Technology and Social Justice

Misconceptions about human life and social order lead to endless trouble. So, I’ll make a few more comments on current misconceptions that relate to social justice.

One misconception is an overemphasis on individual choice that results in an extreme emphasis on rights at the expense of other aspects of social relations. While it’s better for people to have rights than not, today’s one-sided emphasis is destructive and destroys the freedom and equality it claims to foster.

A right demands a remedy, so making individual rights the basis of social order requires a legal structure to enforce them. The more extensive the system of rights, the more comprehensive the structure has to be.

The various rules and expectations that make up social order are concerned with everything of social importance. But people’s economic condition, and what is thought honorable and disgraceful, are obviously important socially. Putting individual rights at the center of social order means they should apply to those things as well.

That is why the demand for equal rights now extends to rights like equal consideration and a standard of living like that of other people. That’s what, at their most idealistic, diversity, equity, and inclusion are all about.

But that’s a problem. The problem is not that it’s good for some to have too much and others too little, or for some people to be looked down on, or that no one should try to mitigate hardship and extreme inequality. It’s that enforcing a comprehensive system of rights regarding such things means determining who gets what in all cases—otherwise, some people will be denied their due.

Today, people understand things technologically. If you want to accomplish something, you set up a clear, rational system designed to bring it about by simple, straightforward, and reliable means. In the case of human beings, the clearest and most reliable means are rewards and penalties, either legal or economic.

A technological approach to a system of social justice based on individual rights thus means setting up a system of rules and regulations, designed by expert bureaucrats and backed by rewards and penalties, to govern social relations in detail. Who gets what and how people view each other is decided centrally.

But that means the destruction of human freedom and agency. We are not even allowed to decide what to think about other people. Markets and voting retain a limited role, since choice is allowed from a menu of options that won’t cause problems for the system. But the restrictions become quite narrow since the goals of the system are so demanding and comprehensive.

We saw that during the period of peak wokeness. People could lose their livelihoods for saying there are only two sexes. The demands seem to have moderated since then, but they remain institutionalized in many settings and will eventually return in full force unless the features of public thought that give rise to them change. But there is very little sign of that. The one-sided emphasis on choice, individual rights, and technology—rather than, for example, human nature and the common good—remains the same.

The world is too complex to accommodate the degree of centralization required by such a system. The loss of agency makes people worse and less happy by making them irresponsible and disengaging them from their own lives. It also makes them poorer and less equal. It reduces productivity, since it severs the link between reward and results. And it puts all power in the hands of bureaucrats (and inevitably billionaires) answerable only to themselves.

The approach has other biases as well. For example, an expert bureaucracy that takes over healthcare will, if its goals are equality and utility, order the system toward economic efficiency and consumer satisfaction. That means it will view its task as maintaining human beings as productive resources, scrapping them (with the aid of pro-death propaganda) when their upkeep becomes too expensive, and—when demand and purchasing power are there—producing consumer goods like abortions, babies, cosmetic surgeries, and extension of life beyond its economic justification.

We see these tendencies today. Related problems apply to other aspects of state involvement in everyday life—public education, welfare programs, and so on. How can a Catholic support such a system?

Another problem with current understandings of social justice that demand transformation of social life is the problem of scale. This hasn’t been talked about as much as some others, but more people are taking an interest in it.

Technology and mass production taught us the economies of scale. These are often impressive. It would take a huge effort to make a single automobile, far less—car for car—to make millions of them. Henry Ford demonstrated that and put America on wheels. But some things can’t be industrialized, and that includes most things involving human interactions.

That’s not always true, of course: the technological and industrial approach to war has been very effective. States that were slow to adopt it, like nineteenth-century China and the States of the Church, found themselves at the mercy of foreign powers, so they changed or perished.

But destroying the enemy’s physical ability to resist, as in the Second World War, is simpler than most social goals. In recent years, we have repeatedly seen that even something as brutal as war has complications that technological methods cannot deal with. Our efforts in Vietnam and Afghanistan failed completely in spite of overwhelming material superiority and huge expenditures for bureaucratic “state-building” programs that turned out to be useless.

The failures weren’t surprising. Large-scale goals that involve human beings are generally quite difficult to achieve. In recent years, studies have proliferated showing the difficulty of applying ideas on a large scale that look good and seem to work on a smaller scale. Students of entrepreneurship, development efforts in poor countries, and social programs generally have been especially active in the area.

We are all familiar with situations in daily life in which something that seems quite helpful stops seeming so helpful after a while. Conditions change, the low-hanging fruit gets picked, we begin to notice drawbacks, what started off seeming like fun because it was novel becomes routine and boring, so we slack off.

Similar problems apply to programs and organizations. The pool of talented people, unused resources, and easy successes dries up. Innovation and enthusiasm give way to bureaucracy, routine, and careerism. Funding and official status bring in people who like comfort, status, security, and free money. Set procedures fail to respond when circumstances vary. Efforts funded for political or idealistic reasons keep getting funded for those reasons, even if actual results aren’t there.

Secondary effects also appear, causing problems that can eat up benefits. The world is as it is because of the general stability of the systems that compose it. That stability exists because established systems respond to disturbances in ways that dampen their effect. Interventions intended to be beneficial are not immune, no matter how good the intention is. Social security reduces feelings of intergenerational obligation. Food aid programs suppress local production, open up opportunities for theft, and entrench local do-nothing elites who take control of them.

Such initiatives may still be worth pursuing in some form, but thought is needed. Once again, the moral is that no legal or organizational scheme can bring about the Catholic vision of good social order. So someone who says “it is the communists who think like Christians” is making a very serious mistake.

As a political movement, communism has repeatedly led to poverty, violence, and oppression. That happens for a reason. To say that God became man is not to say—as the communists in effect do—that man by his own efforts can be God. When he tries to create his own reality, everything goes wrong.

Some find skepticism about bureaucratized social justice depressing or even cynical. They shouldn’t. What truly makes people depressed is a political progressivism that attributes everything that happens to society in general and so denies the agency of ordinary people.

What denial of utopia means is not that nothing can be done to make people’s lives better, but that there is always something for each of us to do here and now. As Jesus said, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation.” What’s needed is the leaven of faith, hope, and charity constantly acting invisibly. We all can take part in that.