"My concern is that she would use the agency for the purpose of promoting social justice," [GOP Senator Judd] Gregg said [about Elizabeth Warren] on ABC's "Top Line" webcast.
Is social justice now a verboten subject in the new, post-Palin conservative movement? And, if so, why?
As a Catholic and Christian, do I not have a moral obligation to promote social justice? The Catechism treats social justice as part of the life in Christ. Pope John Paul II wrote that "peace is built on the foundation of justice." He situated "daily work and struggles for justice in the context of bearing witness to Christ the Saviour."
Granted, many progressive Catholics conflate the moral obligation to pursue social justice with the teachings of liberation theology. This is probably why people like Glenn Beck dismiss social justice as just a code word for a left-liberal political agenda. Granted also, Elizabeth Warren's politics probably overlap a lot with adherents of liberation theology.
As John Paul himself illustrated, however, it is possible to have a commitment to social justice without embracing the socialistic politics of liberation theology.
Conservative Catholic scholar Michael Novak powerfully addressed this point in his essay Social Justice: Not What You Think It Is. He quotes Pope Leo XIII, for example, as teaching that:
Therefore, let it be laid down in the first place that in civil society, the lowest cannot be made equal with the highest. Socialists, of course, agitate the contrary, but all struggling against nature is in vain. There are truly very great and very many natural differences among men. Neither the talents nor the skill nor the health nor the capacities of all are the same, and unequal fortune follows of itself upon necessary inequality in respect to these endowments.
Novak further explained that:
Friedrich Hayek wrote a really powerful little book called The Mirage of Social Justice, in which he picked up on the way the term "social justice" was being used in the first half of the 20th century. He said "social justice" had become a synonym for "progressive," and "progressive" in practice means socialist or heading toward socialism. Hayek well understood the Catholic lineage of social justice, how the term had first appeared in Catholic thought, until almost 100 years later it became dominant on the secular Left.
The Popes, Hayek noted, had described social justice as a virtue. Now, a virtue is a habit, a set of skills. Imagine a simple set of skills, such as driving a car. The social habit of association and cooperation for attending to public needs is an important, newly learned habit widely practiced, especially in America. Social justice is learning how to form small bands of brothers who are outside the family who, for certain purposes, volunteer to give time and effort to accomplishing something. If there are a lot of kids who aren't learning how to read, you volunteer for tutoring. ...
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.
Interestingly, Timothy Dalrymple argues that if we adopt Novak's definition "the Tea Party movement is in fact a social justice movement."
The great majority of those attending the rallies would tell you that the policies they advocate are for the common good of all, including the poor. On the conservative way of seeing things, the interests of the haves and the have-nots are not as easily divisible as Wallis portrays them. Much though it may strain the credulity of the trained progressive, Tea Partiers sincerely believe that taking more and more money away from society's most productive citizens, and thus disincentivizing productivity and diminishing the resources for private investment; spending more and more in Washington, and thus making economic decisions on political criteria and expanding a federal government that is rife with self-serving inefficiency and corruption; and giving more and more through government distribution, fostering a culture of dependency and vote-buying, is poisonous to our national character and economy and will adversely affect everyone, the poor most of all.
(HT: Joe Carter)
If Senator Gregg wants to worry that Warren will pursue a left-liberal political ideology that will negatively impact the economy, I'd probably agree. But his disdain for the concept of social justice is sadly misplaced.
