Alister McGrath (2006). The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World.
McGrath's is not a polemic against atheism, but an account of it as a cultural phenomenon that arose and declined in a specific historical period and context. That historically concrete (as Marxists say) perspective naturally irritates atheists who want to treat atheism as the default position independent of time and place. Many atheist writers have assumed that atheism is the truth and have sought to explain Christianity or religion in general, not seeing their own disbelief as a cultural-historical phenomenon in need of explanation. (Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, for example, do not trouble themselves with the truth claims of Christianity but assume its falsity as their starting point.)
Hence the claim that atheism does not need explaining because it is simply an absence of belief (not believing). But it is really a positive "belief that something is not the case." Since 1) this disbelief has a distinct history of rise and decline; and 2) it is, unlike Christianity or theism, a rare and until the 19th century an eccentric belief, it is a perfectly proper subject for the kind of study McGrath conducts. It is true that in the late 20th century, half the world's population lived under officially atheist regimes, but this temporary political success and its consequences in themselves are part of the explanation of atheism's subsequent decline.
One reviewer gives the impression that the dictionary definition of atheism is absence of belief in God or gods. I did not do an exhaustive search, but the Merriam-Webster online definition I found corresponds to McGrath's use and everyone else's until very recently: a)a disbelief in the existence of deity; b) the doctrine that there is no deity. McGrath well describes the attempt by some recent atheists to expand the definition to include those who have no particular opinion, those who are searching and questioning but undecided, and those (agnostics) who consider the answer unknowable. It is an indication of atheists' demoralization in face of the failure of the old secularization thesis, the loss of atheism's appeal, and the resurgence of religious (especially Christian) belief throughout the world and the confident militancy of Islam, that they go to such lengths to puff up their numbers.
The importance of the book is the way McGrath takes atheism seriously as a social, cultural, and historical phenomenon in its own right. It deserves examination in sociological, historical, and cultural terms no less than the religions to which it responds. It played an important historical role in the critique of established religion and the oppressive role it played, for example, in 18th century France. In this context or that of 19th century Russia, atheism could reasonably be seen as a liberating force and much was made of the blood shed in the name of religion through the centuries. This argument lost much of its force in the 20th century given the record of anti-Christian forces like Nazism (which adopted much of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity and Christian morality as a vapid and servile restraint on the amoral Superman) and the officially atheist and even bloodier regimes of Stalin and Mao. These regimes, unrestrained by Christian morality or the universal proscription on intentionally killing the innocent, shed massively more innocent blood than all previous religions and religious states combined. Atheism was no longer the liberator but the oppressor. As McGrath points out, atheism has at least as much to answer for as any major religion, yet it has not begun to do its own soul-searching (if that's the word!).
McGrath arguably spends too much time on "organized atheism" in the form of Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her organizations and the English National Secular Society. But the account of these relentlessly dreary and unappealing outfits serves a purpose as well as being amusing. It shows how atheists can be just as corrupt, prejudiced (O'Hair was fiercely homophobic, as Hitler and Stalin were anti-semitic), and nasty as religious organizations But one could argue that atheism is by its nature a diffuse, unorganized and unorganizable cultural current, and most atheists have always been embarrassed by such operations. Of course, to that extent the failure of atheism to meet the human need for community (a central strength of religion) is all the more a challenge for its adherents.
To me, the most interesting part of the book is the discussion of Protestantism as a precursor of atheism. Protestantism (to which McGrath himself adheres) "disenchanted" nature (the earth no longer being "charged with the grandeur of God," divorced sacred from secular/profane, the religious from everyday experience, the verbal (preaching and Scripture) from the sacraments and sacramentals that gave physical expression to the divine and united heaven and earth, most fully in the Eucharist. It denounced artistic depiction of God, stripped the altars, destroyed statues, and laid waste to the cultural treasures of Christendom. The churches became bleak and grim, and God absent, distant, and disagreeable. As McGrath says, "...it is a small step from declaring that God cannot be pictured to suggesting that he cannot be conceived as a living reality in the rich imaginative life of humanity" (p.212). It is no accident that it is in a very different form, Pentecostalism, that Protestant Christianity is thriving today among the poor and oppressed of the world.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query mcgrath. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query mcgrath. Sort by date Show all posts
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Monday, August 31, 2009
Explaining Atheism Pt. 1
I have been reading both recent popular atheist books by the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens et al. (Ditchkins, as Terry Eagleton calls them)and also some of the critiques of this outpouring of militantly anti-religious (primarily anti-Christian) bestsellers. The best of these critiques of the atheists (so far) are by David Bentley Hart, Alister McGrath, Dinesh D'Souza, and the formerly leading atheist philosopher Antony Flew, as well as the Marxist critic Eagleton himself.
All of the anti-religious writing and much of the response assume that it is religion that needs to be explained and justified. During the heyday of atheism in the 19th century, the leading atheist intellectuals, wrote not to refute religion but to explain it as a social or psychological phenomenon. That is, Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, most influentially, took as their starting point that the truth claims of Christianity and all other religions were false and did not trouble themselves with the task of refuting them. The default position, the truth, was atheism. The task then was to explain why religion had been such a universal phenomenon in human experience until their time. (See McGrath's excellent, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World for a review of the explanations advanced by Feuerbach, Freud, and Marx.)
But what if we examined atheism in the same way? We assume that it is false as well as rare in the cultures of humankind. Then the task is to explain its rise to prominence among European intellectuals in the 18th and especially 19th centuries, its political spread so that half the world's population lived under officially atheist regimes by the mid-20th century; and its rapid decline, along with theresurgence of religious belief since the late 20th century. From this perspective, atheism is a socially constructed, historically specific phenomenon, of immense importance in its day and still of wide appeal in Europe and among the elites of North America.
McGrath's Twilight is immensely helpful in this regard. Of particular interest to me is the way that the notion of a "war" between science and religion arose in the social conditions of 19th century England and eastern North America. It is of course the opposite of the truth as far as Christianity is concerned. Almost all the great scientists from the Middle Ages through Newton were either churchmen (priests or monks, etc.) or at least devout Christians. One of the greatest scientists of the 19th century, Gregor Mendel, was a Catholic monk. In 19th century England, the parson-scientist was a stock figure in literature, reflecting in part the underemployment of the clergy in the state-supported church. The rise of professional scientists led to a rivalry between the scientific amateurs (clergy) and professional scientists as the latter asserted their claims to recognition and support. A war was thus invented between science and religion, put forward by two highly influential books, John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1876).
Today, no reputable historian of science, to my knowledge, accepts this account of such a conflict or war, but the influence of this anti-religious narrative is still widespread among popularizers of atheism and the general public.
I am intrigued by McGrath's interpretation of the rise of this story of a social opposition between scientific amateurs and professionals. Is there a similar phenomenon in the history of social work where, with the gradual professionalization of social work, charity came to have a bad name? At first it was to be "organized" in a "scientific" way, replacing the old-style random acts of kindness with a more systematic approach to social casework. Today, the old Charity Organization Societies, in which the profession has its origins, is regarded in a poor light by most professional social workers, not because they lost sight of charity as love and a fundamental Christian duty, but because they were too moralistic and insufficiently professional and scientific--or insufficiently devoted to social change and justice. Just as the parson-scientists were seen as insufficiently professional by full-time scientists, so the pastoral care of the clergy was seen (by professional social workers) as a kind of amateurish social work.... [more to follow!]
All of the anti-religious writing and much of the response assume that it is religion that needs to be explained and justified. During the heyday of atheism in the 19th century, the leading atheist intellectuals, wrote not to refute religion but to explain it as a social or psychological phenomenon. That is, Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, most influentially, took as their starting point that the truth claims of Christianity and all other religions were false and did not trouble themselves with the task of refuting them. The default position, the truth, was atheism. The task then was to explain why religion had been such a universal phenomenon in human experience until their time. (See McGrath's excellent, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World for a review of the explanations advanced by Feuerbach, Freud, and Marx.)
But what if we examined atheism in the same way? We assume that it is false as well as rare in the cultures of humankind. Then the task is to explain its rise to prominence among European intellectuals in the 18th and especially 19th centuries, its political spread so that half the world's population lived under officially atheist regimes by the mid-20th century; and its rapid decline, along with theresurgence of religious belief since the late 20th century. From this perspective, atheism is a socially constructed, historically specific phenomenon, of immense importance in its day and still of wide appeal in Europe and among the elites of North America.
McGrath's Twilight is immensely helpful in this regard. Of particular interest to me is the way that the notion of a "war" between science and religion arose in the social conditions of 19th century England and eastern North America. It is of course the opposite of the truth as far as Christianity is concerned. Almost all the great scientists from the Middle Ages through Newton were either churchmen (priests or monks, etc.) or at least devout Christians. One of the greatest scientists of the 19th century, Gregor Mendel, was a Catholic monk. In 19th century England, the parson-scientist was a stock figure in literature, reflecting in part the underemployment of the clergy in the state-supported church. The rise of professional scientists led to a rivalry between the scientific amateurs (clergy) and professional scientists as the latter asserted their claims to recognition and support. A war was thus invented between science and religion, put forward by two highly influential books, John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1876).
Today, no reputable historian of science, to my knowledge, accepts this account of such a conflict or war, but the influence of this anti-religious narrative is still widespread among popularizers of atheism and the general public.
I am intrigued by McGrath's interpretation of the rise of this story of a social opposition between scientific amateurs and professionals. Is there a similar phenomenon in the history of social work where, with the gradual professionalization of social work, charity came to have a bad name? At first it was to be "organized" in a "scientific" way, replacing the old-style random acts of kindness with a more systematic approach to social casework. Today, the old Charity Organization Societies, in which the profession has its origins, is regarded in a poor light by most professional social workers, not because they lost sight of charity as love and a fundamental Christian duty, but because they were too moralistic and insufficiently professional and scientific--or insufficiently devoted to social change and justice. Just as the parson-scientists were seen as insufficiently professional by full-time scientists, so the pastoral care of the clergy was seen (by professional social workers) as a kind of amateurish social work.... [more to follow!]
Friday, March 18, 2011
The Lure of Heresy
As Alister McGrath shows in his brilliant and compelling book, Heresy: A History of Defending the Truth
, heresy has enormous appeal to the postmodern mind. Consider Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. Risibly inaccurate and absurd as it is - there are shelf-fulls of books and articles refuting it on every point - millions of people believe its fabrications to be the real story, the suppressed truth of the history of Christianity.
McGrath's book analyzes the dynamics of heresy's appeal and I won't try to summarize it. In my experience, the attraction is similar to that of conspiracy theories in general. Believing that, say, 9-11 was a government conspiracy - which millions do despite all the evidence to the contrary (Popular Mechanics took apart the most widely believed theories, but with no discernible impact on popular belief) - enables one to bask in one's own intelligence and cleverness. We are not duped like everyone else - said as if we were a small group of people in the know, rather than millions. Such conspiracy theories and heresies rest not on a serious examination of evidence, but on a will to challenge tradition, orthodoxy, inherited wisdom and belief. Modern art rests on this desire to shock and offend, on the denial of beauty and tradition. There is something of the permanent adolescent about all this, as the German writer Martin Mosebach points out in Heresy of Formlessness
in relation to art and liturgy:
These thoughts came to mind after a recent trip to the Barnes & Noble bookstore in the Ala Moana shopping center in Honolulu. I usually check out the sections of religion and philosophy and once again I was struck by how the Christianity shelves give more space to heresy than to orthodoxy, to Crossan and Spong than to Benedict XVI. Brant Pitre's 's brilliant and bestselling book, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist: Unlocking the Secrets of the Last Supper
was not to be seen, nor was the pope's great work of lectio divina, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem To The Resurrection
. Does this reflect consumer demand or the bias of the B&N buyer? I don't know.
In any case, it was something of a relief to come home and find Fr. Robert Barron
's take on John Crossan at his Word on Fire site. Here it is:
, heresy has enormous appeal to the postmodern mind. Consider Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. Risibly inaccurate and absurd as it is - there are shelf-fulls of books and articles refuting it on every point - millions of people believe its fabrications to be the real story, the suppressed truth of the history of Christianity.McGrath's book analyzes the dynamics of heresy's appeal and I won't try to summarize it. In my experience, the attraction is similar to that of conspiracy theories in general. Believing that, say, 9-11 was a government conspiracy - which millions do despite all the evidence to the contrary (Popular Mechanics took apart the most widely believed theories, but with no discernible impact on popular belief) - enables one to bask in one's own intelligence and cleverness. We are not duped like everyone else - said as if we were a small group of people in the know, rather than millions. Such conspiracy theories and heresies rest not on a serious examination of evidence, but on a will to challenge tradition, orthodoxy, inherited wisdom and belief. Modern art rests on this desire to shock and offend, on the denial of beauty and tradition. There is something of the permanent adolescent about all this, as the German writer Martin Mosebach points out in Heresy of Formlessness
in relation to art and liturgy:The 20th century cult of youth culminates in a cruel curse: while the aging process cannot be stopped, the aging human being is not allowed to mature. and is condemned, until his life's end, to play the long-dead games of his youth. This is most clearly seen in the world of art--which is so closely related to religion--where the avantgardisms of 1905 are still being repeated again and again, as an ossified ritual, a hundred years later. And, with her famous aggiornamento, the Church thinks that, in order to survive, she needs to 'open herself' to these senile avantgardisms! (Mosebach, pp.81-82).
These thoughts came to mind after a recent trip to the Barnes & Noble bookstore in the Ala Moana shopping center in Honolulu. I usually check out the sections of religion and philosophy and once again I was struck by how the Christianity shelves give more space to heresy than to orthodoxy, to Crossan and Spong than to Benedict XVI. Brant Pitre's 's brilliant and bestselling book, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist: Unlocking the Secrets of the Last Supper
was not to be seen, nor was the pope's great work of lectio divina, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem To The Resurrection. Does this reflect consumer demand or the bias of the B&N buyer? I don't know.In any case, it was something of a relief to come home and find Fr. Robert Barron
's take on John Crossan at his Word on Fire site. Here it is:Thursday, April 14, 2011
Atheism as a Cultural Phenomenon
Paul Adams
My first "Listmania!" list on Amazon.
It's at
http://www.amazon.com/gp/community-content-search/results/ref=cm_srch_q_col_rpli/?query=atheism+as+cultural&search-alias=rp-listmania&x=7&y=9 and below.
Atheism as a Cultural Phenomenon
A Listmania! list by Paul Adams (Honolulu)
Much writing about atheism and religion assumes atheism as the default position, with religion as the phenomenon that needs to be explained. But atheism is by far the rarer phenomenon, something that became widespread in the 19th century, peaked in the second half of the 20th century, and has been declining since. This is a list of books that attempt to understand atheism as a historically specific cultural phenomenon. The authors are philosophers, theologians, and cultural critics rather than sociologists--there is a whole other literature on secularization theory. The books do not debate the truth claims of atheism but represent attempts, mostly by non-atheists, to understand atheism in its historical and cultural specificity.
1. Drama of Atheist Humanism
by Henri de Lubac
The list author says:
"Study by a great 20th century Catholic theologian of Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Comte, and others."
$16.79 Used & New from: $14.70
(5 customer reviews)
2. The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World by Alister E. McGrath
The list author says:
"see my review"
$11.31 Used & New from: $6.40
(63 customer reviews) | 3 customer discussions
3. Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies by David Bentley Hart
The list author says:
"A brilliant book, though, admittedly, more about the revolutionary nature of Christianity and its cultural-historical impact than about atheism. See my review."
$11.09 Used & New from: $10.16
(47 customer reviews) | 1 customer discussion
4. The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse
by Steven D. Smith
The list author says:
"Smith argues that it is not primarily religion but rather the strictures of secular rationalism that have drained our modern discourse of force and authenticity."
$20.04 Used & New from: $19.98
1 customer discussion
5. A Secular Age
by Charles Taylor
The list author says:
"As Alasdair MacIntyre says, "Taylor's book is a major and highly original contribution to the debates on secularization that have been ongoing for the past century. There is no book remotely like it.""
$30.00 Used & New from: $24.98
(27 customer reviews)
6. The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith by Peter Hitchens
The list author says:
"Fascinating account by Christopher Hitchens's brother--partly for the historical and cultural context in postwar England in which both boys (and I) grew up. See my review."
$15.63 Used & New from: $6.59
(50 customer reviews)
7. Reason, Faith, and Revolution (The Terry Lectures Series) by Terry Eagleton
The list author says:
"Atheists and Christians alike will likely share the assessment of one reviewer that the book is "by turns thought-provoking, infuriating, inspiring and very, very funny.""
$10.66 Used & New from: $5.98
(30 customer reviews)
8. A Short History of Secularism by Graeme Smith
The list author says:
"Argues that secularism was born of Christianity and that it is impossible to understand the idea of the secular without understanding that, at root, it is Christian."
$29.00 Used & New from: $5.00
(1 customer review)
9. The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion by Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger
The list author says:
"Fascinating dialogue between German philosopher and neo-marxist Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI."
$10.17 Used & New from: $8.75
(7 customer reviews)
10. An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age by Jurgen Habermas
The list author says:
"Further development of Habermas's thinking on the relation between secular reason and faith, in debate with Jesuit philosophers."
$42.30 Used & New from: $38.29
(1 customer review)
11. Clash Of Orthodoxies: Law Religion & Morality In Crisis
by Robert P. George
The list author says:
"The book is not a study of atheism as such but a critique of the ways in which secularism, or practical atheism, has become not an alternative to orthodoxy but another orthodoxy of its own."
$10.18 Used & New from: $3.17
(21 customer reviews)
12. No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers by Michael Novak
The list author says:
"Addressing, from within the Judeo-Christian tradition, the views and experiences of atheists, Novak sees a kind of common ground in the experience of nothingness (the dark night of the soul) experienced by Catholic mystics."
My first "Listmania!" list on Amazon.
It's at
http://www.amazon.com/gp/community-content-search/results/ref=cm_srch_q_col_rpli/?query=atheism+as+cultural&search-alias=rp-listmania&x=7&y=9 and below.
Atheism as a Cultural Phenomenon
A Listmania! list by Paul Adams (Honolulu)
Much writing about atheism and religion assumes atheism as the default position, with religion as the phenomenon that needs to be explained. But atheism is by far the rarer phenomenon, something that became widespread in the 19th century, peaked in the second half of the 20th century, and has been declining since. This is a list of books that attempt to understand atheism as a historically specific cultural phenomenon. The authors are philosophers, theologians, and cultural critics rather than sociologists--there is a whole other literature on secularization theory. The books do not debate the truth claims of atheism but represent attempts, mostly by non-atheists, to understand atheism in its historical and cultural specificity.
1. Drama of Atheist Humanism
by Henri de LubacThe list author says:
"Study by a great 20th century Catholic theologian of Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Comte, and others."
$16.79 Used & New from: $14.70
(5 customer reviews)
2. The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World by Alister E. McGrath
The list author says:
"see my review"
$11.31 Used & New from: $6.40
(63 customer reviews) | 3 customer discussions
3. Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies by David Bentley Hart
The list author says:
"A brilliant book, though, admittedly, more about the revolutionary nature of Christianity and its cultural-historical impact than about atheism. See my review."
$11.09 Used & New from: $10.16
(47 customer reviews) | 1 customer discussion
4. The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse
by Steven D. SmithThe list author says:
"Smith argues that it is not primarily religion but rather the strictures of secular rationalism that have drained our modern discourse of force and authenticity."
$20.04 Used & New from: $19.98
1 customer discussion
5. A Secular Age
by Charles TaylorThe list author says:
"As Alasdair MacIntyre says, "Taylor's book is a major and highly original contribution to the debates on secularization that have been ongoing for the past century. There is no book remotely like it.""
$30.00 Used & New from: $24.98
(27 customer reviews)
6. The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith by Peter Hitchens
The list author says:
"Fascinating account by Christopher Hitchens's brother--partly for the historical and cultural context in postwar England in which both boys (and I) grew up. See my review."
$15.63 Used & New from: $6.59
(50 customer reviews)
7. Reason, Faith, and Revolution (The Terry Lectures Series) by Terry Eagleton
The list author says:
"Atheists and Christians alike will likely share the assessment of one reviewer that the book is "by turns thought-provoking, infuriating, inspiring and very, very funny.""
$10.66 Used & New from: $5.98
(30 customer reviews)
8. A Short History of Secularism by Graeme Smith
The list author says:
"Argues that secularism was born of Christianity and that it is impossible to understand the idea of the secular without understanding that, at root, it is Christian."
$29.00 Used & New from: $5.00
(1 customer review)
9. The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion by Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger
The list author says:
"Fascinating dialogue between German philosopher and neo-marxist Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI."
$10.17 Used & New from: $8.75
(7 customer reviews)
10. An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age by Jurgen Habermas
The list author says:
"Further development of Habermas's thinking on the relation between secular reason and faith, in debate with Jesuit philosophers."
$42.30 Used & New from: $38.29
(1 customer review)
11. Clash Of Orthodoxies: Law Religion & Morality In Crisis
by Robert P. GeorgeThe list author says:
"The book is not a study of atheism as such but a critique of the ways in which secularism, or practical atheism, has become not an alternative to orthodoxy but another orthodoxy of its own."
$10.18 Used & New from: $3.17
(21 customer reviews)
12. No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers by Michael Novak
The list author says:
"Addressing, from within the Judeo-Christian tradition, the views and experiences of atheists, Novak sees a kind of common ground in the experience of nothingness (the dark night of the soul) experienced by Catholic mystics."
Friday, December 21, 2012
Hugh Hefner's Theology of the Body - and John Paul II's
Paul Adams
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is once again scheduled to be married to his fiancee Crystal Harris, this time on New Year's Eve, 2012. Prompting some thoughts about puritanism and sexual expressionism...and John Paul II's answer to both.
I recently had the privilege of sitting in on a seminar taught by Professor Michael Waldstein, the distinguished theologian who not only translated John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body but also provided the book with a brilliant 128-page introduction. One of the most memorable sessions involved an unscheduled discussion about Hefner's theology in relation to JP II's. The occasion was the interview with Hef conducted in 2004 by religion reporter Cathleen Falsani. According to Waldstein, Falsani is a very bright graduate of Wheaton, the Evangelical college). The interview - under the improbable title “Hugh Hefner: Man of God?” - appeared in the SoMA Review. I would link to it except that the site carries a computer safety warning. Still, her account of the meeting is included in a collection of Falsani’s interviews with famous public figures about their spiritual lives.
I recently had the privilege of sitting in on a seminar taught by Professor Michael Waldstein, the distinguished theologian who not only translated John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body but also provided the book with a brilliant 128-page introduction. One of the most memorable sessions involved an unscheduled discussion about Hefner's theology in relation to JP II's. The occasion was the interview with Hef conducted in 2004 by religion reporter Cathleen Falsani. According to Waldstein, Falsani is a very bright graduate of Wheaton, the Evangelical college). The interview - under the improbable title “Hugh Hefner: Man of God?” - appeared in the SoMA Review. I would link to it except that the site carries a computer safety warning. Still, her account of the meeting is included in a collection of Falsani’s interviews with famous public figures about their spiritual lives.
The conversation with Hef is revealing and seemed to surprise both participants. It seems Hef had a Puritan upbringing. He's descended from the original Mayflower Puritans but was raised sorta Methodist as he explains (loose in dogma, strict in morality).
To set the stage for looking at Hef and his spiritual evolution, first a word about concupiscence and adultery in the heart - the topic for the day from TOB. Bear with me here and I think you'll find it interesting from a cultural perspective, if nothing else. I think it brings out how very differently a Catholic thinks about things than a Protestant or secularist. The two - Protestantism and secularism - are closely linked, I think, historically and spiritually - some say Protestantism is a stepping stone to atheism. Even some Protestant theologians like Alister McGrath, whose book, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World, I reviewed here, thinks there is truth in the observation. (See also Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society.) Of course, in countries like the U.S. where Protestant/secularist culture predominates, even Catholics start to think like Protestants, a great loss to the larger culture as well as themselves.
In the Catholic view as explained by John Paul II, concupiscence is defective love, in as well as outside marriage, which it corrupts, so that even a marriage between Christians falls short of a Christian marriage when the spousal love is corrupted by it. Thus adultery in the heart can happen even within a marriage while adultery in the flesh cannot. But adultery in the flesh (i.e., involving someone outside the marriage) doesn't happen unless adultery in the heart has already happened. A full and integral love (of flesh, blood, spirit) derives from the mystery of Creation (God who is love creates us out of love for love, so man cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of self [cf. Lk 17:33]).
Our main difficulty with sexuality is that we don't see it in its full value, its real beauty, which is tied up with the spousal meaning of the body. We are created male and female for a one-flesh union that is a full communion of persons, the archetype of which (without the sex) is the Trinity, a communion of Persons in the complete giving and receiving of love. Jesus warns, not against normal sexual desires when he says the man who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart (Mt. 5:27-28), but against the dehumanizing reduction of another person to an object for one’s own use, like a bar of chocolate. His strictures, more harshly stated than the OT Law in some areas, can be a danger for persons of a scrupulous disposition. But Jesus' point is not puritanical or sex-negative. It is to reduce everything to the commandment of love, which Augustine summed up perfectly in the very non-Puritan injunction to "Love and do what you will."
So the answer to our tendency to objectify the person we are attracted to, to see her in a utilitarian way, in terms of her usefulness for our pleasure, is not to turn away in revulsion at our drives, our bodies, and sex, to take a cold shower (the Protestant-Kantian approach) but to love more. Not to look away but to look more closely, to see the woman as a full person on her own journey through life and toward God, with her own goods (love is willing the good of the other as other, a matter of will and not just feeling or drives). This corresponds more or less to the way Aristotle talks about friendship. It's about living for someone and sharing life with them (the gift of self). For the utilitarian alternative, think of the way I go to the store and buy a bar of fine dark chocolate. I don't ask it if it wants to be bought and used by me for my pleasure. I just pay for it, unwrap it, and eat it, an object of use for my pleasure, and then throw away the wrapper. Treating a person that way is a real problem, combining slavery and rape. Prostitution, even where it does not involve trafficking and coercion, is like that except it involves two people using each other in a commercial exchange in which each gets what they want, sex or money. But there is no pretense of loving or even seeing the other as a full person with his or her own life journey, any more than there is in my relation with the cashier when I pay her for a bar of chocolate.
So what is the character of sexual desire in a right relationship? It's part of an exchange of gifts--joy through giving and receiving joy.
From this perspective, utilitarianism is the other side of the coin of Puritanism. Puritans, as did Luther, worried about selfishness. You have to avoid pleasure in sex, or at most give it without receiving it. This is manifestly absurd. I kiss my wife to give her pleasure, but I make it clear that I am doing it for her, I get no pleasure from it myself as that would be selfish. She'd slap my face. Reminds me of the advice to English wives who were supposed to do their marital duty but not to enjoy it - just "lie back and think of England" - England being presumably so unerotic a thing to think about as to fill you with a sense of duty but without any pleasure attached. Kant is like this, isn't he? - One should act out of duty only, not pleasure.
So in puritanism and porn (or hooking up), you have two sides of the same coin. In both, sexuality is separated from the person, in one case to be repelled, in the other embraced as 'recreation.' The actual teaching of Jesus is beautiful and liberating. The real challenge is to love wholeheartedly, not defectively.
Hefner was consumed by the sense that an injustice was done to sex. He was not hugged, he was left with a longing for love, which his mother could not express because hugging your kids is too pleasurable and like a good Lutheran she wanted to avoid pleasure. So poor (though rich) Hef never broke out of his puritanism. He just switched sides. From born again to porn again. He is right to say (para. 4 of the interview) that organized religion (to the extent it embraced this puritan revulsion from sex) played havoc with people's lives and was very unChristian. But he's wrong to tell his mother that because of what she was unable to give as love, "it set me on a course that changed my life and the world." No it didn't. He just changed sides, but remained as far away as ever from a full integration of sexuality with love and the full human integrity of the person. He, no more than his mother, was able to love fully and integrally. Both meant well, but neither was able to break out of their puritan chains.
Of course, Catholicism has been deeply influenced, more in some countries than others, by this puritan strain. Nostra culpa. But the challenge is to recover - in the midst of a deep dehumanization as well as desacralization of sex, the body, love, and marriage - a fully human and so fully Christian understanding, which seems more and more to be the task of countercultural 'creative minorities' rather than a socially available option on a large scale.
But young people who encounter JP II's TOB find it life-changing. I wish more Catholics understood it and were capable of teaching it. It's JP II's greatest gift to humanity, which is saying a lot given his many and profound contributions - to ending Soviet-style Communism/totalitarianism, stopping the rot in the Church, and his connection to millions of spiritually deprived young people. (I like that poster of JP II, in the style of motivational management posters about teamwork. It says, Generation JP II: Raising Our Parents Catholic.)
Fr. Robert Barron has some excellent discussion of these themes in his essay, Sex, Love, and God: The Catholic Answer to Puritanism and Nietzcheanism. See also such video clips of his as this:
and this, discussing Hanna Rosin and her defense of the hook-up culture as good for women -
Friday, October 19, 2012
Practicing Social Justice
Practicing Social Justice: A Virtue-Based Approach
Paul Adams
Social justice is a much used but ill-defined and problematic term in both Catholic social teaching (CST) where it developed and in social work, where it has become a “core value.” Drawing on the traditions of CST, Novak’s (e.g., 1993; 2003) work on social justice, and virtue ethics (Adams, 2009), I want to propose a way to clarify the concept and integrate it into our faith and practice. Social justice is dismissed by some, especially economists, as code for a particular partisan political program or as an all-purpose justification for a new law, right, or program. Conceptually, social justice combines the classical duality of justice as state of affairs and as state of character (virtue). In the case of social justice, the virtue sense has been neglected and the term reduced to a matter of government policies and programs.
As the NASW (2008) Code of Ethics has it, the value of social justice involves, as its ethical principle, challenging social injustice, (a state of affairs) “focused primarily on issues of poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and other forms of social injustice.” The issues identified seem to be states of affairs to be remedied rather than things people do. At the same time, the ethical principle specifies certain activities in which social workers habitually engage: “Social workers pursue social change, particularly with and on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups of people” - that is, social justice involves or constitutes a virtue, an acquired disposition to act in a certain way. In this one short paragraph, the Code expresses the duality between regulative principle or state of affairs on one hand and virtue on the other, that critics claim renders the whole concept incoherent and ideological.
The most comprehensive and telling critique of the term and its use was made by Hayek (1976), who sees in it a utopian statism and conflation of ends and means. It becomes in practice an all-purpose justification for any expansion of state power vis a vis civil society. It moves directly from the obligation to relieve or eliminate poverty, on which Christians and others across the political spectrum agree, to the assumption that the way to do this is through Federal programs of social assistance, what John Paul II (1991, #48) called (and warned against), the “social assistance state.” The implication is that those who want to end poverty but see such programs as often counterproductive in their unintended consequences, not as sharing a common value but different strategy, but as committed to a value of social injustice. But no-one espouses such a value, any more than any society adopts injustice or cowardice as a cardinal virtue. Thus Novak (1993) summarizes Hayek's objection: "Those who claim to speak for social justice prejudice arguments concerning means and ends by defining their opponents as 'unjust.' In brief, use of the term social justice is moral imperialism by the imposition of abstraction" (p.77).
Recent work in virtue ethics and Novak’s response to Hayek’s challenge suggest a way through the conceptual fog by recovering an understanding of social justice as a virtue (Novak, 2009). It is part of the cardinal virtue of justice, but social in its orientation to the common good and in its constitutive practices. Central both to social work and CST, the virtue of social justice requires habits of heart and mind that sustain the intermediary associations and institutions that stand between individual and state. Its aim is to improve the common good beyond the home (the virtue of giving the community its due) and it involves working with others, requiring skills and habits of cooperation and association.
My aim here is not to pursue the argument about the coherence or incoherence of social justice as state of affairs, regulative principle, or criterion against which to measure policies and legislation. Laying that question to the side, I want to examine the other aspect of social justice and to suggest that it is the core virtue of social work practice.
As distinct from the view of social justice as ideal state of affairs, the virtue of social justice focuses on the kind of person a social worker (especially a Christian one) should be. It asks how the virtue of social justice is required for and developed by normal, everyday practice at all levels and in all fields.
Practicing the virtue of social justice conforms to the CST principle of subsidiarity, which holds that “needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them and who act as neighbors to those in need” (John Paul II, 1991, #48). It requires seeing people as active, creative, caring contributors to their families and communities, and hence the common good, rather than as passive recipients and dependents of the "social assistance state” (John Paul II, 1991, #48).
A virtue-based approach to social justice brings to social work practice a more adequate Christian anthropology of the human person than that implicit in either individualist or collectivist visions of social reality. As such, and as we will examine through restorative justice and other practices, the virtue of social justice supports an empowerment-based practice that strengthens families and communities, so promoting democracy and the common good (Tocqueville, 2004) by building rather than substituting for the caring capacity of those closest to the situation.
Social Justice in Practice: Three Examples
Let’s begin by considering three examples of ways of helping that both practice and promote the virtue of social justice. They are the kind of microfinance developed by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the patch approach to community-centered, locality-based social work practice pioneered in the UK and transferred to various parts of the US, and Family Group Conferencing (FGC) as developed in New Zealand and adopted and adapted in the US and many other countries.
Grameen Bank
Like the Franciscan friars of the fifteenth century and Archbishop McGrath, C.S.C. (1924-2000) of Panama City in the twentieth, the economist Mohammed Yunus saw the importance of providing small loans at low interest to poor people (primarily women) so that they could use their entrepreneurial creativity and energy to build small businesses. As loans were repaid, new loans could be made to other borrowers in the community. In the Grameen Bank case, a key aspect of the program is the forming of groups of women “who repay their loans via frequent installments in a group setting” (Feigenberg, Field, & Pande, 2010). As Feigenberg et al, say, citing Larance (2001), “Repayment meetings provide clients opportunities they did not have before including ‘walking across the village to attend the center meeting, sitting in conversation with a diverse set of women, handling money for the group and receiving personal address.’”
This approach can be and is discussed in terms of social capital (Putnam, 1993) - the trust, norms of reciprocity, and networks - that is, in terms of the forms of social organization the program develops. But it also illustrates how a program may require and develop, in both its organizers and clients, the virtue of social justice, the personal disposition and habit of joining with others to promote the common good.
Patch
Patch is an approach to delivering social services, including child protection and other forms of social care, that utilizes a locality-based integrated team of human service workers (Adams & Krauth, 1995; Adams, Alter, Krauth, St. Andre, & Tracy, 1995; Adams, 2000). I was involved through a Federal technology transfer demonstration grant in the early 1990s in adapting the British approach in a distressed neighborhood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The Iowa patch team has continued in expanded and modified form and other patch teams have sprung up in various parts of the country since.
In the UK, a patch team would usually, but not always involve a single agency, the local authority social services department responsible for statutory child welfare, mental health, aging, and other services. The agency’s social work and other staff were redeployed from a central downtown office to a number of small, neighborhood-based teams and given responsibility for work within a locality, usually of about 10,000 residents. The team contained specialists in various areas of practice but, as a team, offered integrated, comprehensive services.
In the context of a more fragmented American urban service system, the Iowa Patch Project integrated staff from five state or local programs: Iowa Human Services (four child protection social workers, Juvenile Court Services (a probation officer), City Housing (inspector), County Homemaker Services, and a community center) into a multi-agency team located conveniently within the neighborhood. The idea was to take advantage of some decategorization of funding streams in order to offer changed practice on the ground.
The team started with the recognition that most helping in communities is non-professional, involving extended family, friends and neighbors, churches and informal networks, schools and voluntary associations, beauty parlors and natural helping figures, groups, and systems. The task of social work, they concluded, was to identify who else was involved and close to the situation, to enable them to tap into their own wisdom, knowledge of the situation, and resources in order to interrupt problem-perpetuating patterns of relationship. Such an approach requires decentering both the service system and the professional-client relationship. It depends on teamwork among and partnership between the patch members and the residents of the neighborhood.
The shift in practice - from case by case work to shared teamwork, from reactive to proactive (from crisis response to providing a little help when needed at an earlier stage), from professional responsibility for solutions to shared responsibility among those involved, and to the interweaving of formal and informal helping - is best illustrated by an example. On visiting a house to inspect it for code violations, the housing inspector (who despite her lack of any social work education, was one of the first to grasp the patch concept) found some frayed electrical wiring. In the past this would have been the extent of her professional concern. But she also noticed a single mother, new to the neighborhood, with several children and only one piece of furniture, a sofa. She brought this information back to the team, which sent out an MSW practicum student and a CPS worker to talk to the woman. They put her in touch with a local church which set her up with needed furniture and with a moms’ group that the team had initiated. Thanks to “a little help when needed,” what might have turned in a few months to a formal case of child neglect never became an official case at all (Adams, 2000).
Responding in this way depended on the role flexibility and shared work of the team members, their proactive approach (the norm would have been for CPS to target more serious cases where bruises were evident, a child had run away or committed a serious offense), and their prior work in the neighborhood. They were able to involve the church because they had already built relations with the churches in the neighborhood. The moms’ group had developed out of a TaeKwonDo class offered free to local kids by the probation officer. The moms would hang around during the class, chat with each other despite their own isolation or shyness, and a regular moms’ group formed naturally and continued under its own steam.
Family Group Conferencing
As an alternative to honor killings and vendettas between families, some form of restorative justice practice seems to have been universal across time, place, and cultures prior to the development of the modern state as a way of confronting and correcting injustices and making things right (Braithwaite, 2002). Of the many adaptations across the world to the context of the bureaucratic-professional state, ranging from addressing cases of minor delinquency to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I want to focus briefly on the use of the Family Group Conference (FGC) in New Zealand and Hawai‘i.
In both countries there was a surviving indigenous practice of family group meetings, the whanau hui (Maori) and ho‘oponopono (Hawaiian). In each case the state’s child welfare system has drawn on this experience to develop a hybrid process of traditional and modern, formal-legal and informal, to address cases of child abuse and neglect among the whole population, indigenous and other. These are the FGC in New Zealand and ‘Ohana Conference in Hawai‘i. The professional practice in both cases is to plan for and conduct a meeting of the extended family group (whanau, ‘ohana) to address the concerns about the children’s safety and to come up with a plan to ensure it. The phases of the meeting vary, but include at least introductions, information sharing, private family time, and a decision about the plan, how to monitor it, follow up, and reconvene as needed. The professionals who have been involved, like the conference coordinator, social worker, school counselor, and therapist, share their knowledge of the situation and answer questions. Then they leave the family alone to discuss the situation and formulate a plan. The plan, which may involve (extended) family, community, and agency resources, is nearly always accepted after some clarification and negotiation. Families are far more creative in generating options and utilizing family and community resources than social workers who rely on their own professional skill and knowledge of resources and the situation to develop a plan.
The relation of family and community to state is one Braithwaite (2002) describes, by analogy to regulating business, as “responsive regulation” and Adams and Chandler (2004) call “state-enforced family self-regulation.” In either case, the state does not abdicate responsibility for the “bottom line” (child safety in this case) and retains its full coercive power in the background, but it widens the circle of responsibility for finding and implementing solutions and aims to keep family self-governance and empowerment in the foreground.
Person in Social Environment: A Christian Perspective
If we ask what these three approaches have in common we can see that they all imply a certain view of the human person and her environment that is neither individualist nor collectivist, not laissez faire or statist. Here we may draw upon the work of John Paul II, central to all of whose teaching is the need for an adequate understanding of the dignity and destiny of the human person. Drawing on his major contributions to CST (John Paul II,1991) and to the theology of the body (John Paul II, 2006), we can discern three dimensions of the theological anthropology of the human person - the personal, social, and societal. All three are necessary components of an undertanding of the virtue of social justice.
Personal dimension
John Paul II discusses the subjectivity of the person and the subjectivity of society as key principles of CST. Persons cannot be reduced, without violence to their humanity as persons in imago Dei, to their economic functions, either as cogs in a machine or as individual economic actors. They are self-experiencing moral agents, with creativity, initiative, resourcefulness, and capacity for innovation and problem-solving. They should never be reduced, he argues, to passive recipients of services or targets of intervention (see also Benedict XVI, 2006). They are created by God, who is love. They are created out of love and for love. Created in his image, we are creative. Our creation out of and for love reveals, in the words of a key passage in the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, 24:3, “a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons and the union of God’s sons in truth and love. This likeness shows that man, who is the only creature on earth God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of self (cf. Lk 17:33).”
Social work from the beginning drew on this need to find ourselves through a sincere gift of self, if we are to find ourselves. Jane Addams (1893) speaks eloquently of “The subjective necessity of social settlements.” We have not always recognized this need of our clients also to give, to contribute in association with others to the solutions of the problems they confront. As persons created in the image and likeness of God, they too have a need to make a sincere gift of self.
Social dimension
Persons are social by nature, John Paul II argues. It is natural for them to cooperate with others beyond their immediate families to build associations, to join together as free individuals to take responsibility for the common good. American society, as Tocqueville noted, has been characterized not so much by rugged individualism, as usually understood, as by the virtue of joining with others to achieve a common good, such as digging a well, building a church, or raising a barn. Americans relied not on themselves as lone individuals, nor on the state as the French did, nor on the benefactions of aristocrats as did the English in his view. Instead they relied on the principle of association, which Tocqueville described as the first law of democracy.
The call to be co-creators with God runs through all of CST. In work, we are also co-creators with each other. Even creating something as simple as a pencil is a collaborative enterprise. We live in an economic system defined by creativity and participation with others in transforming goods of the earth to serve human needs. The decisive factor in production in today’s economy, John Paul (1991) argues, is man himself, his knowledge and capacity for perceiving the needs of others, and collaboration.
Societal dimension
Jewish and secular, the Russian dissident and Israeli cabinet minister Natan Sharansky (2006) described Jesus’ response to his questioners, “Render unto Caesar,” as the “anti-totalitarian principle” (p.33). Of the great papal authors of CST, Leo XIII foresaw the dangers of the all-powerful state, Pius XI saw its growth around him, John Paul II lived most of his life under it in both Nazi and Communist forms, and Benedict grew up in a deeply anti-Nazi Catholic family in a totalitarian Nazi state.
Like all the papal encyclicals on CST, John Paul II’s stress the importance for human dignity of the state’s supporting and allowing the social space between state and individual, the associations or intermediary groups through which people exercise their freedom and their nature as social beings.
The point here is that when people join together in intermediary associations to improve things of direct interest to themselves they also build a dense civil society, a rich and diverse social space between individual or family and the state. CST consistently warns of the dangers of state hegemony over or domination of civil society. It is consistent in this way with the republicanism inherited from Ancient Rome, which emphasized freedom from domination by the state or sovereign, a mixed constitution with separation and sharing of powers so that the reins of government were not gathered in the hands of an individual or group, and an active role for citizens with contestation and accountability (Pettit, 1999).
Leo XIII, the champion of free associations, saw that these intermediary groups were important not only for their correspondence to the personal and social nature of man, but also for the common good of the society as a whole. The state, therefore, has a special responsibility to ensure the freedom and vitality of civil society and not to seek to subject to its will the structures and institutions that mediate between state and individual.
Origins of ‘Social Justice’
With this emphasis, Leo, in his 1891 encyclical letter, Rerum Novarum, set up the approach that Pius XI forty years later captured with the term “social justice,” deploying it throughout his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, and thereby making it canonical in CST.
Leo was responding to the social dislocation and dehumanizing conditions of nineteenth-century capitalism, the breakup of traditional society, the threat to family, child labor, the factories, mines, and sweatshops with their inhuman conditions for the men, women, and children who worked in them, and the cold utilitarian ideology vividly portrayed by Dickens in Hard Times (1854). But he also offered an alternative to what he argued was the wrong response to these developments, socialism. Leo denounced statism and egalitarianism in favor of the defense of private (or “several” in Novak’s preferred term) property, which was a condition of common prosperity and freedom of speech and action.
At the same time, Leo insisted on the right to a living wage, something made realistic by the economic dynamism of the industrial market economy. Our understanding, since Adam Smith, of the cause of the wealth of nations makes poverty no longer an unavoidable condition and for that reason a sin. Without that understanding of the cause of wealth as a principle of CST, “social justice Catholicism” and the “preferential option for the poor” tend to a static view of poverty as something which continues to be a permanent feature of the human condition. Compassion readily turns into a matter of feeling sorry for the poor, sustaining them in their poverty, and having the State do something to provision them. The poor themselves remain passive objects of assistance in a social assistance state.
The right of free association, first defended by Aquinas ([1256] 1902) in Contra Impugnantes, was an essential part of Leo’s vision and Leo was its great champion. It was the guarantee against a Leviathan state, the absolute sovereign over every sphere of life as proposed by Hobbes and Rousseau. The associations or intermediary groups of civil society are the hidden gem of CST, overlooked not least by those who advocate for CST and “social justice” precisely as an argument for the increased reach and power of the state over civil society.
Pius XI recognized the great gains made since Leo’s time in living standards and working conditions, but saw also the rise of the totalitarian state in Italy and Germany, against which he urgently and repeatedly warned. At the same time there is an ambiguity in his use of the term “social justice,” where both its senses - virtue and ideal state of affairs - are present but unreconciled (Novak, 1993) .
Social Work and Rerum Novarum
Both Leo’s Rerum Novarum, the first great work of modern CST, and social work as a practice, were late nineteenth century responses to the conditions of labor in an industrial market economy. Both were anti-socialist but pro-labor, both expressed concern for the poor and for workers as persons, and opposed their reduction to economic units or functions, considered only in the utilitarian terms espoused by Dickens’s memorable character Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times, a “practical man” who believed only in cold, hard facts.
Social work’s pioneers saw the inadequacy of random handouts - “not alms but a friend” was the slogan of the Charity Organization Societies, which sought to provide help that really helped, that built on a relationship with and understanding of the person helped, her situation and needs. In this they opposed not only random almsgiving that made the giver feel good but also compassionate but did little or nothing to address real needs and the “liberal” approach of another Dickens character, Ebenezer Scrooge, who declined to contribute to charity, believing that the government should take care of social problems and that was what he paid taxes for.
The Settlement House movement, like the COS but with different methods, sought to build relationships with poor people. The urban ‘settlers’ both practiced and promoted social justice, joining with others and stimulating the formation of groups and associations of various kinds to work for the common good of the immigrant neighborhood residents and of the city. They assisted and supported labor unions, the development of the fields of public health and labor law, cultural groups and projects (most lasting of which, perhaps, was the Settlement House Cookbook). They organized and campaigned against government corruption and the spoils system. They saw their poor immigrant neighbors as creative members of the community with much to contribute. They offered and worked for an alternative both to class conflict - they aimed to bridge the gap between the classes - and to a cold indifference or casual ‘charity.’
Both COS and Settlement House movements saw the need for social reforms but neither saw the way forward in terms of increased government spending or state-run, tax-funded social programs or what John Paul II called the social assistance state. Both might have said, with Pope Benedict XVI (2006), “The state which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing the suffering person – any person – needs: namely, loving personal concern” (p. 69).
Social Justice as a Virtue
Just as social work and CST emerged as responses to the new social conditions, with their new freedoms and new dislocations, insecurities, and needs, so social justice emerged as a new virtue, a new form of the cardinal virtue of justice for the new times. As a virtue, it involves giving others their due, not individually as when one justly pays one bills, but socially as when one gives the community its due. It is the virtue of joining with others to achieve common purposes. It is the virtue Tocqueville noticed in the United States, where citizens relied on their own resourcefulness and initiative to achieve a common purpose. It is social both in its aims (the common good) and in its constitutive practices.
Social justice is the virtue required for and developed by civil society. It empowers the mediating structures (Berger & Neuhaus, 1996), the space between individual and state, the free associations admired by Tocqueville in America and championed by Leo XIII. From this perspective, it is a mistake to think of those key principles of CST, solidarity and subsidiarity, as opposing or balancing each other, such that solidarity is associated with the common good which in turn is associated with state power, while subsidiarity is associated with the market and private property. They are different kinds of concept. Both apply to the duties of the state, as John Paul II (1991, #48) says, but both apply also to communities of a lower order, that is, those that constitute civil society or the intermediary groups.
Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization, according to which “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good” (John Paul II, 1991, #48). Solidarity is the principle of love or caritas, of friendship and willing the good of the other as other. Like “a view to the common good,” it should characterize social practices and structures at every level from neighborhood initiatives and local religious associations to Federal programs.
The heart of solidarity, as of social work, is relationship. In this respect, central government, though sometimes necessary to meet needs and address problems that cannot be handled at lower levels, as well as to support and protect those lower levels from its own bureaucratic and controlling tendencies, is at a distinct disadvantage. As Archbishop Chaput (2009) argues, “Government cannot love. It has no soul and no heart. The greatest danger of the modern secularist state is this: In the name of humanity, under the banner of serving human needs and easing human suffering, it ultimately, ironically—and too often tragically—lacks humanity” (p.29).
Speaking to the personnel who carry out the Church’s charitable activity and warning them against being diverted into a radical utopian activism in the name of justice, Benedict sees that, more than anything, these workers (and we could say Christian social workers in any setting) “must be persons moved by Christ’s love, persons whose hearts Christ has conquered with his love, awakening in them a love of neighbor” (p.85).
The social worker whose character is formed in Christian love has, as a deep part of her character, a radical humility—which is necessary both to the virtue of love and to professional competence.
My deep personal sharing in the needs and sufferings of others becomes a sharing of my very self with them: if my gift is not to prove a source of humiliation, I must give to others not only something that is my own, but my very self; I must be personally present in my gift (Benedict XVI, 2006, p.87).
Benedict invokes here the radical humility of Christ on the Cross, which in Christian understanding redeemed us and constantly comes to our aid. In helping we also receive help, Benedict (2006) says—being able to help is no merit or achievement of our own. “This duty is a grace” (p.88).
The virtue of social justice expresses two aspects of the human person in society emphasized by John Paul II in Centesimus Annus and which, as we saw, find expression in the three programs we discussed, the Grameen Bank, Patch, and Family Group Conferencing. The first he calls the subjectivity of the individual. The person as self-experiencing agent cannot be reduced to his economic functions. From the Christian vision of the person as co-creator and unable fully to find himself except through the sincere gift of self (Gaudium et Spes, 24:3; Lk 17:33), arises the correct view of society.
This second aspect refers to the social nature of man, the fact that persons are social, not as bees in a nest or cogs in a machine, but precisely in their full humanity. This is what John Paul calls the subjectivity of society. From this conception follows the need for “structures of participation and shared responsibility” (Centesimus Annus, #46) as well as the understanding of all CST that our social nature is not subsumed under the state, which is one expression of it. The intermediary groups that we form in the social space between individual (and family) and state are expressions of our human nature that call for respect and forbearance on the state’s part.
Social Work and the Virtues
Since the virtues have been neglected in social work theory and education for more than fifty years, notwithstanding the revival of virtue ethics in other fields like medicine and law, it may be helpful, before discussing social justice as a uniquely social work virtue, to examine the relation of social work to the virtues in general (Adams, 2009).
In the preamble to the NASW Code of Ethics, the term “well-being” occurs three times. “The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being…. A historic and defining feature of social work is the profession’s focus on individual well-being in a social context and the well-being of society.” According to the 2008 version of EPAS (CSWE, 2008), “The purpose of the social work profession is to promote human and community well-being.” For Aristotle, eudaimonia, translated as well-being, flourishing, or happiness (which in its classical sense resembles health in that it is not simply subjective—I could be wrong about being happy as I could about my health) connotes the good life. The virtues, in this tradition, are necessary for and partly constitute the good life, that is, the well-being of individual and society—the mission of social work.
For Aristotle, then, as well as Aquinas, and for that matter, the Dalai Lama, ethics is rooted in “real” happiness, understood as human flourishing or well-being, as distinct from pleasure (Aquinas, 1981, 2005; Aristotle, 2002; Pinckaers, 1995). The key New Testament term “joy” clearly does not mean anything like the utilitarian concept of happiness as pleasure. As is the case for other animals, flourishing is about what, given our nature, is necessary for humans to thrive as individuals and— inseparably from that—as communities. Aristotle thus roots the human need for the virtues in biology, in what it takes for humans to flourish given their nature (including above all the capacity for reason).
Virtues are not simply means to human flourishing, however, but partially constitute it. For Aquinas, building directly on Aristotle but sixteen hundred years later in the very different context of Christian theology, there were three types of good inherent in our nature as humans that defined our telos. Like all animals, it is a good for us 1) to maintain ourselves in existence and 2) to reproduce ourselves and care for our offspring. In contrast to other creatures, it is also a good for humans 3) to develop and use the powers of rational thought and, in consequence, to know and love God (Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae 94.2; Williams, 2005).
In social work where the character of the agent has long been understood as inseparable from the professional act or intervention performed, the virtues refocus attention on the character of the practitioner and the professional use of self. This reorientation accords well with the growing body of research suggesting the importance of the client-practitioner relationship as distinct from the specific theories or methods employed (Drisko, 2004; Graybeal, 2007; Wampold, 2001).
In the classical view, then, ethics is fundamentally about individual and community well-being or happiness, eudaimonia. The virtues are key to and partly constitute human well-being. Social work aspires to serve human goods that are important for individual and community well-being. To that extent as well as because of the importance of the character of the social worker, it is, no less than medecine, a virtue-based profession (Adams, 2009).
From these considerations, we can see that achieving the purpose of social work (to “promote human and community well-being”) requires both promoting the virtues in others and practicing them ourselves. Among the virtues, however, that of social justice holds - or should hold - a distinctive place in social work practice. As the disposition to form associations, to join with others to achieve common goods, it both requires and develops in practitioners and those with whom we work those “habits of the heart” (Tocqueville, 2000) that protect the true social nature of man, the “subjectivity of society,” against the excesses both of individualism and collectivism. Its practice helps protect the mediating structures (Berger & Neuhaus, 1996), the associations of civil society, against the state’s direct custodianship.
Promoting Social Justice
Promoting social justice necessarily requires work at multiple system levels and includes attention to the social conditions in which the virtue (and other virtues) flourishes or withers. The moral-cultural, political, and economic systems interact either to discourage or encourage initiative, creativity, responsibility, and the civic virtues that build social capital. The discouraging kind of configuration of cultural, political, and economic systems has been documented in the feudal structures that reduce serfs to a passivity that limits responsibility to the dictum, “pray, pay, and obey;” in the Mafia-influenced world of southern Italy studied by Putnam (1993), where trust and civic responsibility do not reach beyond the extended family; and in the kind of cultural-political-economic structures described by John Paul II (1991), where “by intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending” (Centesimus Annus, #48).
On the other hand, political and economic policies and the culture can encourage initiative, creativity, responsibility, community, practicality - civic virtues and social capital by sustaining
economic freedom in the framework of law (property rights, including patent laws - Art.I, sec.8 of the U.S. Constitution; restriction of child labor; right to organize, etc.). The importance of these things for economic development and fighting poverty worldwide are well described by DeSoto (2000), Collier (2007);
political freedom: from torture or slavery, but also respecting the subjectivity of society and intermediary groups as opposed to seeking state control of all;
cultural freedom: to think, investigate, create, and practice one’s religion and exercise one’s conscience freely.
That is, as John Paul II argues, a free economy - capitalism rightly understood, in which the economic sector is “circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious” (Centesimus Annus, # 42) - is the system in which people are best able to exercise and develop their creative potential. Such an economic system, appropriately circumscribed, “recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector” (Centesimus Annus, #42).
Practicing Social Justice
For a social worker, practicing social justice involves habits of joining with others (teamwork) to work for change in multiple systems, seeing families (supported by decision-making and self-governance processes like FGCs) as building blocks of democracy, not passive recipients of services. Practitioners learn to listen to, deliberate with, and support others involved while modeling and reinforcing those practices in those families and communities with which they work. As a virtue, social justice entails a disposition to practice and develop the skills of collaboration, partnership practice, and empowerment for the common good.
Pellegrino (2008) has developed a list of virtues required for and developed by the practice of medicine. Virtuous doctors in his view are those who apply their knowledge and skills by exercising such virtues as prudence, benevolence, compassion and caring, courage, intellectual honesty, humility, effacement of self-interest, justice, and trustworthiness (Pellegrino, 2008, and Pellegrino & Thomasma, 1993). A similar list could be developed for the virtuous social worker, with social justice working in unity with the other virtues to form her character and practice. In social work (but also in medicine) equanimity needs to be added to the list.
Joining with others in a decision-making and problem-solving process like FGC requires self-mastery (the cardinal virtue of temperance or moderation) with respect to the occupational tendency to assume an ultimatist attitude - here’s the plan and here’s what you have to do if you want to get your kids back. Equanimity is the virtue that recognizes, in this context, that I am not the family’s boss, I have a limited mandate (which, however, cannot be abrogated) to ensure that the family’s plan offers a good chance of keeping the children safe (Fisher, 1994). But that responsibility does not extend to determining the content of the plan, substituting my better idea for the family’s, or requiring services or treatment that I think helpful for a parent though not evidently needed for the child’s safety.
Joining with others, collaborating with them to improve a situation and achieve a common good requires, at every system level, recognition and acceptance of the fact that one may not and should not always get one’s way. Negotiating care in the community at the level of individual families and their networks requires the devolution as close to the front line as possible of authority to make agreements and commit resources. Otherwise, if workers agree to negotiated decisions that are subsequently countermanded by managers who were not involved in the negotiation, families and communities will become disillusioned and cynical about the public agency’s commitment to partnership and empowerment (Adams & Nelson, 1997; Smale & Tuson, 1993; Adams, 2000).
For this reason, Hawaii’s Department of Human Services modified the rules for its statewide family group conferencing program, called ‘Ohana Conferencing, to prohibit supervisors from overruling conference decisions if they themselves had not been present at the conference (Adams & Chandler, 2002; 2004). In New Zealand, the family’s plan stands unless the social worker successfully challenges it in court. Where such safeguards do not protect the decision-making process, and collaborative decisions are vetoed, the result is not to practice or promote the virtue of social justice, but to undermine it by making joining with others in such processes seem pointless.
Practicing social justice as a professional social worker involves working with those closest to the situation to enable them to tap into and strengthen their own cultural, material, and network resources. The aim is to share (but not abdicate) responsibility for resolving problems with others, not only addressing the immediate problem but also leaving the caring capacity of families and communities stronger than before. Practicing social justice as a virtue, as an abiding state or part of one’s own character, also entails promoting that virtue in those individuals in families, small groups, formal and informal associations, and communities with whom we join.
References
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