Meaningless Morass, Part III

Two-Heeled Achilles

In his book, The Tyranny of Cliches, Jonah Goldberg gives us a history of the concept of "social justice".  It first entered the lexicon of the West in the middle of the nineteenth century, courtesy of the Roman Catholic moral theologian, Luigi Taparelli.

Taparelli was concerned to resist the statist view of reality, where there are only two entities that count--the individual and the State.  He argued that human beings are social creatures.  The individual is necessarily involved in more social institutions--more communities--than just the State.

These intermediary associations act as both bridge and buffer between the individual and the State.  The associations of "lower society" maintain their own autonomy . . . . Taparelli introduced the phrase "social justice" as a way to emphasize that much of the important stuff lay outside the realm of the State.  It had nothing to do with redistributing wealth (never mind fighting for gender equity).  Taparelli thought of and employed social justice in a completely different way that (sic) almost everyone, Catholic and otherwise, does in contemporary society.  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.138.]

Just as "liberalism" back in the eighteenth century indicated the maximisation of individual liberty against the Leviathan State, yet today its meaning has been subverted and taken over by proponents of soft-state-despotism, so with the concept of "social justice".
  In the hands, hearts, and minds of the Progressive movement in the United States, "social justice" has become "an empty vessel to be filled with any and all leftist ideals, and then promptly wielded as a political bludgeon against any and all dissenters". (Ibid., p. 142).

Herbert Croly, the founding father of modern liberalism, writing in the early part of the twentieth century expressed it very clearly:

The idea of individual justice is being supplemented by the idea of social justice.  When our constitutions were written, the traditions of English law, the contemporary political philosophy and the economic situation of the American democracy all conspired to embody in them and their interpretation an extremely individualistic conception of justice--a conception which practically confided social welfare to the free expression of individual interests and good intentions.  Now the tendency is to conceive the social welfare not as an end which cannot be left to the happy harmonizing of individual interests, but as an end which must be consciously willed by society and efficiently realised.  Society, that is, has become a moral ideal, not independent of the individual but supplementary to him, an ideal which must be pursued less by regulating individual excesses than by the active conscious encouragement of socializing tendencies and purposes. [Cited by Goldberg, op cit., p. 143f.]

Society (aka, the State) must impose social justice, and that efficiently.  That is the first Achilles Heel of the modern idea.  But worse, no-one has any limits as to what the concept can be shaped and twisted to resemble.  What is "socially just" in the end amounts to nothing more than a social realisation of what anyone, or a particular pressure group, happens to consider good.  For the Nazi, social justice is achieving and maintaining the supremacy of the white ethnicity.  For the feminist, it is the provision of ubiquitous free abortion clinics.  For the beauty pageant contestant it is the achieving of world peace.  For the Marxist, it is achieving an operational egalitarianism--from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, and so forth.  So catholic, so diverse, so variable, so inclusive as to be devoid of precise definition.

This Achilles of social justice at first glance appears a mighty warrior.  But he is a peculiar miscreant.  He has two heels, both fatal.  Social justice promotes and legitimises a Leviathan-like State with no limits to withstand its power.  It also is a meaningless concept.  It includes everything, and therefore means nothing.