The World Day of Social Justice greets a year when social justice is returning to favour. Bank executives begin to own their social responsibilities. Liberal economics begin to be seen, not as the condition for a productive economy but as a barrier to it.
The common good is no longer seen as an oddity but as a powerful idea. Government spending is seen as helpful; austerity directed against the poor and the passion for balancing budgets are no longer boasted of.
That is the rhetoric. For governments, though, it is business as usual. Tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts in budgets that further humiliate resourceless Americans or Australians, with the ritual verbal muggings of minorities, coal worship and river destruction, continue unabated. Even if the cawing of economic liberalism is no longer heard in our land, the birds of carrion still feast.
This mismatch between rhetoric and practice discloses the lack of a coherent vision of society that shapes society. In developing such a vision the principles of Catholic Social Teaching can be a helpful resource. Their central insight is that each human person is precious and demands respect. People must not be treated simply as means to an end, as workers are if they are seen simply as a cost in production, or as people who seek protection are if seen simply as alien.
In this teaching, too, relationships are all important in human life. We depend on our environment and on one another in all that is significant in our lives: from being born and educated to making money and enjoying technology. Because we depend on one another we are also responsible to one another, particularly to the most vulnerable. That responsibility touches us in our domestic life and also in the organisation of the economy. So the making of wealth and the running of business have a social license — they are part of society with a responsibility to society.
Reflection on social justice generally focuses on the relationships between people in the institutions they form — businesses, media, churches, the military, governments etc. It looks at the human relationships that are embodied in the management of the economy, government and so on, and points to aspects that impede human flourishing.
More recently the importance of the environment for flourishing has been recognised. When this is disrespected we all suffer. Vulnerable people are often disadvantaged by pollution, by extremes of heat and cold, by rising sea levels and unreliable power supply. It is natural then to ask what we owe to our environment in order to ensure that it — and we as part of it — flourishes.
"Social justice does not mean simply beginning to act rightly. It demands teasing out and identifying what is knotted and reweaving what is matted."
This broadening of the scope of social justice invites an all-encompassing view of it. It invites us to see people in all their relationships that affect their flourishing. These include their relationships to ancestors and descendants, to their living places and language, to family, friendship and work groups, to states and nation, to their natural and built environment, to the groups they join, to government and its officers, to the legal and economic systems and their high priests.
We also see the importance of ecosystems — the multiple and interrelated aspects of life in disadvantaged areas that impede human flourishing. They also include the practices, rules and alliances that make an economic system that fosters inequality seem decent and inevitable. Among them, too, are the history of dispossession, discrimination and brutality facing Indigenous people that have fostered environmentally destructive practices and resistance to reform, and the contemporary destruction of native people's habitat by corporations assisted by first world investors and pension funds. .
Seen from this perspective many of the strands of relationships that connect people to society and to the environment are tangled. Social justice does not mean simply beginning to act rightly. It demands teasing out and identifying what is knotted and reweaving what is matted. It is a work of reconciliation in which the threads knotted in the ecosystem need carefully to be recognised, picked apart and rewoven harmoniously together.
Reconciliation involved more than setting right wrongs. It embraces also the relationships between the agents and the beneficiaries of action for social justice. Because they are part of the same ecosystems of love and exploitation, reconciliation demands self-reflection as well as social activism.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.
World Day of Social Justice is 20 February 2018. Main image: Thousands of migrant workers, mainly from Egypt and Tunisia, wait to cross into Tunisia from Libya. UNHCR/A Duclos