We've heard a lot about Social Justice lately. When used in a positive way, it is often connected with the move toward public recognition and equal treatment for historically disenfranchised peoples, including Blacks, Latinx, and Queer persons. When used in a negative way, Social Justice is portrayed as a kind of Leftist "trojan horse" to inflict good hearted people with guilt and shame and even debt because of historic policies and events they had nothing directly to do with. So, is "social justice" just some kind of newly devised left-wing catch phrase designed to browbeat Americans into policies which are at odds with the foundational principles of our civilization?
Not at all. Social justice is a kind of "label" or "bucket" to contain a whole host of concerns about how to order society for the common good. It is a somewhat new label for a very old concept. We see this idea of using new "labels" to describe older concepts in religion and science as well. For instance, the Bible never uses the label "theology", and yet the word "theology" describes all of the ways the Bible helps us see God, and God's relations with the world. In fact, the Bible never uses the words "Trinity" or "Incarnation" or "Democratic" or "Virtuous" or even "Biblical". And yet, most Christians would say these are absolutely key descriptions of Biblical concepts. Likewise, no ancient literature ever spoke of chemistry or fluid dynamics or astrophysics or plate tectonics. And yet, when we read ancient accounts of natural phenomena in Earth, Sky, and Sea, we can use these modern scientific labels to explain what was happening. In a similar way, "Social Justice" is a label that points us toward a basketful of concepts related to living in Community together.
One of the great themes of world literature is how we create a good and just and noble society. In our culture, when we simply speak of "justice", it often has very individual and punitive overtones: What is the right punishment when someone commits this or the other crime? But the great Wisdom Traditions that we build our civilization upon have a broader view of justice than this. When we look to ancient Hebrew literature, the word "misphat" means not only individual justice and righteousness (that's usually "tsedeq"). Rather, misphat refers to the structures and practices that make up a just social order. When we turn to Greek philosophy and early Christian literature, "dikaios" and "dikaiosune" refer not only to individual righteousness, but also the social practices and expectations that make an entire people "just". A very helpful video summary of the Biblical materials on Social Justice can be found here.
Likewise, in ancient China, "li" and "yi" refer to social propriety, expectations of benevolence toward others, and skill in crafting actions which have moral fitness according to various concrete social situations. In the Indian religions, every person has a "dharma"--- a set of prescribed rituals and duties and responsibilities to perform according to their social location and stage of life-- which work together to uphold "rita", which is the right ordering of the social and physical world order. In both the Dharmic traditions of India, and the Confucian tradition in East Asia, the individual has a social responsibility to others which is part of upholding the "Mandate of Heaven" and finding one's place within the cosmic pattern that holds reality together. This is much broader than a private and retributive sense of justice as meting out proper punishment or rewards for actions.
And when we make a turn toward Western Civilization with its roots in the Roman Republic, we find a rich Latin literature that reflects on "Iustitia", along with the rewards that come from publicly noble and virtuous action, along with shame and sanction that come from failing to fulfill the social responsibilities of "Iustitia". From these Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Roman roots, the great tree of the Western Canon of Literature grows. To distinguish a merely individual and punitive sense of "justice" from the rich web of social interconnections and responsibilities indicated in the Canon of Literature, the shorthand phrase to use is usually "Social Justice". We may come up with a better term for it in the future. But for now, this is it.
I know this term has become uncharacteristically charged in our current culture. But it is just a label for discussing a very deep and wide foundational concept in both Eastern and Western Civilization and Literature. In our current culture, it is not as if one "side" has a sense of Social Justice and the other "side" doesn't. It is that both "sides" have DIFFERENT conceptions of Social Justice, and we need to unpack and discuss and debate them. Or to put it in a metaphor from Biblical scholar NT Wright: Labels are like suitcases packed with meaning. In our culture, we tend to take the suitcases and try to beat the hell out of each other with them. Instead, we would be better served by opening our suitcases side by side to compare and contrast what we have packed inside them.
If we have been trained by the media or society to be positively OR negatively "triggered" by the use of the phrase "Social Justice", we may want to examine that. If we hear someone use the phrase and automatically assume they are "one of us", or hold the same values we do, we need to stop and unpack our suitcases. People often have very different understandings of what is justice and for whom. Likewise, if we read the word "Social Justice" and want to immediately silence or avoid the conversation, we must wonder if we have been tricked into censorship. The easiest way to avoid difficult conversations about Social Justice is to silence any discussion about it reflexively. Like the "Newspeak" in George Orwell's novel "1984", we need to wonder if there are powerful vested interests that do not want us investigating justice, because it is not in their interests.
The concept of Social Justice is wide and vast, and it is foundational to civilization, and many people have it packed in many different ways. The term Social Justice is a topic of discussion from the Right Wing Federalist Society (a Conservative Libertarian think tank) to the Left Wing scholar Cornell West (a Christian Socialist). All of us who have a vested interest in strong and cohesive society are well served by entering into discussions and analyses of what our foundational texts show us when they discuss the constellation of issues contained in the phrase "Social Justice". If we ignore discussing Social Justice and its implications for our communities and cultures, we run the risk of impoverishing our ethical imagination, and stunting the growth and development of our society.
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