DEFINE SOCIAL JUSTICE!

DEFINE SOCIAL JUSTICE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 29, 2009

“Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others.”

John Rawls (1921 – 2002), Political philosopher

REFERENCE:

In my recent missive (April 28, 2009) titled “The More Things Change The More They Remain The Same,” I ended it with this statement:

“Notice all the characteristics of obsessive-compulsive behavior I alluded to earlier. This is the minefield we are in now. What is on the other side? I don’t know and am unlikely to be there when people such as you get there. It sounds melodramatic but I believe it true. We have finally become a single human race and social justice is not a dream or an ideal, but a necessity for our survival as human beings.”


A WRITER WRITES:

Dr. Fisher,

Define social justice if you can.

E

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Lance Morrow wrote the featured article in Time (January 11, 1988) titled “1968: The year that shaped a generation,” with this lead in:

“1968 (was) like a knife blade, the year severed past from future.”

Sociologist Mary Gordon called the decade of the 1960s the “Age of Innocents” and “The Cult of the Child." She wrote:

“What a society thinks and feels about its children is an index of its attitudes about a great number of things: knowledge, power, sex, the future. Childhood begins in helplessness and ends in independence. Or at least that is what we moderns think. One of the signs that mark us as radically unlike our forebears is our perception of childhood as a distinct entity, a state of being not simply leading into another, later state (adulthood) but qualitatively different from it."

Those of us born a generation or more before that period know that children who were not of the upper classes were relegated to being “young adults” practically from birth.

We could drink ourselves into oblivion and ignore the status quo, or accept it and behave. The school and church kept us behaving and believing, but it became clear by 1968 that the school and church no longer believed in their roles.

World War II changed the rectitude of my generation. It put our mother’s in factories; our fathers off to war, and the moral integrity of society that kept a chastity belt around our minds became loosened but it did not fall off.

Many of us pursued knowledge because we had the freedom and privilege to do so. Society had shrunk in size during the Great Depression not only economically but also demographically. There were less of us to mind the company store and run society. So, those that pursued knowledge reaped the benefits, far greater than generations before.

The irony is that when the family, school and church paid attention to molding us into little adults, it stuck. We were never really children. We were little adults with a moral center. We had an internal monitor that limited the ways we might misbehave.

We possessed a bias that we were a chosen people and could magnanimously bless the rest of the world by telling it how to live and behave.

Few of us are in financial trouble today because we never had much and the little we had we saved for a rainy day. We were an underclass and didn’t know it until we graduated from our state universities.  Then we learned that brains often didn’t matter as much as the pedigree of the institution from which we graduated.   .

We were adults because we were never children. We were workers placed in a factory society with a factory mentality, a factory orientation, and a factory culture.

We were of the radio age, the reading of books age, the age in which entertainment was not provided but created largely by us.  We were the age that had respect for the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, for our parents, priests, teachers, and other authority figures. To this day, I cannot call my doctor by his given name.

We accepted ten or twelve levels of management when we entered our professions, middle managers who did nothing but shuffle papers to “in” and “out” baskets, and who devised a system of what was called “standards of performance” and “performance appraisal.”  We worked in obese organizations long before obesity became a common personal problem.

Teachers and doctors and dentists and engineers of our era were cut from our underclass and behaved pretty much as we did. The quality of teaching was excellent despite the low pay and long hours. These professions seldom complained, or equally amazing, never considered themselves to being used or exploited.

We as a generation had the experience of military service, which kicked us into shape and took the starch out of us if it needed taking. We gave up two to six years of our lives to the military, two years active duty and four years in the active reserve subject to recall to active duty. We accepted because it was the law of the land. But it was also an extension of the way we were programmed, which was to be loyal and to accept sacrifice. None of us would ever have thought of burning our draft cards or avoiding the draft, much as we might not be looking forward to military duty. We were programmed to “duty.”

We devoured newspapers, magazines and dime store novels. We liked picture shows that had no message other than to entertain. We got enough of that at church. We were not prepared for 1968.  As parents in that timeframe, we lost our children, failing to realize we never gave them a moral compass, as our parents had given one to us.

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At the end of the 1960’s, we were in the first real television age, a medium that people of my generation still could not quite fathom Elvis Presley, the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones

The playfulness of the 1960’s led to the hippie movement and a full-fledged abdication of everything adult. Hugh Hefner removed the chastity belt.  His success was an alternative to the pent-up angst of war (WWII) on war (Korea) on more war (Vietnam). He provided a voyeuristic escape into hedonistic self-indulgence without society’s inclination to grasp the significance.  Pornography, which followed, was an answer to love being locked out of normal behavior. The 1960’s generation had no intention of growing up, and equated the biological libido with love

Gordon writes:

“As the prosperity of the sixties gave way to the belt tightening of the seventies, and the fast-track eighties moved into the austere nineties, we as a society grew increasingly incoherent about our ideas of childhood. A society’s notions of the relationship between pleasure and responsibility depend upon how rich it feels.

“Innocence is expensive, and we no longer know what we can afford, or for how long. We can’t decide whether we want our kids to get cracking on math scores so they can keep up with their Japanese age-mates or just to relax and play ‘like children’ as if we knew what that meant. What is more difficult, we are no longer sure whether our children are innocent or not.”

We have had all the freedom and the social justice anyone could ever imagine and this is what we have made of it. We have no leadership, no temperance, no frugality, but we do have is leaderless leadership, corruption, scandal, and an economy trying to correct itself without learning much about why it went wrong.

I have lived in a democratic society with the rule of law and the privileges afforded one of my circumstances. I do not confuse privileges with rights. I have taken advantage of my privileges with the freedom to be all that I could be.  

That said an individual should have: 

(1) An opportunity to receive an education,

(2) An opportunity to compete for a job,

(3) An opportunity to earn a living wage,

(4) The right to freedom of choice,

(5) The right to live wherever he pleases,

(6) The right to public health with potable drinking water and public sanitation,

(7) The right to purchase safe food and suitable housing,

(8) The right to practice the religion he chooses,

(9) The right to partner with whom he wishes.

Social justice can be reduced to human rights.

Freedom and social justice are a single fabric, not separate determinants. There cannot be freedom without justice, or justice without freedom. A French mathematician once said:

“Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.”

I see freedom and social justice in that same light.

Be always well,

Jim

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