SOCIAL JUSTICE, ONE MORE TIME!

 

SOCIAL JUSTICE, ONE MORE TIME!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 11, 2011

A READER SENDS ME THIS EXCHANGE:

LONDON -- As political and social protests grip the Middle East, are growing in Europe and a riot exploded in north London this weekend, here's a sad truth, expressed by a Londoner when asked by a television reporter: Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

The TV reporter from Britain's ITV had no response.  So the young man pressed his advantage. "Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of
us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

In 2009, a reader asked me to define social justice.  This is what I wrote on April 29, 2009:

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:

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 Innocence” 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 mothers in factories; our fathers off to war, and the moral integrity of society kept a chastity belt around our minds.

Many of us pursued education 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.

When the family, school and church paid attention to molding us into little adults, it took hold. We were never really children. We were little adults with a moral center. It was an internal monitor that limited the ways we might misbehave.

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 ran into the subtle advantage given graduates of prestige universities.

We had our own advantage, as we were young adults, while many of the elite behaved as spoiled children. We had worked in factories, had a factory mentality, orientation, and factory drive.  We were like a well-oiled machine, doers not contemplators.

We were of the radio age, the reading of books age, and the age in which entertainment was not a purchased commodity but something created.  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 tolerating middle managers who did nothing but shuffle papers to “in” and “out” baskets, devise systems such as “standards of performance” and “performance appraisal.” 

The working organization was obese long before obesity became a personal problem.

Teachers and doctors, dentists and engineers of our era were cut from our underclass, thanks to the GI Bill with returning veterans entering college. The quality of teaching was excellent despite the low pay and long hours. Teachers seldom complained.  Equally amazing, they seldom considered themselves 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 this because it was the law.  It was an extension of our programming, which was to be loyal with a sense of duty.  None of us would think of burning our draft cards or avoiding the draft.

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 the moral compass we had been given by our parents.

* * *

At the end of the 1960’s, we were in the television age.  People of my generation still could not quite fathom the likes of Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones

The playfulness of the 1960’s led to the hippie movement and to a full-fledged abdication of everything adult.

Hugh Hefner removed the chastity belt.  He offered an alternative lifestyle to assuage the pent-up angst of war (WWII) on war (Korea) on more war (Vietnam), providing voyeuristic escape into hedonistic fantasy.  Pornography, which followed, was an answer to love locked out. The 1960’s equated the 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 the freedom as well as the protection of the First Amendment of the Constitution to retreat into the sensual, and to become lost in it.  We have retreated as well from seeing clearly what is right and wrong.

Privilege should not be confused with rights.  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 is synonymous with human rights.

Freedom and social justice are a single fabric. 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 light.

Be always well,

Jim

*     *     *

In view of what is happening in Wisconsin over public employees being asked to pay part of their healthcare costs, and into their retirement, as well as minimizing their collective bargaining rights, I am not surprised that the recall of elected officials Tuesday (August 9, 2011) was a partial success, as two Republican senators were recalled.  My wonder is what is next. 

It is not only the exorbitant costs of entitlements for working public employees, but the benefit costs that accrue to the retired that are contributing to Wisconsin’s (and many other states') fiscal insolvency.  No one seemed to be looking ahead to this day. 

Nor do I fault public employees, provoked by employee unions and insurance companies, who paint these workers as victims, for acting like a mob.  In truth, they have been on an unsustainable gravy train, and it is running out of fuel. 

Yes, I’ve seen the riots in London on television.  The hysterical behavior of young people shows they lack the maturity to hold a job much less understand what is in play.   

Great Britain has free public education, free healthcare, generous entitlements to those on the dole, with many choosing the dole to working if work is available.  Increasingly, the Brits have followed the Swedish social welfare model, and that society is in trouble as well.   

Social justice has come to be seen as something that can be given by the state, and not something earned by the individual. 

Social justice has become the equivalent of a safety net that condones excess, forgives missteps, and provides refuse for those unwilling to take care of themselves. 

Social justice is taken to be something deserved without qualification. 

Bleeding hearts rose out of the human relations movement of the 1930’s, and reached a crescendo with human resource management.  If bleeding hearts could lead to social justice, I would be for them, but they cannot.  HR treats people as children with management as the surrogate parent.  So, children is how workers remain as they chronologically age from twenty to thirty to forty, and fifty, and beyond. 

The young man interviewed by the London reporter happened to be black.  He equated destroying property, and jeopardizing the lives of the innocent as justifiable behavior to get media attention. 

He sees himself as powerless and the media as powerful. 

Salvation is found through others, not from the self.  It is the mindset of the child with the belief that material conflagration will lift him out of his inertia.

*     *     *

The state created this mess by finding it easier to promise than to listen, easier to provide welfare than to train and create jobs, easier to ignore festering emotions than to attack chronic social ills; easier to enforce the law than to understand why people break it.

People are disinclined to be anti-social.  People enjoy the company of others like themselves.  Ninety percent are inherently good.  People are reasonable and will respond to reason.  But people will not grow, will not prosper, and will not feel good about themselves if others are allowed to carry their burden.  

The more we do for others the less they do for themselves, which results in weaken resolve and diminished character. 

Social justice need furnish no guarantees. To the complaints that there is no freedom, no opportunity, I say, “Then make it!  Use your brains and unique powers to create your niche.”

Indolent blacks will mock those who try to get ahead, calling them "whities."  They see whites owing them relief from their misery.  Unfortunately, misery is a mindset, so with relief comes the demand for more relief, until it is impossible to satisfy, leading to more pathological behavior.

Closing with a non sequitur, I wonder if it means anything that a bookstore in downtown Manchester was not broken into or looted, but all the other stores in the vicinity were.  Ponder that if you will.

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