Thursday, June 28, 2012
If there were a Hall of Fame for political rhetoric, the
phrase “social justice” would deserve a prominent place there. It has the prime
virtue of political catchwords: It means many different things to many
different people.
In other words, if you are a politician, you can get lots
of people with different concrete ideas to agree with you when you come out
boldly for the vague generality of “social justice.”
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catchword
can stop thought for 50 years. The phrase “social justice” has stopped many
people from thinking for at least a century — and counting.
If someone told you that country A had more “social
justice” than country B, and you had all the statistics in the world available
to you, how would you go about determining whether country A or country B had
more “social justice”? In short, what does the phrase mean in practice — if it
has any concrete meaning?
In political and ideological discussions, the issue is
usually whether there is some social injustice. Even if we can agree that there
is some injustice, what makes it social?
Surely most of us are repelled by the thought that some
people are born into dire poverty, while others are born into extravagant
luxury — each through no fault or virtue of his own. If this is an injustice,
does that make it social?
The baby born into dire poverty might belong to a family
in Bangladesh, and the one born to extravagant luxury might belong to a family
in America. Whose fault is this disparity or injustice? Is there some specific
society that caused this? Or is it just one of those things in the world that
we wish was very different?
If it is an injustice, it is unjust from some cosmic
perspective — an unjust fate, rather than necessarily an unjust policy,
institution, or society.
Making a distinction between cosmic justice and social justice
is more than just a semantic fine point. Once we recognize that there are
innumerable causes of innumerable disparities, we can no longer blithely assume
that either the cause or the cure can be found in the government of a
particular society.
Anyone who studies geography in any depth can see that
different peoples and nations never had the same exposure to the progress of
the rest of the human race. People living in isolated mountain valleys have for
centuries lagged behind the progress of people living in busy ports, where both
new products and new ideas constantly arrive from around the world.
If you study history in addition to geography, you are
almost forced to acknowledge that there was never any real chance for all
peoples to have the same achievements — even if they were all born with the
same potential and even if there were no social injustices.
Once I asked a class of black college students what they
thought would happen if a black baby, born in the middle of a ghetto, had
entered the world with brain cells the same as those with which Albert Einstein
was born.
There were many different opinions — but no one in that
room thought that such a baby, in such a place, would grow up to become another
Einstein. Some blamed discrimination but others saw the social setting as too
much to overcome.
If discrimination is the main reason that such a baby has
little or no chance for great intellectual achievements, then that is something
caused by society — a social injustice. But if the main reason is that the
surrounding cultural environment provides little incentive to develop great
intellectual potential, and many distractions from that goal, that is a cosmic
injustice.
Many years ago, a study of black adults with high IQs
found that they described their childhoods as “extremely unhappy” more often
than other black adults did. There is little that politicians can do about that
— except stop pretending that all problems in black communities originate in
other communities.
Similar principles apply around the world. Every group
trails the long shadow of its cultural heritage — and no politician or society
can change the past. But they can stop leading people into the blind alley of
resentments of other people. A better future often requires internal changes
that pay off better than mysticism about one’s own group or about “social
justice.”
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