Progressives prefer social affliction to social justice
Today’s progressivism believes that “social justice” is “afflicting the comfortable.” The ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius knew this could only lead to horrific injustice.
Today, the progressive movement’s ultimate buzzword, slogan, and statement of faith is “social justice.” The term is, in its way, an excellent choice. It seems to encompass an ethos, a systematic ethics, and an overall goal. Yet it is vague enough to mean almost anything. Indeed, I very much doubt that, if challenged, any progressive could explain it if they tried.
The term is also advantageous in that it implies a distinct moral imperative. Progressivism, it all but explicitly states, is not in favor of specific policies but rather essential goodness. This is essential to a movement whose overall worldview is distinctly antinomian, especially in its attitudes toward sex, gender, and the family. “Social justice” grants the imprimatur of morality to a movement that advocates for what many people consider grotesquely immoral.
Above all, the slogan makes people feel good about themselves. It allows progressives to feel that they are not simply political partisans with contingent policy goals. Instead, they are part of a redemptive movement working toward a blessed society (“social”) in which all are treated fairly (“justice”). Like most radical political movements, progressivism enhances its adherents’ self-esteem and gives them a sense of meaning they both lack and deeply desire.
It is important to acknowledge, however, that the idea of a more just society is not by definition a bad thing. In many ways, it is driven by an understandable and instinctual revulsion in the face of human suffering. The sight of poverty, homelessness, prejudice, and oppression is troubling to any vaguely empathetic human being. Bearing witness to it is to bear witness to the terrible vagaries of fate. In such a situation, one’s natural instinct is toward rectification.
Nonetheless, empathic reaction is only part of any coherent understanding of the world. Thus, the attempt to encapsulate such an understanding in a two-word slogan is bound to fail. Indeed, once examined in any depth, the progressive understanding of “social justice” collapses in short order.
What, after all, is “social”? What is “justice”?
For example, to live in poverty is most certainly a terrible thing. No one who does so should simply be discarded. Nonetheless, there are a great many people who, in full possession of their faculties, have made poor choices that inevitably lead them into poverty. They accepted the moral hazard of their choices and are now suffering the inevitable consequences. This does not mean one should be indifferent to their suffering, but one must acknowledge the moral complications involved.
For instance, if the burden of relieving such suffering is placed on society, the consequences of one person’s bad choices are inherently imposed on others. After all, someone has to pay the bills. It can be argued that, by imposing such costs, one is committing an injustice. The “social” is not at fault, but is nonetheless made to subsidize “justice.”
To most progressives, all this is irrelevant. Justice is justice and justice must be done despite the social costs. However, this brings one back to the question of what “social” and “justice” actually mean in practical terms. What is the mechanism by which “social justice” is to be achieved? After all, if costs are to be imposed, one has a right to know what one is paying for.
At best, the practical recommendations of progressivism amount to a standard left-wing policy agenda mixed with a vague deracinated Christianity. Progressivism has a certain overriding preference for economic and political egalitarianism, though it is certainly not socialism in the classic sense of labor owning the means of production. It sympathizes with the “underprivileged” of society, though the understanding of who is “privileged” and who is not is somewhat arbitrary and fluid.
At its most extreme, this extends to sympathy with the demimonde and a reversal of moral polarities. For example, victims of crime effectively become the perpetrators and vice versa. Today, this has increasingly strong and disturbing elements of racialism and antisemitism, usually through conceiving of certain racial and ethnic groups as privileged and therefore essentially criminals.
Above all, however, “social justice” amounts to a politics of general discontent. “Justice” is never “social” enough and the “social” is never “just” enough. Because “social” and “justice” are vague and ever-shifting concepts, discontent can always be maintained and the motive force of all activism—the desire for radical change—ensured. This is essential to any political project but has no particular appeal to those who are not discontented.
As a result, progressivism is perpetually in conflict with the content. In fact, it views contentment as something like a sin. For example, an oft-quoted aphorism popular among left-wing journalists holds that the media’s job is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” This persecution of the satisfied is a profoundly important principle to progressives and it is doubtful they could function without it. The result, however, is a disturbing one, because it means that progressives must be constantly at war with their own society. In such a situation, the consequences for that society can be very grave indeed.
II.
These consequences, quite often, are not just detrimental but profoundly anti-social and unjust. For example, during the recently concluded Democratic National Convention in Chicago, retail establishments—including many small businesses—closed shop and boarded up their windows for the duration. They did so because of their fear that anti-Israel protester-terrorists and other progressive “activists” would run riot and destroy their property. Thankfully, this did not occur, but the fact that such actions were thought necessary was horrifying.
There is a reason this story went largely unreported: Among progressives, who make up much of the media, small business owners and the lower-middle-class in general are not just expendable but beneath contempt. While not as aggressively demonized as large corporations, small business owners are generally seen as exploitative property owners who oppress their workers and thus prop up a system that is both anti-social and anti-justice. The notion that the lower-middle-class is a social group that might deserve justice as well is deemed unthinkable. They are comfortable and therefore must be afflicted.
One sees a similar phenomenon at work in the strange case of the many progressive cities that have effectively decriminalized petty crime. While large corporations are certainly victimized by shoplifters and similar criminals, it is small businesses that are hit hardest, as they generally exist on the edge of possible ruin and—unlike corporate chains—cannot survive the looting that pro-crime policies have enabled.
Thus, a strange phenomenon has emerged: The class that is essential to any prosperous city is being deliberately destroyed. One could argue that progressives—especially the politicians among them—are doing so unconsciously. This may well be the case for those who are less than bright, but it cannot be the case for any of them with even a modicum of intelligence. They believe they are afflicting the comfortable and thus doing good. At the very least, they consider it a necessary evil to achieve a socially just society.
Of course, there is not the slightest justice in such progressive policies. Nor are they particularly social. In effect, they punish the innocent and reward the guilty. This has terrible implications, because should such policies continue, the guilty will eventually rule society. At the very least, society will be forced to accommodate itself to the transgressions of the guilty. Hence, the skyrocketing rates of crime in progressive-run cities.
Needless to say, this is pure social injustice and, ultimately, social self-immolation. It creates a vicious cycle that has been noted since the 1970s: Progressive policies force citizens to vote with their feet. The law-abiding and productive leave the cities in which they are treated unjustly. This in turn demolishes the city’s tax base. Then the city’s ability to provide services and maintain order collapses. Thus, the city becomes even more unlivable, driving more and more citizens out, further shrinking the tax base, and so on. In other words, afflicting the comfortable ends up afflicting the afflicted as well.
One would think that the natural reaction of those in charge would simply be to remember one of the most important imperatives we have: When something isn’t working, stop doing it. In other words, they would change their policies. But this is impossible, because, ultimately, the progressive understanding of “social justice” is not about altruism but about punishment.
This may be the most sinister aspect of the progressive ethos. “Social justice” is, generally speaking, presented as the desire for a more compassionate and empathetic society. This is certainly politically advantageous, but it is largely untrue. In fact, the opposite is the case. “Social justice” is about judging society and, inevitably, finding it wanting. To do justice, therefore, demands penalties. The unjust must be made to pay the price of the injustice they have done. The comfortable must be afflicted because they deserve it.
It is important in this regard to remember the extraordinary scope of progressive condemnations. By their own testimony, they view social injustice as “systemic.” That is, injustice is built into the system and hardwired into every aspect of its institutions. This means that everyone is guilty. And if everyone is guilty, everyone and anyone can be punished.
One should not shrink from the full implications of this: It is the essence of totalitarianism. Albert Camus chillingly described it in his play Caligula, in which the deranged Roman emperor declares, “A man dies because he is guilty. A man is guilty because he is one of Caligula’s subjects. Now all men are Caligula’s subjects. Ergo, all men are guilty and shall die. It is only a matter of time and patience.” There is no one who cannot receive a knock at the door. There is no one from whom everything cannot be taken. Exterminate all the brutes.
In the United States, thankfully, this ethos is rarely taken to its logical extreme. Progressives have no gulag to which they can send their enemies. They have numerous means of punishment, however. Progressives can deny people employment, strip them of their livelihoods, deprive them of their Constitutional rights, defame them with impunity, destroy their property without consequence, and generally make their lives miserable. All of this occurs because those who ought to know better, the ostensible adults in the room, allow it to happen; and they allow it because, on some level, they feel it to be just.
It is important to emphasize that no free society can or should countenance such behavior for any appreciable length of time. Sooner or later, a confrontation of some kind must take place. Quite often, this means serious social dissension and upheaval, including political violence. One can put aside the moral implications of this for the moment and simply note that such a situation is not just anti-social and unjust, but demolishes the ideal of “social justice.” It proves that the progressive understanding of “social justice” not only cannot make society just, it cannot even preserve society itself.
That is to say, the progressives’ “social justice” paradigm doesn’t work and it doesn’t work in a profoundly dangerous way. In its highest form, its telos, it consumes itself and everything else along with it. The question, then, is whether there are better ways to achieve “social justice” or, at least, a society that is more socially just than it was before. There is some reason to think that there are.
III.
One of the oldest thinkers who contemplated the questions of society and justice is ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius (551-479 BCE). Living at a time of profound political upheaval not unlike our own, Confucius—much like Plato and other Western thinkers—was deeply concerned with what constituted the proverbial “good society.” He believed that such a society ought to be and indeed must be a “just” one, but his ideas as to how such a society might be built are profoundly different from those of modern progressivism.
First, Confucius did not believe that history was “progressing.” This is not surprising, because the very idea that history is progressing toward a redemptive consummation is a largely Judeo-Christian idea. Nor did Confucius believe that things were inevitably “getting better.” In fact, he thought they were getting a great deal worse. He idealized the early days of the Zhou dynasty, which began several centuries before his birth, and sought to return to them.
Second, while he was deeply concerned with justice, justice was not Confucius’s highest ideal. Above all, he believed, a good society would be harmonious. That is, each facet of society, acting upon the highest principles of morality and respect for ancient values and rituals, would work together on behalf of the common good.
However, Confucius did not devalue the idea of “justice” as most people would understand it. Rather, Confucius appeared to believe that harmony and justice were inseparable. As he knew from the rampant injustice, despotism, and chaos of his own time, a disharmonious society is inherently unjust and an unjust society inherently disharmonious. Without harmony, he felt, justice was impossible.
This profoundly contradicts the most basic principles of progressivism’s understanding of “social justice.” The very purpose, the raison d’être of “social justice” as progressivism understands it is to create a disharmonious society. That is, to agitate, to create controversy, to foster the destabilization of institutions and systems that are deemed unjust and even demonic. To the extent that it deals with harmony at all, progressivism loathes it, regarding it as a form of ossified institutional oppression that must be overthrown “by any means necessary.”
Interestingly, something very like this overturning occurred concerning Confucius himself. During the leftist rampage called the Cultural Revolution, China’s communist tyrant Mao Zedong attempted to destroy every last vestige of Confucianism. His “Red Guards” even destroyed the philosopher’s ancestral home and engaged in other forms of iconoclasm disturbingly similar to today’s statue-destroying progressive mobs. Mao did so out of the conviction that Confucius represented all the feudal, oppressive, and unjust institutional vestiges that stood in the way of the communist paradise he was determined to create by whatever means necessary.
Confucius would undoubtedly have disapproved of Mao and modern progressivism’s weakness for such attempts at decimating the past. Confucius believed that the historical foundations of society and the institutions constructed upon them were the key to social harmony because they constitute society itself. He likely understood that destroying society in order to save it is not just vaguely insane but creates the kind of chaos he dreaded and caused so much suffering and injustice during his lifetime.
Mao was by no means the first tyrant who attacked the foundations Confucius had built. In 213 BCE, China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang undertook what came to be called “the burning of books and the burying of scholars.” He ordered Confucius’s works destroyed and numerous Confucian scholars murdered. The resulting carnage was likely less considerable than historical memory has it, as the Confucian tradition survived and eventually overcame Qin Shi Huang himself. In Chinese culture, the first emperor has gone down in infamy as a merciless tyrant who nearly annihilated the society he ruled. Confucius, by contrast, is perhaps as influential today as he was in the days of the man who tried to destroy his legacy.
It should be no surprise that one of the few Chinese rulers who admired Qin Shi Huang was Mao himself, who not coincidentally undertook his own equally unsuccessful attempt at burning the books and burying the scholars. Mao’s failure underlines an essential point: It may well be that the extraordinary longevity of Chinese civilization can be directly attributed to the strength of Confucius’s foundation. It survived Qin Shi Huang and it survived Mao. This alone is testimony to its power.
IV.
Nonetheless, the Red Guards’ essential criticism of Confucius has also survived and cannot be entirely dismissed. There is no doubt that Confucius revered the past almost to a fault and was deeply skeptical of attempts to confront unjust authority. His philosophy implies that if it has the imprimatur of the past, such authority deserves deference and obedience.
Still, Confucius did acknowledge that tyrants and tyranny exist and are generally speaking very bad things. However, unlike in the Western tradition, with its long history of revolutions stretching back to ancient Greece and Rome, he does not appear to have favored overthrowing such rulers. It seems that his preference was for scholars and upstanding men to teach the tyrant to forgo despotism in favor of a virtuous monarchy. In other words, he felt that one should seek to teach a bad ruler to be good.
To us today, with the terrible legacy of 20th-century totalitarianism still within living memory, this appears somewhat naive, to say the least. Nonetheless, it cannot be entirely dismissed. Revolutions and rebellions usually come at enormous human cost, even and sometimes especially when they are undertaken in the name of justice. After all, Mao himself, the great self-styled revolutionary who so loathed Confucius, likely murdered more people than Hitler and Stalin put together.
Moreover, the concept of educating the despot so he serves the good rather than evil illustrates an essential aspect of Confucius’s thought that is profoundly at odds with modern progressivism: The importance of moral labor.
One of the philosopher’s most famous statements asserts: “To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.”
Initially, this seems to be a fairly simple, even banal statement. On closer examination, however, it is quite profound and even slightly disturbing, because one quickly realizes that it can take a lifetime to set our hearts right.
As Confucius himself put it: “At 15 I set my heart upon learning. At 30, I had planted my feet firmly upon the ground. At 40, I no longer suffered from perplexities. At 50, I knew what were the biddings of heaven. At 60, I heard them with docile ears. At 70, I could follow the dictates of my own heart, for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right.”
It should be noted that in Confucius’s time and still today, by the age of 70 one has disturbingly little time to go about setting the world in order. By then, the shadows are gathering and the end of our lives is distressingly near.
To the progressive, such a view is utterly unthinkable. People must set their hearts right immediately and without delay. If they do not, they are deemed as at best wanting and at worst outright evil. This, in turn, demands “justice”; which is to say, punishment. The judgment on who has successfully set their hearts right and who has not is allocated to the progressives alone, who consider themselves a kingdom of saints with the power not only to look into men’s hearts but also to condemn them as they see fit. They demand that others “do the work” that is no work at all but mere submission to the saints’ catechism.
This is an essential point because, through a certain ethical modesty, Confucius rejected the punitive. If a man is not virtuous, he should seek to become virtuous. But this is a long and arduous process, which even Confucius himself could only achieve near the very end of his life. Nonetheless, he said, “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” Or, as an ancient rabbi put it, “It is not for you to finish the work, but nor are you free to desist from it.” This implies not just a modesty of the self, but a modesty that must be extended to others. If a man is at least trying to be good, one should aid, not condemn him.
All of this, Confucius seems to have believed, fostered the harmony he sought for his own deeply disharmonious society. Moreover, as noted above, he believed that a harmonious society is inherently a just society and vice-versa. If injustice exists, one should certainly seek to rectify it, but one ought to do so by moral self-cultivation and the encouragement and education of others rather than by punitive means. “Social justice,” for Confucius, demands a generous attitude toward both society and justice. Society can be made better but, in trying to better it, one should not end up making it worse.
In a Confucian sense, then, the goal of those concerned with “social justice” should not be to impose it for the sake of a messianic fantasy but rather to restore the social harmony that has been disturbed by injustice. This cannot be accomplished by coercive means, which are inherently disharmonious and unjust.
A story is told of a Confucian scholar who was asked by a warlord, “Everything I have I won on horseback, why should I bother with books?” The scholar replied, “Everything you have, you won on horseback, but can you rule it on horseback?” The implication is obvious: A world, a nation, a family, and ourselves cannot be put in order through war, let alone through a society at war with itself.
All of this may be difficult for many of those sincerely concerned with “social justice” to accept. They will, like Mao, see it as an avaricious and self-interested defense of systemic injustice. But they should remember something of utmost importance: Confucianism has survived because, for the most part, it works. To this day, as evidenced in many far-Eastern nations, Confucius’s thought has served as the foundation of many successful and prosperous societies. These societies have undergone immense social and political upheaval over the past century and in countries like China, those upheavals continue today. Nonetheless, Confucius and the society he founded have survived and, today, many of the societies that once rejected and even sought to destroy his legacy have returned to him.
In the West, evidence mounts daily that progressivism and the “social justice” ethos, with its culture of condemnation and coercion, is not working. As noted above: When something isn’t working, stop doing it. Then, start thinking about what to do instead. It is possible that, with his essential belief that harmony and justice are inseparable and mutually dependent, a very ancient thinker who saw that his society was not working and contemplated what to do about it can teach us a very great deal.