Subtlety and Social Justice

Subtlety and Social Justice

I’d like to talk to you a little bit today about social justice. But in the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you: I don’t like most social justice sermons that I hear. Actually, truth be told, I don’t like most sermons that I hear, and I’m not sure this one will be much better, but that may just be because I’m unusually cantankerous for my age.

We are not a political party or a social club or a philosophy class. We are a church. Our conviction as Unitarian Universalists is that everything we do is -- or should be -- primarily religious. There is an often-ignored imperative to be holistic in how we approach these issues.

I think that’s part of the reason I’m instinctively reluctant to throw myself too fully into social justice work, no matter how eloquent the exhortation from the pulpit. I do harbor certain convictions, at the very least about which is the lesser of evils, but I’m intuitively uncomfortable with taking actions. I have an abiding devotion to the deliberative subtlety which is often lost in the grays of effective political action. All my action comes with footnotes – and if it can’t, I’d rather just not do it.

So am I just a coward? The answer seems to be “sort of.” The reluctance to act that comes from a love of intellectual rigor is often bolstered and even overtaken by a personal shyness which leads me to hide from social action in the more intellectually defensible “love of subtlety.”

In the last few months I’ve been thrown into a leadership role in the campaign for a living wage for employees of the University of Virginia, where I’m a third-year philosophy major -- a campaign for what we so very glibly call “social justice.” I’ve put a lot of effort into this campaign, but my justification for participation in it is internally well-parsed.

And as I’ve adjusted to the pace and gotten over the initial adrenaline of such an exhilarating campaign, I’ve still been preoccupied with a potentially paralyzing question. For all this talk of what’s right, How do we know?

How do we know what’s right? How do we know we’re doing it in the right way? What is it that gives our social action moral legitimacy? If this matters more than just winning some political game -- and I can tell you, there are moments of strategic maneuvering when that’s all it feels like -- then how do we make sure we’re treating the work with the respect it deserves?

For me, as I’ve been doing more and more work for the Living Wage Campaign,[1] I’ve felt precisely that lack of balance, and I fear for the moral legitimacy of the work I’m doing. I’m forced to go back and try to come up with a theory to explain why I feel so off-kilter. What is the source of this terrible malaise, amidst great fun, exhilarating action, and some very real victories?

Our conviction as Unitarian Universalists is that everything we do is -- or should be -- primarily religious. So we need a theology of social justice. We need more than just the primitive, simplistic idea -- “social justice good” – we need to know how and why it is bound up in the essential stuff of who we are. I’m not theologian enough to expound such a theology – and you don’t want to hear me try -- but I do have some thoughts about what it should look like.

I think my discontent has sprung from disconnection between disparate parts of myself. I believe that an answer to those basic questions -- the outline of a theology of social justice -- requires some sort of idea of the relationship between the three essential tasks of the human being: thinking, doing, and relating.

The Buddhist eightfold path is divided into three similar categories: Knowledge, virtue, and consciousness.[2] Thinking, doing, relating. Thinking for knowledge, doing for virtue, relating for consciousness. All three are important, and inextricable.

There should be a creative tension between thought, action, and relationship, but we often avoid it, confining our intellectual activities to so-called intellectual questions, our doing to social issues, and our relating to interpersonal interactions -- as though they were separable. They aren’t. Moral responsibility has multiple dimensions, a deliberative, an active, and a relational, which we have detached, but which, in a complete moral life, must always be linked.

I don’t think this problem is uncommon among Unitarian Universalists. We are great doers, and great thinkers, and great relaters, but we segregate those parts of our lives to different arenas. We ignore the Unitarian imperative to be whole.

In the reading this morning we heard an exhortation to “Teach the believers how to think,” and thinking is the first important aspect of a theory of social justice.

In my view it is crucial that we think more deeply -- at every stage -- about the moral dimensions of the work we are doing. By this I don’t mean the use of moral terms or moral argument in order to obtain our desired ends, but the sincere and profound engagement in the meaning of morality itself. To use moral rhetoric without having deeply considered its sources and implications borders on dishonesty. These questions go to the very heart of our calling as people of faith.

To be intellectually credible, our thinking needs to have three parts to its cycle: individual thought, dialectic or communal thought, and doubt.

First I think we each need to individually consider what moral perspective has brought us to this work, where it fits into a larger vision of an Ideal World, and where its limitations lie. Then I think we need to be in authentic dialogue with one another about those moral perspectives.

Third, I think our dialogue needs to be intellectually rigorous. We must always be doubting our own rightness, always on guard against idolatrous certainties, and against the hardening of our spirits to the humanity of others. These are things which we must do, even if they do make us less effective, though I’m inclined to think that they will make us more effective. If we do not, though we may win a battle or two in the public sphere, we will have lost the struggle that matters most: the struggle to live meaningfully, deeply, and well.

If thinking is about the right ends, doing is about right means. But really, the means are inseparable from the ends, because one of our ends ought to be the transformation of the means. If we want the national and world discourse to be thoughtful and substantive, we ought to insist that it start here, in these churches, and not indulge ourselves in easy self-righteousness. That we do it is important. How we do it is important, too.

How we do things is vital, because when the public discourse and the inner dialogue on any issue are honest, clear, candid, and fair, then we have no reason to fear the moral legitimacy of the result.

As a member of the Living Wage Campaign at the University of Virginia, I am confident that if the debate meets that high standard, the University community and the University administration will see the economic, social, and moral advantages of a living wage, as well as their legal power to implement it -- but if, after that kind of debate, they still don’t, we’ll have lost on the merits, and I’ll be proud to have taken part in the dialectic. That’s how we can win a living wage, and it’s how I want to.

We must reject the contention (implicit or otherwise) that superficial, dishonest debate is okay, because that’s what’s normal in the rest of world. Churches, like individuals, should not be mere reflections of a wide and hurting world, but engines for its positive transformation.

We don’t always meet that high standard of debate. Too often we decide what we think is right, and then move onto action, without ever reconsidering our reasons for doing the social justice work that we do. We become convinced that we are on to some great secret, and it becomes justification for little lies, for little unkindnesses. We stagnate, and we do not engage the idol-breaking power of doubt.

The last thing that gives our action legitimacy, I think, is being in right relationship. It matters how we treat our opponents and how we treat our friends. All our campaigns, all our speeches, all our little footprints in the shifting sands of time, are ultimately about doing right by people, and at the moment an opponent becomes an enemy, or a comrade merely a means, we have lost. We owe each other better than that.

But being in right relationship is about more than how we treat each other. It’s about being awakened to the Holy in all things, to a transformation of our very perceptions so that every glance draws us to the Divine.

All of consciousness is about relationship, and so if we are in right relationship with all the things we see, our intellectual deliberation will be rooted in love.

This is prophethood: thoughtful, loving action, not beholden to the idolatries of the left or the right, in honest conversation and sometimes honest disagreement with each other, and even within ourselves.

‘Til justice -- whatever that is -- rolls down like waters, and peace like an ever flowing stream. Onward and upward and wider and deeper to the Commonwealth of God. So may it be. Amen.

O Karma, Dharma

by Philip Appleman

O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,

gimme a break before I die:

grant me wisdom, will, & wit,

purity, probity, pluck, & grit.

Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, kind,

gimme great abs & a steel-trap mind,

and forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice -

these little blessings would suffice

to beget an earthly paradise:

make the bad people good -

and the good people nice;

and before our world goes over the brink,

teach the believers how to think.

[2] The last category is often called “Concentration,” but this is also one of the folds of the eight-fold path, and this dual usage is potentially confusing. I prefer the term “consciousness” here, but I don’t read Sanskrit, so I can’t speak to its linguistic accuracy.