With the reinvigorated push for "social justice" by today's left, it seems apropos to take a second look at Balint Vazsonyi's chapter on the subject in his 1998 book
America's 30 Years War. Because I could not begin to state it so well as Mr. Vazsonyi, I am using a long, direct quote, in fact, all of chapter seven of the book. In light of such a long quote, it is important to provide the full copyright information, viz.,
America's Thirty Years War, Who is Winning? Balint Vazsonyi, Regnery Publishing, Inc., Washington, D.C., 1998. The book is available at http://www.amazon.com for under $11. For the purposes of space, I will not indent the following direct quote.
America's 30 Years War, Chapter Seven, "Social Justice"
A Monumental Deception
The quotation marks in the title are used advisedly. The words themselves are among the most successful deceptions ever conceived. Ask a variety of people to define what "social justice" means, specifically, and you will get as many answers as people queried. Ask the same person at different times and you will get different responses. All "definitions" of social justice boil down to any of the following:
(1) somebody should have the power to determine what you can have, or
(2) somebody should have the power to determine what you can
not have, or
(3) somebody should have the power to determine what to take away from you in order to give it to others who receive it without any obligation to earn it.
If millions upon millions have been deluded into searching for "social justice," it is because "social justice" displays the irresistible charm of the temptress and the armament of the enraged avenger; because it adorns itself in intoxicating cliches and wears the insignia of the highest institutions of learning. Like a poisonous snake, it radiates brilliant colors. Like the poppies in
The Wizard of Oz, it lulls the mind to sleep.
The easiest targets happen to be civilized people, who care about the fate of others. Americans, especially, are famous for their concern for fellow humans and support of worthy causes. They have fought two world wars to rescue western civilization, without any thought to material gain. Americans may be said to possess an uncommonly active "social" conscience. Actually, the word "conscience" does well enough alone. Why do we attach the word "social?"
Because, more than a century ago, advocates of socialism embarked on a campaign to inject the world "social" into every conceivable arena. Such a systematic perversion of the language had to have a purpose to plant the thought that "social" infuses everything with a positive content. If successful, it was bound to surround the word "socialism" with a positive aura. Conspiracy? No--a well-thought-out program, openly advocated and diligently implemented by its planners. They have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Friedrich Hayek in
The Fatal Conceit (1988) lists over 160 nouns to which the adjective "social" has been attached with some frequency. Hayek traces the origins of the usage to German theorists and argues persuasively that "social," far from adding anything, in fact drains all nouns to which it is attached of content or meaning. Regardless, speakers of all political persuasions have taken to using the word with alarming frequency.
Why should a word, just because it became the obsession of certain German thinkers, pervade English, the language that has given us "common sense"? What would our conscience
not prompt us to do that our "social" conscience would? Conscientious persons value life and possess a sense of duty. Conscientious persons believe in everyone's right to the pursuit of happiness, law or not. Conscience imposes an obligation to care about, and to work toward, the betterment of the human condition. What does "social" add to this list, other than a political slant?
A Process of Elimination
Advocates of social justice point to the downtrodden, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised. Advocates of social justice insist that, in order to demonstrate a social conscience, a person must resolve to
eliminate poverty,
eliminate suffering, and
eliminate differences among people. The assumption is that society can and will reach a state in which all its members enjoy just the right quantity and proportion of attributes, possessions, and good fortune in relation to all other members, and to their own expectations.
Special attention must be focused upon the word "eliminate." As noted, the demand to "eliminate" has been with us since the French Revolution. It is a key word, because it is peculiar to the thinking of those who advocate social justice. What are the practical implications?
In order to eliminate poverty, agreement must be reached on terminology. Poor by what standard? Poor in Albania or Zaire is very different from poor in Switzerland or the United States. Poverty, then, is relative, and in relative terms, there will always be "poverty" as long as some people have more and others have less. Two possibilities arise. One is to establish the authority which will take possession of all goods and distribute them evenly among the populace. This would have to be a continuous process because the more gifted and more industrious will keep accumulating more than the others. The second option is to concede that it is all nonsense.
The elimination of suffering presumes even greater divine powers. The worst offenders propose to eliminate suffering through various government decrees and executive orders. These same people speculate about "the elimination of
differences," a truly disturbing phenomenon.
One possible answer may be an affliction peculiar to people who apply the word "social" with great frequency. I will refer to it as "Compartmentalized Brain Syndrome," or CBS for short. Sufferers from CBS have more or less the same information as the rest of us in the various compartments of the brain. But traffic between the compartments has broken down. No connection is made between two bits of data, even within the same subject matter, such as tax rates and tax revenues. The breakdown may be either temporary or permanent.
By way of illustration, a United States senator recently complained bitterly about the diminishing interest young people show in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The same senator fully endorses multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is code for the gradual elimination of all Western traditions. A person who fails to recognize the connection between declaring the Western canon irrelevant, and the decline in the appreciation of Bach's music is suffering from CBS
The same may be said of persons who speak of "the downtrodden," "the dispossessed," and "the disenfranchised" in today's America. Clearly, no law in the United States would ever create or permit any such thing. CBS sufferers nonetheless refuse to notice that people are different, and that differences of abilities, aspirations, family circumstances, and a variety of other factors will always produce a wide range of results. Alternatively, they view people in terms of conditions that existed in times past, as if slavery or segregation were still with us, or women's suffrage not yet adopted. Persons afflicted with CBS tend to hold a number of nonsensical opinions, and nonsense cannot be justified except perhaps through more nonsense.
State or Process
The ultimate nonsense is the search for social justice. This is not to insult the millions of highly respectable persons who have been deluded into adopting social justice as their goal. But the truth is, if subject to honest scrutiny, the very concept flies in the face of both reason and experience. Worse still is the presumptuous implication that, were social justice possible, certain persons are better able than others to judge
what it is. (Incidentally, how does such an implication square with the doctrine that we are all the same?)
"Social justice" generally means that justice must prevail in the social sphere. But society is in constant flux; its
state undergoes constant change. Thus, if a state of justice exists in a given minute, it is unlikely to exist in the next. There will be either more or less justice. How do we monitor performance? What are the measurements? Who judges the data? And, even more troubling, what of the choice between a static and a dynamic society? Most favor a dynamic society for obvious reasons. But a dynamic society produces variable states of social justice.
According to the only theory in existence, to attain a satisfactory state of social justice, social tensions--the source of dynamism--are to be eliminated (there is that word again!). Once that is achieved, society will of course be
static. We have to work diligently, the prescription goes, to attain a state of being with no social tensions.
The state so characterized is known as "communism."
A Disconcerting Conclusion
Unwittingly, perhaps, in many cases, but persons who advocate social justice advocate communism. Taking social justice to its logical conclusion, nothing less will suffice. The howls of protests such a conclusion is likely to elicit confirm the many misconceptions associated with the word "communism." We need to relieve the word of the misleading connotations it has acquired along the way.
That is, when we say "communism," we see the Kremlin, Soviet tanks crushing twelve-year-olds, Castro puffing on a cigar, and Mao's Red Guards cutting off the limbs of the elderly with a knife. But none of that is the essence of communism. The essence of communism is
social justice--the elimination of poverty, the elimination of suffering, the elimination of all differences that erect walls between people. The essence of communism is the global village in which everyone benefits equally within an interdependent and socially conscious world. The essence of communism is the rearing of children by the village. Even Hitler's version, which he called "national socialism," was intended to deliver great and lasting benefits to the masses, once a few million redundant people were, well, eliminated.
We need to rid ourselves of the images of starving North Koreans, of Rumanian orphans with AIDS, of multitudes in shabby and filthy clothes, of landscapes polluted beyond recognition. That is not what communism was designed to be. That is not what communism is going to be.
Once we reach the true state of communism, we are told, there will not be poverty. There will not be suffering. There will not be differences in the living standards of people. Children will never be hungry. There will not be bonuses for corporate executives. There will no longer be some with spacious homes and others homeless. There will no longer be some who cannot afford health care and others who have elective surgery. There will not be people who are disadvantage.
Nor will there be people who can do as they please.
There will be Social Justice.
If this does not correspond to the idea of social justice, what does? For there must be an end state, or the pursuit of "social" justice is nothing more than the excuse for a permanent state of "social"--warfare.
Prescription for War
Warfare, of course, was precisely the vision of the person who promised us the state of perfection he called communism. His name was Karl Marx, and he was the original sufferer from CBS. His economic theory, his reading of history, his political advice to the rest of the world for the remainder of time, all show a mind seriously afflicted by that disease. How else could an otherwise brilliant mind reduce the myriad differences among people to matters of class? How else could a brilliant mind look upon the exploding kaleidoscope of history and see only class warfare? How else could a brilliant mind write the two vast volumes of
Das Kapital based on a single arbitrary and erroneous thesis of value?
Indeed, to adopt Marx's view means to join in social warfare. The behavior of social warriors brings to mind Dostoevski's description in
Crime and Punishment of some strange new microbes. Men attacked by them became at once mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible..."
Social warfare clearly undermines domestic tranquility. But the even greater evil is that it fuels discontent and induces a permanent state of hopelessness by setting unattainable goals. And unattained they shall remain, except of course in communism--if you believe the theory.
Perhaps some do.
But the rest of us need to face the fact that the Rule of Law and the Search for Social Justice cannot exist side-by-side because social justice requires that those who possess more of anything have it taken away from them. The Rule of Law will not permit that. It exists to guarantee conditions in which
more people can have
more liberty,
more rights,
more possessions. Prophets of social justice--communists, whether by that or any other name--focus on who should have
less. Because they have nothing to give, they can only take away. First, they take away opportunity. Next, they take away possessions. In the end, they have to take away life itself.
Are two of the three taking hold already?
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