What Is ‘Social Justice’ Anyway?
In actuality, the words don't have any real meaning.
October 22, 2009 - by Herbert London
During the recent Jewish holidays I heard one rabbi after another speak of “social justice.” Uttered with remarkable sincerity, this expression and its meaning elude me. I recognize justice as the adjudication of competing positions in a court of law and in accordance with the Constitution and its precedents. But what is social justice?
I’m not naïve. From Sharpton to Wright, social justice has come to means redressing the wrongs of the past in the form of government benefits or reparations. The expression has a hint of retribution as in “you owe us.” In actuality, the words haven’t any real meaning. There are always those who grieve, and as long as the government attempts to satisfy those with a gripe, the plaintive cry for social justice will have irresistible appeal.
Justice is rarely social unless, of course, it is categorical as was the case with the Holocaust. In most instances justice is personal, e.g., seeking retribution for a contractual violation. Even if one were to attempt to redress the evil of slavery, how would one do so? Not every black person in the United States is a child of slavery. Moreover, people do not live in slavery — here at any rate — and race is not a barrier to success as President Obama and a host of corporate leaders demonstrate.
That the expression lives leads to confusion and discontent. There are principles on which the nation rests such as the rule of law, respect for private property, free expression, and individual rights. But social justice is not among them, albeit its radical antecedent ensures its place in the contemporary protest movement.
For many, social justice is a form of egalitarianism. Why, it is sometimes asked, should a few have so much and the many so little? This is the fairness gambit. Overlooked by acolytes of this position is that individualism on which this nation has put a premium is often at odds with economic equality. If people are free to pursue their goals, some are likely to be more successful than others.
The government has attempted to legislate a form of egalitarianism through progressive taxation. But even with a progressive tax designed to reduce the wealth of the most successful Americans, income disparity cannot be eliminated. Unless you change human nature and incentives as the Soviet Union unsuccessfully attempted, economic equality (read: social justice) is unattainable.
It is instructive that so-called progressives want to gain control of the state in order to bring about social justice. However, whenever this effort has been successful the progressives or radicals end up rewarding themselves and impoverishing those they claim to represent. Poor people are invariably subject to this political protest chant, but most know that it is a fiction borne of demagoguery.
Life is not fair — an observation everyone understands intuitively. The rich want something they cannot buy and the poor covet what the rich already have. If there is psychic justice, it is found in religion where every believer is equal in God’s eyes. But in the City of Man, social justice is a chimera, often sought but impossible to attain.
Perhaps it is time to inter this notion, bury it deep into the past. Of course, that isn’t likely to occur when so many are committed to its retention. They will parade across our streets calling for social justice as if they had any idea what it is they are seeking.
This is the lamentation of our age, a chant of frustration and desire. As long as governments seek to address this apparent concern manifest as passion, there will be reinforcement for the employment of these empty words. Listen carefully and you will hear the words “social justice” at any protest rally. This is a case of reifying fake ideology.
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Francis W. Porretto:
Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek destroyed the idea of “social justice” in The Fatal Conceit. Thomas Sowell has demolished it repeatedly, most memorably in The Vision Of The Anointed and The Quest For Cosmic Justice. Any decent semantician could tell you that the phrase is incapable of bearing an objective meaning. Why, then, are we unable to eradicate it from our discourse?
Simply, because of undeserved guilt. The white population of this country has been bludgeoned for nearly fifty years into believing that it must make amends for the crimes of others, including some that are the figments of racialists’ and Islamists’ fevered imaginations. Flacksters have succeeded in transmuting our natural sympathy for others not as well off into guilt over not having artificially hauled them up to our level. Incredibly, that often extends into exculpation for horrors such as black-on-white crime and jihadist terrorism.
It’s time we put an end to it — and delegitimizing anyone who mutters “social justice” in any forum would make a good start.
Oct 22, 2009 - 4:17 am 2. dan:
“Social justice” is just another instance of semantic manipulation – a shorthand formulation for Leninism, designed to dragoon the maximum number of useful idiots into its vast unwitting network. And then, once introduced by a certain number of shrill agents of influence, the host country’s own people – usually its most educated – adopt it in enough numbers to do Revolution to each other.
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Gary Ogletree:
If you believe in social injustice then you have to have a government cure. Equal justice before the law, equal opportunity just don’t work for me if I’m feeling lazy, keep making dumb decisions or have a streak of bad luck. I know from my own experience that it’s always someone else’s fault. And I resent carrying a bag lunch when I see others living it up on an expense account. I don’t want to hear about other people being prepared to take advantage of opportunity, working hard when I was getting stoned, etc. That’s both annoying and depressing. And hateful. You all owe me. That’s why God created Saul Alinsky and Barack Hussein Obama, mmm, mmm, mmm.
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blotto:
The 800 pound gorilla in a pink tutu in the room is that white progressives have used and are using Lenin’s strategy of engendering racial animus-disguised as social justice-in order to drive the so-called victims-blacks- toward more government control. For 60 years, white progressives have inculcated into the black psyche that only they can help them, give them reparations in the form of government assistance, and represent them in government.
That blacks have swallowed this hook, line and sinker has been both fatal to our republic and fratricde for blacks.
That progressive thinking white Americans(?) would tell other white Americans you don’t matter, you don’t deserve to go to college because a lesser qualified black does, you don’t deserve a job because of lesser qualified black does, that you don’t deserve a home because a lesser qualified black does is yet the greatest untold story of our generation. These white progressives do this while sitting firmly ensconced in their jobs in the HR Depts, college administrations, MSM, and government is truly amazing and at the same time utterly hypocritical.
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Vinny Vidivici:
’social justice’ = grievance-group tyranny
‘economic justice’ = class-warfare looting
Both driven by the same bogus sense of entitlement used by aristocrats throughout history and ‘revolutionaries’ in the modern era to justify control and wealth confiscation.
Take a good, hard look at the charlatans and frauds at the forefront of today’s ‘human rights industry’, the poseur ‘men of the people’ with Swiss bank accounts running third world squats, or the gangsters posing as ’statesmen’ at the Cirque de Merde on Turtle Bay.
If some people want to assuage their synthetic guilt by living on their knees before these sorts of imagined moral superiors, let ‘em pay for it themselves. Leave the rest of us out of it.
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ahad ha'amoratsim:
What is Social Justice? Easy, it’s the name of Father Coughlin’s magazine, Social Justice, during this period, in which he printed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, echoed Goebbels’ claim that Marxist atheism was a Jewish plot, advocated violence and legal restrictions against Jews in the US, and justified Nazi actions during Kristallnacht. Like Mojo said, the internet box is a wonderful thing.
And like nearly everyone else here has said, Social Justice is an attempt to put a pretty name on the politics of grievance and the justification for using legal and extra-legal violence to take wealth and property from a disfavored group. It’s not just taking it from white people and giving it to black people, though. It’s taking from whoever the villain group of the moment may be, whether Jews, whites, business people, small business owners, [doctors, insurance company evildoers] people whose pensions are invested in hedge funds — and giving it to those they supposed stole it from. For an early example, see Ber. (or if you prefer, Gen.) 26:12 – 22.
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Genesis: 26 - 12 Isaac planted crops in that land and the same year reaped a hundredfold, because the LORD blessed him. 13 The man became rich, and his wealth continued to grow until he became very wealthy. 14 He had so many flocks and herds and servants that the Philistines envied him. 15 So all the wells that his father's servants had dug in the time of his father Abraham, the Philistines stopped up, filling them with earth.
The Philistines were big on "social justice" I guess.
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