Freedom & Virtue Institute-Page 6

27 Jul

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Keep it Personal

“Buy Local” is a mantra familiar to most contemporary consumers. There may be various motivations for the practice: to support a neighborhood economy; to minimize environmental impact; or to enjoy the benefits of fresh food or home-crafted rather than mass-produced items. Related to these reasons is what ought to be the central consideration: the importance of personal relationship. The superiority of personal relationships over impersonal systems extends far beyond commercial transactions. In fact, we should be pushing for “local” in government, education, philanthropy, entertainment, and just about everything else.

Localized government was the ideal of the American system from the beginning. In the colonial period, Puritan farmers in New England, middle-class merchants in Pennsylvania, and wealthy planters in Virginia participated actively in local governments, where most matters that affected daily life were settled. The federal system erected after independence sought to preserve the dispersion of power among national and state governments, ensuring that governing decisions would not be predominantly centralized in a monolithic national authority. These arrangements both allowed and encouraged the involvement of individuals in the making and enforcing of law, giving them control over their own destiny and the responsibility that goes with control. New England town government was not without its faults (e.g., the Salem witch trials), but it worked, by and large, in part because it what based on personal interaction among the interested parties.

Similarly, organized education started as a radically local endeavor. An area’s citizens funded and oversaw the schoolhouses their children attended and the teachers who instructed them. This has been preserved to some extent, with many decisions left to local school boards and primary jurisdiction for educational matters left to states. But local control has been eroded here, too, as school districts have gotten larger, state mandates increasingly tie the hands of school boards, and federal involvement has preempted state control in many areas. Decisions that affect the individual parent, student, or teacher are often made by officials located far away— if the decisionmaker can even be identified within a vast educational bureaucracy. Deprived of the possibility of personal engagement in decision making, school stakeholders are left with a feeling of powerlessness and infantilization.

The problem has even infected the impressive and enviable American charitable sector. As philanthropy has been professionalized and nationalized, personal relationships have declined in importance. National organizations raise large sums of money using empirically proven methods, but donors lose the sense of reciprocity that comes with giving to community organizations headed by people they know.

All of these are general points that must be qualified. Some functions must by their nature be national in scope. Some commercial, governmental, and charitable activities do gain efficiency and effectiveness by increasing in scale. “Small” isn’t necessarily synonymous with “personal,” nor “large” with “impersonal.” In some instances, impersonal transactions are preferable to personal ones.

But the generalizations remain true. Robust personal involvement—where people come to know each other well and genuinely care about each other—comes more easily in relationships that are geographically near rather than distant. Smaller institutions that cultivate personal relationships tend to be more responsive and less sclerotic than big ones, which must of necessity rely more on systems of rules and procedures than individual judgment and adaptation.

National policies and personalities will always have an attraction because they seem “more important,” but the fact is that most of us have little control over them. What we can influence is our local culture, economy, and politics. As we refocus on our own communities and deal with our own neighbors, we may find that charity and decency find their way back into our civil discourse.

17 Jul

0

The Hopeful Roots of a Movement

by Ismael Hernandez in Articles

“For the sons of this world are shrewder in dealing with their own generation than the sons of the light.”
–Luke 16:8

The Civil Rights Movement grew out of a profound spiritual conviction that the men and women of that generation were called to ignite the fire of righteousness and truth. It seemed as if God had planned for a people of destiny and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in the midst of that calling. He was born in an era of social and legal injustice against blacks, and experienced it early. One day, as a child, he observed his father sit down in the front waiting seats reserved for whites. The shoe store clerk blurted, “If you will move to the back, I’ll be glad to help you.” Daddy King refused, the clerk refused to serve him, and Mr. King took little Martin out mumbling, “I don’t care how long I have to live with this thing, I’ll never accept it. I’ll fight it till I die. Nobody can make a slave out of you if you don’t think like a slave.”^[1]

Daily reminders of his degraded state seemed to contradict what he was learning from his dad about human dignity. Why were blacks required to address whites, even children, as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” but all blacks were always called by their first names, even if they were elderly? The pain of insulting treatment was worse than what any law could deprive.

*Martin Luther King Jr as a child.*
*Photo Credit:Intellectual Properties Management, Inc., Licensor of the King Estate; AP*

The church was the place where he could find affirmation, a second home for a spirit bewildered by acts of injustice that did not make sense. At Ebenezer Baptist Church he could be somebody among a community that affirmed him and saw blacks as having a high destiny that could not be taken away no matter what whites did. It was a haven where, even if only for a few hours, Martin could have a respite from those who hated him. That spirituality was planted in him and remained there for his whole life.

There was also an endeavor that inspired him: education. Words engulfed him in a world of possibilities. “You just wait and see, I’m going to get me some big words,”^[2] he once told his parents. Education also served as a cleansing agent that exorcised the anger and resentment that builds up when you are mistreated. In college, he had the opportunity to work alongside whites who were fighting against racism, people of goodwill. “I was ready to resent the whole white race, but as I got to see more whites, my resentment softened and a spirit of cooperation took its place.”^[3] At the same time, white stereotypes presenting blacks as degraded and unintelligent motivated him to excel, to show them they were wrong. Even when the possibilities seemed grim and the rules tilted to ensure his failure, he succeeded.

Although King embraced Protestant liberal theology, he was also influenced by natural law thinkers of traditional philosophy and the personalist school. He was not far away from Aquinas and Niebuhr. It is as if he was shaping a worldview, an interpretive lens tinted with all sorts of influences that eventually led to an integrationist approach where hope, informed by reason, led the way. Supported by the songs and the faith of Negro spirituality he began to see the transcendent light that left color behind and affirmed with Paul that “we are all one in Christ.” (Gal. 3:28) The black church also had a tradition of great respect for the pastor as a caudillo of destiny. King’s leadership was honed and his calling for a mission was formed. His studies finished, he returned to a different scenario than the intermittently welcoming one in college; he went back to Montgomery, the “Cradle of the Confederacy.” By the time that Rosa Parks had enough, King was ready.

This destiny was joined by many others whose cradle was the black church and whose aim was also hope. They were able to see beyond the degradations of everyday life, embrace a set of truths about the human person, and recognize them in the founding values of the nation. A cry began to build, a cry for justice. “Be true to what you say on paper!” They indeed embraced that meaning of the papyri better than anyone else in the nation. Even as white clergy remained unmoved, there were these prickly truths that mobilized and eventually transformed the nation. There was a price to pay for rocking the boat. King’s universalism did not fade even as most of those who preached it cowered under pressure. The black church embraced the movement and the name of King’s organization reflected its religious roots: Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Its mission was “to redeem the soul of America.”

It was that redemptive essence that informed the movement as it challenged America and engaged in an arduous, and unprecedented effort, one that called blacks to pick up a cross. But that cross changed America. It became a movement based on a universal faith in humanity, a courageous insistence on non-violence even when it seemed ineffective, and an embrace of the values of the founding as these for the most part reflected the natural law of God. It was integrationist, personalist, and hopeful.

There was, however a great, challenge ahead—a challenge brewing from within the bosom of the movement and whose antecedents were not aligned with King’s. It was not Christian but secular. It was not hopeful but hopeless. It was not reformist but revolutionary. It was not seeking reconciliation but power.

That movement will be discussed in a subsequent article.

^[1] Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1958) p. 19.

^[2] James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (New York: Orbis Books, 1992) p. 26.

^[3] Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Mentor Books, 1985) p. 17.

16 Jul

0

Victimhood Does Not Define Her: An Entrepreneur in South Sudan

by Kevin Schmiesing in Articles

You might remember South Sudan being in the news in the early 2000s, when the long-running civil war in Sudan was resolved by splitting the African nation in two. The region’s troubles have not disappeared. Civil strife, disease, and poverty remain ever-present realities for the people of South Sudan. In the face of these hardships, some succumb to lives of dependency or despair. Others find a way to thrive. Among the latter is Joice—a mother, an entrepreneur, and a beacon of the resilience of the human spirit.

Compelled to begin working at age 14 to support her family after her father’s death, Joice barely finished her high school education. From the first, she exhibited a remarkable entrepreneurial drive. Not content with her menial job transporting vegetables to market, she used her modest savings to open her own business—a food stand—at age 15.

For a while, life was good. Joice married and her expanding business supported her growing family. Then the dream seemed to come crashing down. Her husband abandoned her. The civil war destroyed her business. Joice found herself homeless with seven young children and no means of support. She sank into discouragement and “cried and cried for days.” In these circumstances, some would surrender to the temptation to accept and even exploit their downtrodden status—to embrace victimhood as identity.

But Joice’s faith was unbroken. She would be defined not by what happened to her, but by how she responded. “Human struggle is the means for finding oneself,” Ismael Hernandez wrote in Not Tragically Colored. “By passing through the fires of adversity, a person is refined.” Through struggle, Joice’s faith and determination were refined. A devout Christian, she implored God to help her find a way forward. Then she did her part.

“By passing through the fires of adversity, a person is refined.”
Ismael Hernandez

With a small investment from relatives, she opened a small tea shop in South Sudan’s capital city, Juba. The shop was successful and gradually developed into a full-scale restaurant.

This success didn’t come easily. Besides the inevitable hard work, there are constant threats to the business’s operation. Her employees have to deal with harassment from local bullies, and she has to deal with harassment from tax collectors. Some customers eat and refuse to pay. She must be a canny negotiator with government officials, street boys bent on thievery, and food market vendors who are equally keen to make a profit.

But she has managed to hold it together. Today, Joice’s shop is a thriving eatery with sixteen employees. Joice works eighty hours a week to keep the business humming. On Sundays, she prays and sings and studies scripture.

The restaurant is a marvelous example of how business can contribute to the common good. Sixteen other vulnerable women have found a path out of poverty and into self-reliance by working for Joice. Four orphan boys get decent meals and a place to sleep by lodging in the restaurant and thereby serving as night watchmen. The community has a place to enjoy well-prepared food at a good price.

Joice’s story is proof that in the midst of suffering, destitution, and depravity, there is always hope and dignity. As the friend who related her story to me put it, “She has experienced the worst life can throw at her and has overcome each time.” She is a beautiful testament to the human capacity for flourishing, no matter how challenging the conditions.

The author acknowledges and thanks Gabe Hurrish of Maryknoll Lay Missioners for sharing Joice’s story.

13 Jul

0

One Man’s Journey from Communism to Liberty

by fvAdmin in News

July 7, 2019, Ismael Hernandez joined Bob Harden on his show and shared some insights on his journey as well as what the Freedom & Virtue Institute is continuing to do in this strange time.

On this episode of the show, Bob Harden visits with State Senator and Senate Majority Leader, Kathleen Passidomo, about Florida Public School Commissioner Richard Corcoran’s important directive for all schools to open to all students with a full curriculum in August. We visit with the Founder and President of Less Government, Seton Motley, about the undue influence of California law when Congress ignores its responsibility to legislate. They have an interesting and informative discussion with The Founder and President of the Freedom & Virtue Institute, Ismael Hernandez about the work of the Institute and about Ismael’s fascinating journey from his communist background to embracing freedom and liberty.

The Bob Harden Show – interview with Ismael Hernandez

Please join them live at 7 a.m. on their website, or you can access the show anytime on podcast platforms (iTunes, TuneIn, Spotify, and Stitcher) or in “show archives” on the website, www.bobharden.com.

Each weekday, Bob Harden strives to create a pleasant and positive listening experience that keeps you informed on the issues and helps you enjoy life on The Paradise Coast. While he stands for limited government as envisioned by the Framers of our Constitution, he will balance the political discussion with interviews of community and business leaders, with authors, and with columnists from leading magazines and web sites…both local and national. While the show will be streamed live each weekday morning from 7 to 8 am, you’ll be able to listen at your convenience to podcasts that will be archived on the website.

12 Jul

0

The Most Important Divide is Not Race

by Kevin Schmiesing in Articles

There is a monumental fault line dividing people in America (and many other places). The two sides aren’t black and white, Christian and atheist, or liberal and conservative. They are barbarism and civilization.

For ancient Greeks and Romans, the “barbarian” was a foreigner—a German or Briton or African who did not share the culture of law, philosophy, technology, and religion that characterized those Mediterranean empires. Gradually, however, the term came to apply less to ethnic or national boundaries and more to education and etiquette. Those who were trained in and accepted the dominant customs, manners, and mores of society could be considered “civilized”; those who rejected those norms in one way or another behaved “barbarically.”

In our current casual and egalitarian age, when behaviors such as coarse language and sloppy dress no longer disqualify one from respectable society, the very idea of distinguishing between civilized and barbarian strikes many as offensive. But the distinction ought to be rehabilitated in the present climate, even if its meaning has shifted. For one of the marks of civilization is the gathering of people in cities (civitas in Latin), where they participate freely and peacefully in politics and commerce. This requires adherence to a rule of law regarding respect for property persons.

Unfortunately, the widespread lack of such respect is increasingly evident. Among legions of examples from recent weeks that could be cited are the violence within the “CHOP” in Seattle; the destructive rioting in Minneapolis and many other cities; and the vandalism against statues of heroic figures in American history, including Junipero Serra and Ulysses Grant in California, and Frederick Douglass in New York. This barbarism is not unique to the political left or the political right; it can be found wherever confrontation with difference erupts into shouting, shoving, or shooting. It can be found among politicians, police officers, and pastors, as well as activists, anarchists, and adolescents of all ages. As the Reverend Dean Nelson of the Frederick Douglass Foundation said in the wake of the Douglass statue incident, “There are people within our culture that are more committed to creating chaos then they are solving problems and finding solutions.”

The widespread nature of these instances of mob rule and violence is one marker of the rise of barbarism. An even more distressing one is the unwillingness of broad swaths of the American elite to condemn them unequivocally. In some cities, mayors and other officials have given free rein to property destruction and even assault.

Without question, there are among us wide and deep differences of position and opinion on crucial matters of politics, religion, and morality. We don’t agree on how to combat poverty or racism or disease. But in the midst of such diversity there are only two options: Working through differences in the context of fundamental agreement on the standards of conduct and debate and adjudicating them through fair and consistent political processes; or settling them by force and violence according to the principle of “might makes right.”

This is a deeply ironic moment. Most of the progress the world has made with respect to the treatment of ethnic and racial minorities, women, and other out-of-favor or out-of-power groups, has come about precisely because appeals to sound moral principles have triumphed over “might makes right.” Those who, in the name of social justice, are fomenting a turn to violent settlement of disputes are playing a dangerous game, one that will ultimately result in regress in the quest for justice and equality.

Unless we can agree on the unexceptionable tenets of respect for other human beings and law and order, the common pursuit of other aims can never even start. We must all choose, right now, and stick to our choice no matter how inflamed our passions over any injustice or abuse: Civilization or barbarism?

11 Jul

0

Extremism Is Engulfing Us

by Ismael Hernandez in Articles

As our country is engulfed in the flames of discord, our task is more than merely reporting on events, calling for an end to racism, or making emotional appeals to unity. We go wrong when the advancement of human goods is parasitic to an emotional response that impairs our reason as we attempt to guide our actions. As Thomas Aquinas reminds us, wrongdoing is found in the repugnance of feelings toward reason’s commands. When our passions fetter reason and make it their slave, we cannot see how others are using us as pawns in an ideological game.

Against the reign of passions, reason acknowledges two principles—both included by Aquinas as a second set of the principles of practical reason: (1) The Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have them do to you.); and (2) Do not answer injury with injury.

Doesn’t it feel right to say, as Antifa militants allege, that we don’t debate with fascists, we just defeat them? That we don’t reform the present order—irreformable as it is—we just break it into pieces? The utopian vision informing radicalism cannot admit any other response than rabid activism and destruction. Anyone who fails to realize the obvious truth, according to this approach must be acting in bad faith and their destruction appears as the only solution for the benefit of the whole. If they fail to see the pervasive truth, they are denying my humanity and are tokens of forces whose existence impedes my actualization and the affirmation of my dignity. That is the logic of the radical ideologue, and its enemy is rational dialogue and democratic compromise.

Yet, it is so much easier to let appetite run wild, resulting in injustice and violence while appearing as justice and righteousness! What we see in many cities today—the looting, burning, assaulting and killing—is what we get when we misunderstand justice and become instruments in the hands of ideologues whose task is to inflame and destroy. Their understanding of human advancement depends on the dialectics of history—that the only way to advance is to burn down the present order. What can be better for ideologues than to utilize a real injustice to channel anger and use the manpower of those who otherwise might have different aims?

As ideologues are both revolutionaries and very patient soldiers, they will wreak havoc now and lay in wait afterwards, as a pack of hyenas stalking wounded prey. In the process, they have changed the collective consciousness to accept as true their analysis of history, which will facilitate and ignite the next round of violence. When the flames momentarily subside, their dialectics have won the day. More and more people will understand as reasonable the radical vision of causality and historical analysis. The one challenging that paradigm will no longer be accepted as reasonable or decent. After all, we need to do something.

This is Rousseau and Hobbes fused with the keen distortion of human nature perpetrated by Marx. Just over a century before Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau affirmed that human nature is essentially good, and that people were naturally capable of happiness and peaceful coexistence well before the development of the modern state. Man is good and society corrupts him. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men, Rousseau describes the state of nature as one where man is self-sufficient, worry-free, and cultivates his plot of land freely. Peace informs this pre-civilizational state. But one day someone places a stake to divide the land and property is born, and with it the downfall of humanity.

In 1651, at the opposite intellectual end, Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that our natural condition outside the authority of a political state was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ Not being hardwired for living in large-scale societies we are not naturally political animals. Instead, we’re naturally selfish and in need of guidance not to descend into voracious competition over scarce resources. That being our natural condition, Hobbes argued, we must submit ourselves to an authoritative body with the power to enforce laws and resolve conflicts.

Hobbes and Rousseau represent opposing poles in the great questions of human nature. However, their positions are forced compatible in the thought of Marx and later in Lenin. For Marx, the nature of the human species was not obvious in every individual, being instead a sort of spontaneous order created and always determined in a specific social and historical formation, with some aspects being biological.^[1] The very nature of the human person is collectivized in Marx, thus avoiding Rousseau’s question of the place of society in the discussion of what impedes individual human flourishing. Whether everyone is naturally good or not is irrelevant because what is important is the collectivized economic structure. However, with Rousseau Marx indicts the social order. Capitalism turned us into enemies who endlessly compete with one another and private property is poison.

With Hobbes, Marx and Lenin affirmed the need for a strong collective leading entity pushing the march of socialism. The collectivized self needs guidance, a vanguard, to lead the masses—and use them for the task—toward the ultimate destruction of the capitalist social order. The goal is to erase the present order and, in an inevitable clash, erect a new order, with its own tensions and antagonisms. After all, for Marx violence is the great instrument for progress.

The individual is meaningless because the very nature of the person is collective and the collective needs a guiding force to lead them in the inevitable historical forces that necessitate conflict for advancement. This guiding force within the group cannot evolve organically; it needs to be imposed. As Lenin taught, the economic evolution of capitalism into socialism is impossible. There is the need of a single-minded group of revolutionaries that rises from the more or less chaotic mass of the class as a whole. The groups now leading the looting and burning are those whose hearts are sewn with the thread of vanguardism. They have found that all-encompassing truth that we are racial victims and the present order is intrinsically racist, in need of eradication. In Marx the key was class, in these neo-Marxists it is the irreducible concept of race. From systemic racism theory to “whiteness” studies to Critical Race Theory, they have been able to count the ways that make us dispossessed and called to end the dialectic.

Extremism in the solving of problems emerges frequently as the result of believing that we have found the truth, the all-embracing solution, one that is never reformist, only radical. Once one has found this exhaustive answer it is imperative to actualize it, both in learning and in action. How can we be true to self if one does not acknowledge the priority of activism? When we reach this point, we have been swallowed by the dictatorship of appetite. The last step is to finish the scorched-earth task. The dictatorship of appetite begins with imperfect reality, escapes into emotional appeals, is directed by the ideological aims of the few, and ends up in unbridled passion and destructive action.

We are seeing the dictatorship of appetite in full swing as you read. There is no doubt that a real injustice was recently committed against a man named George Floyd, and other injustices have been committed against others. What is not real is the interpretation at the base of that reality.

The early civil rights movement was not infected with the seed of dialectical materialism as the interpretive model of black reality. The movement was imbued with a reformist embrace of the American ethos and a natural law understanding of the human person and of the social order. Early in the movement, Dr. King approached the microphone of Holy Street Church in Montgomery, Alabama, to proclaim black dignity and demand a generational change. “When the history books are written in future generations,” he declared, “the historians will have to pause and say. ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization. This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.” The present generation has betrayed such honorable aims.

^[1] Marx, Karl, Theses on Feuerbach (1845)

06 Jul

1

America Isn’t All Bad

by Kevin Schmiesing in Articles

As the Ronald Reagan-era diplomat Jeanne Kirkpatrick once quipped, “Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is.” It seems that the time is ripe for another dose of Kirkpatrick’s good humor. After all, true realism involves a willingness to look not only at the dark side of human existence but also human achievement and virtue.

There was a time when the study of history in this country, especially in primary and secondary schools, was conducted through the lenses of rose-tinted glasses. Figures such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt were larger than life, and better than possible. The Founding was all roses and no thorns. Patriots were virtuous heroes while British loyalists were villains. Pioneers and cowboys were romantic characters while Indians were savage and simple-minded. In the twentieth century, the United States successively saved the world from morally inferior Germans, Japanese, and Russians. Slavery was a small black mark on an otherwise gleaming record of American goodness.

This vision of the past survives, perhaps, in some marginal corners of American culture, but it is moribund, stricken down by a more honest reading of the historical record and openness to voices outside the “WASP” (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) elite. Unfortunately, the swinging pendulum did not come to rest at a balanced appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of America’s leaders and institutions; instead, it swung right through to an equally distorted view that overemphasizes moral failure.

We can gain perspective on the situation by engaging in some frank self-reflection. When friends, acquaintances, or unknown observers judge our own character, how would we like them to proceed? By focusing solely on our faults? We all make mistakes. We all say and do things we regret. We all have blind spots. We misstep and offend without even recognizing our error. But we like to think that we are nonetheless “basically good people” who are doing our level best to make our way in the world, to pursue happiness for ourselves and those close to us, and to make the world a better place by caring about and acting for the welfare of others.

In other words, we would consider it unjust for an observer to define us by a single mistake, error in judgment, or even willful sin. We are complex human persons and shouldn’t be reduced to a caricature based on a few actions or the worst features of our personalities.

Should we not apply the same standard of fairness to history?

Slavery was an evil institution that had terrible effects on both oppressed and oppressors and whose horrendous ramifications continue to trouble us today. But the story of the United States is much more than—and much better than—the story of slavery. The story of the American South should not be reduced to slavery. Nor should the stories of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Robert E. Lee.

The story of the European encounter with native peoples contains some grim chapters. We find avarice and atrocities. But there are also edifying chapters. Indians saved the lives of settlers. Missionaries defended the rights of natives in the face of government neglect and injustice.

The story of western expansion includes inexcusable injustices against Native Americans. It shows forth greed, cruelty, and selfishness. But it also displays courage, generosity, and solidarity. We can find plenty of conflict and violence, but we can also find mutual respect, peaceful cultural exchange, and even friendship.

America’s institutions are flawed but not without value. The story of the American military should not be reduced to imperialism and destruction. The entire American Left should not be tarred with the brush of Communism. Protestant Christianity is not all fundamentalism and fanaticism. American Catholicism cannot be understood by focusing solely on abuse and sinister coverups. Law enforcement agencies are not filled with violence-prone bigots.

Sins, errors, failures, and abuse are part of the story, but they aren’t the whole story. When we focus solely on the negative, we are not being more “honest” or “realistic”—we are being less. Someday, future generations will stand in judgment of us. We hope that that they will be fair, maybe even lenient. The Golden Rule says we should do the same unto others.

01 Jul

0

The Surroundings of Justice

by Ismael Hernandez in Articles

We hear much about justice these days, but the concept is seldom defined by those crying for it. As theoretician Anthony de Jasay tells us in his great book Justice and Its Surroundings, “It is one of the most pervasive fallacies of contemporary political theory, that, one way or another, normatively if not positively, every unfulfilled need, every blow of ill luck, every disparity of endowments, every case of conspicuous success or failure, and every curtailment of liberties, is a question of justice.”

If that were to be the case, every social interaction would be a question of justice, with justice erasing every other virtue. It would make justice unintelligible and its attainment a matter of mere subjective desire or appetite or of the power available to impose a given answer.

To correct, for example, a perceived wrong in the far gone past is not a matter of justice. Some people think that society today must correct every wrong committed during slavery and the descendants of slaves today are owed what in justice they deserve. The thought, as lofty as its proponents might think it to be, has nothing to do with justice. States of affairs are not strictly unjust, they just are. Actions, specific actions, might be unjust. Let me explain. A state of affairs might deviate from an ideal and we might find that historically there was a fault in the alignment of just action and a said state of affairs. We can, in that context, speak of an injustice.

However, in the here and now, we can only tie justice to personal responsibility and to a set of rules which are in themselves just or unjust by being equal or unequal in the areas pertinent to equal treatment. A “system” is not at fault the same way as persons are at fault in their individual acts. A “system” might be at fault not if it fails to accomplish the impossible, that is, erasing the errors of the long-gone past, but if it still possesses formal rules that perpetuate the injustice.

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If formal rules deprived of equal treatment in areas relevant to the exercise of rights are no longer in place, we have accomplished justice. The fact that various actors get to that line at variant social states is insignificant to justice.

Attempts at finding justice where the human capacity to enact the said justice absent personal responsibility for a given act are often exercises in hubris or in ideology. It is a case of hubris because we do not possess the insight into reality to be able to piece together existence and determine without failure what could have happened in history absent an event as it was. Nor can we trace responsibility for evil actions throughout the centuries as to locate today a culprit.

If your ideology is one where a collective class of people is the determinant of history, instead of the individual, every member of a class is a specimen of that class and innocent or guilty, deserving redress or deserving punishment. An indictment is categorical, and the solution is dependent on the power to impose a solution. But that is not justice properly understood whereas every individual person, as a moral agent of choice, acts and his acts bring about a molding of character and accountability for choices taken.

In short, justice is not about relieving feelings of unease about a past for which one bears no responsibility even if, as claimed by some, one’s present state is better as a consequence.

28 Jun

0

America’s Two Warring Views of Race

by fvAdmin in News

Article by by REV. BEN JOHNSON taken from the Acton Institute PowerBlog.

America’s current racial strife has roots deeper than recent controversies involving the police. One factor greatly exacerbating these tensions is the contrast in worldviews over the relative importance of “race” in one’s life and how those in dialogue view the American founding, according to Ismael Hernandez, executive director of the Freedom and Virtue Institute and a longtime lecturer at Acton University.

Hernandez has elucidated these contrasting approaches in two new episodes of “Freedom and Virtue” the podcast.

Hernandez first traces slavery to every nation and culture, then places the origins of modern racism in the 17^th century, when exploration brought cultures into contact with one another. Racial categories originated when observers emphasized “certain true biological differences” which are “seemingly irrelevant” but “tend to be very visual.”

This racialized view was weaponized by such forces as “mercantilism, trade, Darwinism: All this gave a new twist of justification to an ancient institution: the institution of slavery,” he says. “Darwinists are the first ones to give to racism some semblance of scientific validity.”

In contrast, what emerges uniquely from this time period is not slavery but the kernel of the abolitionist movement, rooted in biblical sources and Western civilization.

Hernandez then contrasts the “natural law/integrationist/personalist” approach — which sees the individual as having a primary identity apart from any group membership — with the “dialectical separationist” or “collectivist” approach.

“The first stream that has informed race relations in America from the beginning of our nation is what we can call the natural law/integrationist approach, or the personalist approach,” he says. In this view, “the individual person stands sui generis in the midst of the group, so the group doesn’t have priority over the individual.”

“America benefited from the fact that the idea of individual freedom is an individual value,” Hernandez says, a worldview which “took root only in the Christian West.” He contrasts that with the collective view that dominated the pre-modern world:

The slave could conceive freedom, but not as an institutional value. If I was a slave, I wanted to be free — but I wanted to be free so I could return to my community and come back and enslave the other. There was no opposition to slavery as an institution.

Adherents to the natural law/personalist stream believe that the “biblical context and the American constitutional framework, over time, could overcome social, economic, and political racial stratification, precisely because the individual matters and not the group. Embedded in those principles was the seed to the answer of the problem,” he says. “The Constitution was not perfect, but it was neither tragically flawed. Its principles, its basic principles were not those of white supremacy but the principles of liberty.”

Hernandez says this biblical, optimistic view fueled the civil rights movement of the 1960s, led by Martin Luther King Jr.

Hernandez contrasts the natural law tradition, which upholds the integrity of the individual, with the “dialectical separationist approach, or the collectivist approach.” Hernandez also calls it “the dialectic of antagonism,” aptly personified by Malcolm X. In this view, “race is a basic reality, a sort of practical absolute, the heart of individual identity, what we can call racialist essentialism. The very substance of what it means to be human cannot be understood apart from the concept of race at the heart of identity,” he says.

This view sees “the crimes of ethnocentrism, colonialism, imperialism, and racism” as creating an “oppressive and irreformable system” in the United States and the West generally. Ironically, this leads black liberationist collectivists to read U.S. history the same way that “rabid racists read history.”

This has “a precursor in the Marxist understanding of human nature … The very nature of man is collectivized in Marx,” he says. “In Marx, class was what moved history, but in this dialectical system … it is race that is a catalyst.”

As in Marxism, this understanding of race and race relations in America emphasizes “collective identity, collective innocence, and collective guilt. The racial group takes priority. … The only way to end this tension is the acquisition of power” by the group – something Orlando Patterson calls it “sovereign freedom.” To proponents of this collectivist dialectic, “the individual can become an impediment to our progress.”

This view aligns with the policy platform of Black Lives Matter and its allied organizations.

By extension, one can extrapolate that this view deemphasizes investment in improving one’s own, God-given potential in favor of a zero-sum struggle for collective power. The world, and countless families, are literally poorer for it.

27 Jun

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Social Capital Fosters Self-Reliance and the Common Good

by Kevin Schmiesing in Articles

Last week I wrote about the importance of social capital—the capacity to cooperate toward common goals. One of the reasons that social capital is so critical is that the functions it serves cannot easily be replaced. There are many things that need to be done but simply cannot be done by individuals acting alone. When social capital is lacking, the demand for those things does not disappear; instead, that demand is transferred to the political sphere. Expansive government is thus one effect of a dearth of social capital.

Consider a community with a large number of homeless people. The problem is obvious, and all decent residents notice and want to address it. Each individual resident also recognizes that the scale of the problem is beyond his or her capacity to solve. One might establish a relationship with one of the homeless persons and try to help by providing guidance, monetary support, or employment. One might even welcome the person into one’s own home. These would be laudable and potentially effective efforts. But they would, at best, deal with the problem in a piecemeal way. And it’s likely that many residents would not be equipped to help in these ways.

A more comprehensive approach would be to employ social capital. This could be done by enlisting the support of an existing institution such as a church, a fraternal organization, or a local charity. The organization would create a program that focused efforts specifically on homelessness and could bring its existing resources—physical plant, financial resources, social and business networks—to bear on the problem. As the program’s effectiveness became known, additional human and economic resources would be made available to it. (Or, if it was ineffective or inefficient, resources would flow to another approach.) Alternatively, if there was no existing institution that was willing or able to attack homelessness, a new organization could be created. The same feedback would take place, as resources were collected and applied, and success was achieved (or not).

The process I’ve described is not pie-in-the-sky. It has taken place thousands of times across thousands of communities in the course of American history. It has created programs and organizations to combat not only homelessness but also poverty, crime, and injustices of many kinds. It has generated institutions to serve the ill and dying, orphans, widows, pregnant mothers, the elderly, and the disabled. It has built hospitals, community centers, museums and arts venues, parks and playgrounds. All of this has been done through the initiative of individuals but not by individuals acting alone. It has required the cooperation of many people, working together toward a common aim.

But it isn’t automatic. Confronted by social problems, people can say, “I don’t care,” or “someone else will take care of it,” or “that’s why I pay taxes.” Many people have, and their communities are poorer for it.

In this way, the paradox in the title of this piece is explained: Social capital is a fusion of self-reliance with concern for the common good. Eschewing a “someone else” attitude, the self-reliant person takes responsibility for his own good as well as that of his community, recognizing that the two are inextricably bound together.

The alternative to a society of self-reliant, generous, cooperative citizens, is one of dependent, self-centered, fissiparous citizens. In such a society, people do not seek to solve problems on their own or by initiating collaborative efforts; instead, they look to government for solutions. They cooperate for the purpose of influencing policy but for little else. Obligations to the common good are discharged by voting and by paying taxes; otherwise, responsibility for addressing society’s ills—such as homelessness—falls to public officials and government agencies.

While government can be one participant in cooperative efforts to improve communities, it cannot replace the role of private institutions. The institutional framework and incentive structure of government are necessarily different from those of voluntary organizations. In most cases, government programs will be less efficient and less effective. Yet, where social capital is weak, government naturally grows to fill the void. It’s one more reason to commit ourselves to rebuilding the social capital of our families and communities.