Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is. Paul Adams

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СКАЧАТЬ of a world of universal affluence came into view—and came to be desired. In earlier times, whole peoples were subject to suffering bitter want. Most were reduced to passivity and weary patience. Once the causes of wealth were mastered, the human race could begin removing poverty—and with accelerating speed it began doing so.

      Once humans discerned a way to break the chains of poverty, a new moral obligation arose. Poverty shifted from being an irremediable condition to being steadily reducible. In more and more nations, majorities exited out of penury and poverty to better health, greater opportunity, and steadily higher education. Nations came to be labeled as “less developed,” “developing,” and “developed.” In many, this progress was achieved within twenty years. China and India, for example, witnessed the fastest mass movement ever, raising more than 500 million of their citizens out of poverty between 1980 and 2000. The rise of Europe from the ruins of 1945 to measurable affluence in 1965 was also rapid. And so was the vault between 1945 and 1970 of the four “Asian Tigers”: Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan.

      In a word, the cause of wealth has been uncovered during the past 200 years. That cause lies primarily in the creative habits of the human mind, in invention, know-how, and disciplined work with others. That discovery has generated a new moral imperative: All the world’s poor must be helped out of poverty. They must be helped in the most vital way: to make the discovery of the cause of wealth (their own human capital) in their own lives, so as to experience a freedom from penury never known before.

      4. Creativity

The modern business economy has positive aspects. Its basis is human freedom exercised in the economic field, just as it is exercised in many other fields. Economic activity is indeed but one sector in a great variety of human activities, and like every other sector, it includes the right to freedom, as well as the duty of making responsible use of freedom. But it is important to note that there are specific differences between the trends of modern society and those of the past, even the recent past. Whereas at one time the decisive factor of production was the land, and later capital—understood as a total complex of the instruments of production—today the decisive factor is increasingly man himself, that is, his knowledge, especially his scientific knowledge, his capacity for interrelated and compact organization, as well as his ability to perceive the needs of others and to satisfy them.

      (John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, §32.)

      The Jewish/Christian narrative of the human project casts humans as images of God the Creator. Humans create not only beauty in the arts and goodness (with its own beauty) in their moral lives, but also new, never-before-seen wealth in their working world.

      Instead of following Marx’s lead in seeing value solely in human labor, this narrative also proclaims the values to be found in the human mind, in its inventiveness and creativity. It is not always the man who labors with more arduous physical efforts who adds most value even to his own labor, but often the one whose labor is infused with the most originality, creativity, efficiency, and organizational skill. There are certain qualities in labor that spring from the subjectivity of the human person, that is, the laborer himself. He puts part of his own self into his work, his own originality, his own hopes, his own touch.

      Another way of putting this is that the laborer who is creative adds a certain personal and human infusion from his own spirit into the work of his hands. To allow the fruit of his labor to rust outside in a yard—the iron girders fresh from his assigned furnace—is to injure something in him, his heart, his soul. He does not labor simply to produce useless waste, which nobody wants. He wants to contribute some good to the human community. A laborer is not simply an object, but also a subject, a being with imagination and creativity and zest of spirit.

This line of reflection, reportedly passed on to the pope by Mirosław Dzielski, the great Krakow journalist and thinker known as the “Polish Hayek,” led Wojtyła to muse on the subjectivity of both labor and capital. Whereas in Laborem Exercens (1981) the pope spoke of capital as if it consisted just of material things, ten years later in Centesimus Annus he had come to grasp the human factor in capital. He saw the wealth enlocked in human capital, in the subjectivity of the laborer himself. The term “capital” is not well identified solely with things (iron, automobiles, even gold bars and bank accounts) but also points to treasures in the human mind and spirit (such as outstanding work habits, spiritedness, teamwork, education, expanded and refined tastes, and capacities for design).

      The scientists who isolated quinine, and the one who first produced penicillin, may have reduced more human pain and probabilities of imminent death than all the previous humanitarian efforts in history. As Abraham Lincoln pointed out in Wisconsin in 1858, the person who discovers a new way to produce five grains of wheat instead of the previous expectation of one or two has more than doubled the output of the same amount of physical labor. Such an inventor contributes to doubling the agricultural wealth of peoples everywhere who use that method. John Locke made a similar observation about the new wealth produced by painstaking cultivation of a field of berries, compared with the low yields of uncultivated fields.⁸

      There is in each human laborer the potential of generating creative human capital, that is, learned skills of mind, heart, and hand. And it is a great thing for each nation to invest a great deal in building up this human capital within its citizens. Thus, John Paul II wrote:

      Indeed, besides the earth, man’s principal resource is man himself. His intelligence enables him to discover the earth’s productive potential and the many different ways in which human needs can be satisfied. It is his disciplined work in close collaboration with others that makes possible the creation of ever more extensive working communities which can be relied upon to transform man’s natural and human environments. Important virtues are involved in this process, such as diligence, industriousness, prudence in undertaking reasonable risks, reliability and fidelity in interpersonal relationships, as well as courage in carrying out decisions which are difficult and painful but necessary, both for the overall working of a business and in meeting possible set-backs.⁹

      5. Community of Work

It is becoming clearer how a person’s work is naturally interrelated with the work of others. More than ever, work is work with others and work for others: it is a matter of doing something for someone else. Work becomes ever more fruitful and productive to the extent that people become more knowledgeable of the productive potentialities of the earth and more profoundly cognisant of the needs of those for whom their work is done.

      (John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, §31.)

      If you lift from your desktop a bright yellow schoolboy pencil, with a bit of alloyed metal holding tight to a pink eraser, you may gain an insight into how the “universal workbench” of a global economy works. Do you know where the lightweight wood of that pencil comes from—from what country on earth? And the graphite that provides the mark of your writing on paper? And the bronze-colored alloy that holds the eraser? And the gum of the eraser itself? There are not many of us who know whence all those things derive, and what is the most efficient way to procure and to process them. And, by the way, someone needs to know how to produce and process the lacquer that makes the pencil shiny and prevents tiny paint chips from flecking off when schoolchildren put their pencils in their mouths.

      No one person needs to know all the steps in finding, producing, and assembling these elements of the pencil. But some one person or small group does need to know where to find teams of people who know how to produce each element most efficiently and at high quality standards, and maybe another team to assemble them all together, and yet another team to market and to transport them to wholesalers and retailers. A simple yellow pencil may require a global workbench. The workers in Sri Lanka, Chile, and other nations who may have supplied one part or another will never get to speak with or even see the schoolchildren who end up using those pencils. Nonetheless, these workers serve those distant children well. If they do their work, providing СКАЧАТЬ