Catholic Thing on February 20, 2016

The term “social justice,” a potentially useful term, has – as we well know – been taken hostage by progressives in both the secular world and the Church. They have made it a catchall term to aid them in imposing ideological formulas and newly conceived rights on our common institutions, or to promote their favored causes de jure.

These “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs in digital parlance), who support state-enforced redistribution, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street agendas, also portray their opponents as evil people opposed to all that is good, and often employ tactics designed to silence or repress those who dare to disagree.

Writing about these “dangerous pseudo-progressive authoritarians” in a New York Observer article titled “The Totalitarian Doctrine of ‘Social Justice Warriors’” journalist Cathy Young concluded, “Because SocJus is so focused on changing bad attitudes and ferreting out subtle biases and insensitivities, its hostility to free speech and thought is not an unfortunate by-product of the movement but its very essence.”

In an effort to rescue “social justice” from this fate and to clarify its true meaning, Templeton Prize winner Michael Novak, and Paul Adams, Professor Emeritus of social work at the University of Hawaii, have co-authored an impressive book, Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is.

The authors contend that “social justice,” rightly understood, is not a state of public affairs but personal virtue. To explain that premise and “to seek out a fresh statement of the definition of social justice – one that is true to the original understanding, ideologically neutral among political and economic partisans, and applicable to the circumstances of today,” the book is divided into two parts.

The first, “The Theory” of social justice is written by Novak and the second part, by Adams, is devoted to “The Practice.”

Social Justice was introduced as a new virtue by Pope Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno. He called this form of justice “social” because its aim was to improve the common good of a “free and responsible people” by employing social activities closely related to the basic unit of society: the family. Activities could include the creation of local religious and educational facilities and the administering of essential services.

This virtue is also expected to reach ends that cannot be actualized by the individual alone. People are expected to learn three skills: “the art of forming associations, willingness to take leadership of small groups, and the habit and instinct of cooperation with others.”

Social justice wasn’t meant to be dependent on large, impersonal, domineering, and cumbersome federal and state bureaucracies that tend to smother individual and local initiatives. Rather it is a habit of the heart that brings people together to form associations that provide “social protection against atomistic individualism, while at the other pole it protects considerable civic space from the direct custodianship of the state.”

Novak concludes his portion of the work by stressing:

Both Catholic social teaching and the social-work empowerment tradition reject the individualist hypertrophy of the autonomous unencumbered self no less than the hypertrophy of the state. The space – of civil society or mediating structures – between individual and state is the one in which conscience is shaped and the virtues on which it depends are developed through practice and habituation. The virtue of social justice also requires and develops that space in which citizens join together in pursuit of the common good.

As for Catholic social justice in action, Professor Adams describes it as the pre-eminent virtue of free societies. Social workers are virtue-driven and are called to act with people “to improve the common good of families, a local neighborhood, a city, a whole nation, the whole world.”

Social work, Adams argues, is neither individualist nor collectivist, but is devoted to strengthening the caring and self-regulatory capacity of the family and to reduce dependency on the “bureaucratic-professional state.”

Adams greatest fear is that social workers who adhere to Judeo-Christian teaching on life, death, family, and marriage will be driven from their professions. Conscience exemptions are being eliminated in most medical and counseling fields. Conscience has been redefined as merely “personal values that must be left at the office door when duty calls.”

Today clients or patients are sovereign. Any legal practice they demand, the social profession must provide or participate in providing. The professional’s right and duty, Adams observes, “to use her judgment about what is required or indicated or morally permissible is nullified.” The balance of rights between professional and client no longer exists, however, and client empowerment “radically disempowers, even dehumanizes, the professional.”

All too often social service professionals and healthcare workers must either execute policies or perform procedures they find morally degrading – or find a different line of work.

The war on conscience aims at destroying subsidiary associational life, particularly in Church and family. And if Social Justice Warriors succeed, religious freedom will be reduced to freedom of worship and the Church will have to abandon a prime corporate responsibility of caring for the poor, sick, homeless, and orphans.

Because battles over conscience in the public square are so daunting, Novak and Adams conclude that the most important words of Catholic social justice must become: “Do not be afraid.” They call on us to aspire upward and 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 darkest of times.”

True social justice demands nothing less.

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By George J. Marlin

George J. Marlin, Chairman of the Board of Aid to the Church in Need USA, is an editor of The Quotable Fulton Sheen and the author of The American Catholic Voter, and  Narcissist Nation: Reflections of a Blue-State Conservative. His most recent book is Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy.

The Tragedy of Christian Persecution

The Tragedy of Christian Persecution

Published by Michael Novak on RealClearReligion on December 5, 2015:

If you are going to read only one book on the most massive violations of religious liberty -- happening today, even as you read this -- or you feel it's your duty to read only one thing in solidarity with this immense suffering, Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy by George J. Marlin is the one to keep at hand.

The chairman of Aid to the Church in Need covers eight nations of the Middle East, from Turkey to the Sudan, in some painful detail. Behind this detail, lie many hundred thousands of Christian families faced with instant death (or sexual enslavement) or two other choices (1) renounce their hard-won historical faith and submit to the authority of Allah, or (2) enter into dhimmitude, that half-life of paying fines for just being allowed to live and of keeping one's faith completely private, invisible and silent.

But before Marlin gets into all that, he writes two long chapters, one of the birth and rise of Christianity in the Middle East, the other the birth of Islam and the rise of Islamic terrorism 600 years later. Islamic terrorism has been endemic from the beginning, although in some centuries in intermittent remission.

Both sections of the book are essential background reading for our time and also very useful to keep at hand for reference. It is important to keep in mind the many varieties of Islam, and their internal conflicts from country to country in these widely variegated cultures.

Some of the most illuminating material awaits at the end, which brings together voices on Christianity and Islam by informed and experienced Christians, some of them Arabs, who have lived through this period for many decades. For instance, Fr. Wafik Nasry expresses the anguish of seeing so many Christian, Muslim and secular people today "refuse to face reality."

"They pretend," he goes on, "that the radical members Al-Qaeda and ISIS and many other Muslim militant political groups have nothing to do with the true Islam." He adds: "But these pretenders are not facing and/or dealing with reality, but with a figment of their own imaginations. They are dealing with a lie of th own making and live in the realm of wishful thinking. They either pretend not to know or do not really know." Both Muslims and Christians, he insists, "need calmly to face the reality of violence in Islam."

Fr. Nasry gently asks, but is the source of violence in Islam the same as the source of violence in Christianity?

For a Christian, the word "terror" has a negative connotation. Jesus constantly preaches peacefulness, meekness, and the injunction not to reply to a blow with blow of one's own, but rather the resolution "to turn the other cheek." These injunctions are practiced by a cloud of witnesses, among them martyrs who accept death peacefully down through the ages.

For a Muslim, "terrorism" is something mandated directly by God in the Kuran, practiced by Muhammad himself, and persistently both practiced and openly incited by imams down through Islamic history since the seventh century.

Then, summarizing the findings of the Muslim director of Yafa Center for Study and Research, Nasry lists five aims of terror in Islam. In cruelly brief form they are: (1) to punish infidels for unbelief (2) to frighten infidels into keeping their treaties with believers (3) to be a definitive tool of divine might. Q8:12 "I will inst terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite them above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them." (4) to cut as a two-edged sword: striking fear into infidels, and protecting believers from their evils and (5) to put an end to oppression, tumult, and division. Fr. Nasry applauds those who try to bring Islam "up-to-date, but regrets that they have so far been very broadly rejected.

I strongly urge that you put Marlin's book on your list for New Year's resolutions: buy it, read it, and keep it nearby for reference.

FROM THE ARCHIVE: Review of Writing from Left to Right

FROM THE ARCHIVE: Review of Writing from Left to Right

Published by Brian C. Anderson in The Washington Times on December 4, 2013

Catholic theologian, social thinker, diplomat, political speechwriter, journalist, influencer of prime ministers and popes, author of dozens of important books — Michael Novak has lived an extraordinary public life. "Writing from Left to Right" is his entertaining and wise memoir of that engagement with his age, and of his movement across the political spectrum.

Born in 1933 to a working-class Slovak family in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Novak describes two stories from his childhood that colored his later politics. The first is of listening with his father to a crackling radio broadcast in 1939, announcing Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland. "Study all you can about the Nazis and the communists," his father advised. "These will be the two movements that will shape the next forty years." The second is of his Uncles Johnnie and Emil. Both worked at Bethlehem Steel and both offered a supply of gruff common sense. The adult Mr. Novak's anti-totalitarianism and distrust of out-of-touch elites found a source in these early experiences.

"Writing from Left to Right" briefly chronicles Mr. Novak's dozen years as a seminarian and his initial efforts, after leaving religious life, to become a writer, including publishing a first novel, "The Tiber Was Silver," which sold 30,000 copies.

Another chapter tells of his graduate-student days at Harvard University, where a moving encounter with the Catholic existentialist Gabriel Marcel gave him a lifelong interest in the human "person," a being "able to reflect on her own past, approve of some parts of it, disapprove of others, and choose among various roads into the future." The Protestant thinker Reinhold Niebuhr, relentlessly warning about the unintended consequences of human action, became a second enduring influence from this period.

The memoir really takes off when Mr. Novak enters the political arena. He wrote speeches for Democratic stars Eugene McCarthy, Sargent Shriver, George McGovern and Bobby Kennedy, all of whom come off as decent and impressive men. A Stanford professor at the time, Mr. Novak received an invitation from Kennedy, then seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, to fly to Los Angeles to be with him as the California primary returns came in — the very night the candidate was fatally shot.

Five years earlier, Mr. Novak had been in Rome, covering the unfolding of Vatican II, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. That night, he and his wife Karen would dine with JFK friend John Cogley and "The Other America" author Michael Harrington, trying to make sense of the horror.

As these names attest, the Michael Novak of the '60s was on the left. Several things began to push him right. One was religious. Mr. Novak sympathized with Vatican II's progressives, who wanted to renew the Catholic faith, which they felt had become too defensive and closed to new insights into the truth. Mr. Novak's early book "The Open Church" embodied this vision.

Mr. Novak grew troubled as Vatican II began to be interpreted as calling for a complete transformation of the faith, along the lines laid down by secular elites. Such an agenda was distant from the "probing" traditionalism of Vatican II's leading progressives, future popes Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, Mr. Novak believed, and, in his view, calamitously misguided.

By the early 1970s, those secular elites were rubbing Mr. Novak the wrong way in other ways, too, he recounts. "I had begun to notice the appearance of two lefts — one that included my whole family and what it represented, and the other a 'new' left, based on a suddenly emerging 'constituency of conscience,' no longer rooted among people who worked with their hands and backs."

Wealthy, self-satisfied, partisans of a new, more "sensitive" and relativistic morality, the new leftists looked down on Mr. Novak's "unmeltable ethnics" — the working-class, predominantly Catholic, and culturally conservative Americans of Eastern and Southern European descent who'd eventually become the Reagan Democrats. Mr. Novak rejected the new liberalism's cultural and political views, though he still considered himself a man of the left.

Mr. Novak's rightward drift was complete after he immersed himself in the study of political economy and came out a partisan of the free economy — albeit an economy molded by a morally serious culture and robust democratic political institutions. Joining a right-of-center think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, in 1978, where he would remain until his recent retirement (and where I worked for him for several years during the 1990s), Mr. Novak read and read Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Max Weber, Alexis de Tocqueville and a vast literature of other social thinkers.

The research culminated in one of his most audacious books, 1982's "The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism," a powerful defense of democratic capitalist societies based on the very real goods they provided, including the rule of law, respect for the person and widespread prosperity. Margaret Thatcher and Poland's Solidarity leaders, among many others, would draw inspiration from it.

"Writing from Left to Right" covers lots more: Mr. Novak's conflicted views on the Vietnam War; his late-'60s run-in with left-wing campus lunacy at the experimental college of the State University of New York at Old Westbury; his stints as Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights; his tireless efforts during the 1980s and 1990s to build a consensus for welfare reform and to find new approaches to help the poor; and his profound respect for Pope John Paul II, whose encyclical on the free society, "Centesimus Annus," he clearly influenced.

Throughout, Mr. Novak's tone is conciliatory. He draws warm portraits of allies, but he's also magnanimous toward political opponents. This marvelous political memoir deserves the widest possible readership.

Brian C. Anderson is editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal and author of "Democratic Capitalism and its Discontents" (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007) and "South Park Conservatives" (Regnery, 2005).

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