Social justice: A sin that covers a store of evils?
View(s):What is Social Justice, that all her champions compliment her so highly? One idle evening, I asked myself this Important Question! In-between the past of a pleasantly spent day, the present of a pleasing hour, and the future of a prospect not too bleak. In the course of my daily doings, I had already encountered the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Four Visions of the Bodhisatva, the Four Winds of Fate, and the Four Brothers Grim. Or Grimm, if you fancy fairy tales. (Oh, get with it. You know whom I mean.) So I was in a mood – as I am now, as you can see – to pontificate and lay the law down so.
Here goes, then.
Social justice is when we are happy that our problems with other people are solved to our entire satisfaction. Social justice is when our standard of living and our quality of life are good enough for us to be able to afford to criticise the state and anyone else who looks even vaguely complicit that there is something rotten in the et cetera. Social justice is when our sins are so secret and our spirits so sanctimonious that we can point fingers at others without an iota of guilt, shame, or fear. In short, it is the height of hypocrisy in and among a humanity that has hung itself higher than Haman with its “Hello, dears!” and “How are you doings?” and “Hope all is well…” – when, in fact, the world around them (you and I and we are all the same) is going to hell in a handcart.
See? The power of the pen – in a splinter of the mind’s eye – can make the words mean anything we like… I like, I mean… even if the reality is something else… For who amongst us can claim never to have cheated, stolen, or lied? (Substitute any even ‘minor’ misdemeanours such as running a red light, using the office equipment for personal work, jumping a queue, not returning borrowed items, keeping for ourselves lost valuables – without looking for their owners, etc. etc.)
So I’m inclined to agree with whoever lamented that “social justice is a semantic fraud from the same stable as ‘people’s democracy’.” In most polities – and polite societies – around the world today, there isn’t any such animal, mineral, or vegetable. (Really, dears, you only have to read the post-election propagandists’ bitter post-mortems to know that. But let’s leave the pickle of politics out of our Sunday repast, eh?)
Therefore, as the lady pointed out: “Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare, social justice can never be attained.” It was Helen Keller. Of course, she was blind and deaf. That’s perhaps a precondition for being able to sense one’s prime responsibility – for each other’s welfare – because a majority of those who can see, or have vision and clarity of perspective, choose not to see. And those who can hear choose to stop their ears against the pleas and plaints of Lazarus on the doorstep outside our palaces, with silken girls bringing sherbet as a bulwark against the heat of the noonday sun. (“Ignore that nuisance of a beggar at the gate, dear, he will get fed up of ringing the bell… eventually – and go away… and leave us in peace – in our comfy little hell…”)
Indulge me, dears. Read this quote. And tell me if you don’t agree. “The universe appears to me like an interesting, immense, inexorable torture-garden of twisted pleasures and pastimes. Passions, visions, eternal longings, greed, cupidity, lust, hatred, and lies; law, social norms and institutions, justice without peace, peace without love, love but no glory, heroism sinking into hedonism, and cold clean clear clinical religion: these are the monstrous fauna and hideous flora of eternal human suffering in our not-a-paradise.” Who said it? I just did! With a little help. On the World Wide Web. To cheer you up this miserably beautiful Sabbath. So that we can mourn our common lot together with comradely joy.
In this light, we all must agree with American activist Marion Wright Edelman that “the challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place”. Not just pavements, pretty parklands, practical parking lots, places to play cricket; but parity, purity, pity. Social justice is not refraining from stealing our neighbour’s mangoes in order that he might not purloin our papaws. Social justice is not even about sharing the fruit of our labours with the starving person at the corner of our street. Social justice is never simply about the fair distribution of either equitable poverty or ill-gotten gains. Social justice is about seeing in our fallen brother’s speck-streaked eye or our fickle sister’s soulless gaze that humankind is made in the image and likeness of God – and that there, but for the grace of that same God, goes you. Or I.
Social justice is the essence of true religion. Krishna knew it. Mohamed said it. Gautama Siddharta said it and did it. Jesus of Nazareth lived it and breathed it and died for it. It’s your turn, your trial and your tribulation, your time of your testing and your temptation, to live for it. Or die trying. (And while you’re about it, answer that door bell for heaven’s sake… it could be your eternal destiny knocking.)
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