The adjective that economist Friedrich Hayek famously called a
“weasel word” is alive and well in the feel-good phrases social
business, social justice and the social
gospel.
In all three of these phrases, the common weasel word
sucks some of the essential meaning out of what it modifies by
implying that business, justice, and the Christian Gospel are
a-social, or even anti-social, until conjoined with a mysterious
something else. If only the confusion were of merely academic
interest. Unfortunately, the failure to see that business, justice
and the Gospel are intrinsically social has led to all kinds of
mischief in people’s efforts to organize society — most recently
in the Circle of Protection promoted by Jim Wallis and his friends
on the left.
First, consider business. This area of human endeavor
brings together various people and capital to create goods or
services for trade in a marketplace. In a free economy, people
enter these relationships voluntarily in pursuit of
win-win exchanges.
Now it’s true that greedy, unscrupulous businessmen exist,
but this no more contradicts the social nature of business than
sinners in a church, square dance, or Rotary Club contradict the
social nature of churches, square dances, and Rotary
clubs.
The notion of social business adds to all of this
a visibly charitable element. If done wisely, these
business-charity hybrids serve a positive social good, but it’s
important to remember that the charitable element isn’t uniquely
social. Both charity as charity and business as business are
social. Likewise, both encourage human flourishing if done
thoughtfully and ethically, and both damage people and communities
if done stupidly or wickedly.
The social gospel is a less trendy
term than social business, but it’s still a go-to word for
some Christian pastors, as evidenced by a
recent column in the
Oregonian where United Church of Christ minister
Chuck Currie links Occupy America, “the common good of all,” a “new
Great Awakening,” and “the fundamental principles of biblical
justice” with a call to “preach a Social Gospel.”
I’m all for spiritual renewal and the common good, but the
term social gospel leaves the impression that the ordinary
Christian Gospel is some sort of Gnostic religion — without a
horizontal plane extending through the flesh and blood and toil of
human society — until properly incarnated by good-hearted
socialists. The notion is odd in the extreme. Christianity played a
pivotal role in the birth of political, economic, and religious
freedom in the West, and was crucial in establishing institutions
like the university and the hospital. At a more obvious level, the
Gospel involves a billion or so people getting together every few
days in things called churches in anticipation of what’s
supposed to culminate in an enormous cosmic wedding
feast.
The third term, social justice, is unlike the
other two in its having a justifiable raison d’être. It stretches
back to 19th century Catholic social thought and was used in the
context of nuanced explorations of law, ethics, and justice.
Unfortunately, this nuance and precision usually falls away in
popular usage, and the term has been co-opted by the left to imply
that ordinary justice is a mere tool of the ruling elite, with the
real deal being “social justice.”
This impoverished meaning needs to be addressed. If a
society extends justice to the rich and well-connected but allows
the poor to be bullied and swindled by corrupt players inside and
outside of the government, the problem isn’t unsocial justice but a
lack of justice. If the poor in many developing nations can’t get
access to credit or the courts because they can’t register their
businesses, and they can’t register their businesses because they
don’t have the bribe money and connections to navigate a byzantine
regulatory maze, the problem is injustice, plain and simple. Such a
society doesn’t need a social brand of justice any more than a poor
neighborhood without stores needs a social grocery store.
The neighborhood needs an ordinary grocery store, and the unjust
society needs basic justice. Grocery stores and justice are already
intrinsically social.
More than accurate semantics is at stake here. Often the
popular call for “social justice” boils down to an ill-conceived
call for coercive wealth transfers — for instance, getting rich
countries to transfer more of their tax revenues to the governments
of poor countries as foreign aid. It’d be nice if this approach
actually helped the poor, since we’ve been using it for the past 60
years. Unfortunately, the statistical and narrative testimony on
this strategy hovers between mixed and scandalous.
The reasons for this are complex but not so complex as to
excuse the status quo. Much of the aid money gets quietly funneled
into the pockets of corrupt politicians. In other cases the aid
money reaches its intended target but, since the aid money is
fungible, it still supports bad actors. It does so by freeing a
regime of the political necessity of paying for the schools, road
projects and emergency relief already covered by the foreign
assistance. This, in turn, allows the regimes to spend more of
their tax revenues for enhancing their own wealth and
power.
Worse, the small fraction of aid money that actually
reaches its intended destination often puts indigenous producers
out of business, since it’s difficult to compete against free goods
from abroad. Haiti’s rice farmers, for instance, once exported
rice, but today their livelihoods have been all but wiped out by
subsidized U.S. rice dumped on the country as foreign
aid.
Add to all of this international “social justice” the
devastating cultural effects of America’s welfare state. The
neighborhoods flooded with 50 years of this domestic “social
justice” now face far higher levels of criminal injustice and
anti-social behavior than before the justice arrived.
Much of the problem stems from welfare’s effect on the
institution of the family. The percentage of children being raised
by both of their biological parents in America’s poorest
neighborhoods used to be low and fairly comparable to what was
found in middle and upper class neighborhoods, but the Great
Society programs of the 1960s changed that.
As George Gilder put it in Wealth and Poverty,
the underclass husband and father was “cuckolded by the
compassionate state,” a violation which has incited “that very
combination of resignation and rage, escapism and violence, short
horizons and promiscuous sexuality that characterizes everywhere
the life of the poor.”
Yale University sociologist Elijah Anderson put it almost
as bluntly in a 1989
journal article: “It has become increasingly
socially acceptable for a young woman to have children out of
wedlock — significantly, with the help of a regular welfare
check.”
The plain testimony of history is that the left’s strategy
for saving the poor has been a tragic failure. It has stifled
development in poor countries, bred a fatherless underclass in the
United States, and all but bankrupted the European Union. Cloaking
all of this in the guise of “social justice” serves only to
perpetuate the tragedy.
Understand, I’m not saying that the terms social
business, social justice and the social
gospel are covert signs used by a secret society of modern day
socialists. People at almost every point on the political spectrum
can be found using the terms. All the same, it’s important to
recognize that these terms, as often used today, share some of the
same confusion that characterizes socialism. It’s a confusion that
sees business, profit and the market economy as intrinsically
greedy and predatory; that undervalues the power of ordinary
justice for liberating the poor; and that regards the problem of
poverty in materialistic terms.
Sound economics and a sound vision of the human person suggest
another approach, one that history tells us actually works: Set
aside the paternalistic “Circle of Protection” that has trapped so
many humans in a vicious cycle of paternalism and dependency, and
focus instead on cultivating political and economic freedom for the
world’s poor.
