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 of their own and no virtue of their
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 realistic 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 were born, in the middle of a ghetto,
and 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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