Mind over Memes by Diana Senechal

Author:Diana Senechal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

After these justices, social justice seems limited, even superficial. Yet the other justices cannot exist without it or vice versa. To exercise social justice is to secure a standard of living, including liberty, for a collective. The collective is never fixed; groups merge and dissolve. Individuals join and leave. Still, no matter what the changes, the essential goal of social justice remains the same: to secure and defend the rights of underprivileged groups. This work liberates and limits those involved. Eventually it must include other justices or crumble into nothing.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963) epitomizes social justice that extends to other justices. In this letter, addressed to eight white Alabama clergymen who objected to the nonviolent civil rights protests in Birmingham, King argues that the African American cause is actually part of the great human cause of the centuries. Neither he nor his people are “outsiders,” he points out, since injustice affects everyone. Nor is obeying the law an absolute good, since laws are not always just. “A just law,” he explains, “is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in the eternal or natural law.” Because of this, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”; in breaking the eternal law, it damages humankind.[13]

In quoting from philosophical and religious texts, King emphasizes the gravity and longevity of the civil rights struggle. But he does not rest with the large view; instead, he explores the implications of injustice for the individual. He describes the father who sees his six-year-old daughter’s eyes tear up when she learns that she can’t go to the amusement park that has been advertised on television and sees “the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky.” Here King speaks not only of tears and disappointments but of changes to the structure of one’s internal being. In addition, he asks his readers to imagine this, to go beyond their usual awareness. His view of justice moves outward and inward; continually searching and questioning, it resists dogma and self-righteousness.

In contrast, some approaches to social justice avoid such searching; they rest on certainty and conviction. But this easy route has dangers. It is easy to adopt a stance in favor of a group’s rights; it is harder to be kind to the person standing before us. To avoid the difficulty is to flatten the justice. Any social justice pursued to the exclusion of other justices becomes unjust; it lacks calibration and truth.

The violent student response to Charles Murray’s visit to Middlebury College in March 2017 stands as an example of justice gone askew. Murray was invited to Middlebury by the American Enterprise Institute Club to speak on his recent book on class relations. He was widely

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