long but life changing. let me know if you read it.
A Pedagogy of Justice
Daniel Hartnett, S.J.
Daniel Hartnett, S.J. is a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. This piece was first printed in the Summer 2001 issue of Loyola Magazine under the title “Arm-In-Arm for Justice.”
The fundamental proposition underlying Jesuit education is that faith, knowledge and service are intrinsically related. But what does this mean? It means that faith, knowledge and service are not three separate and completely independent aspects of education, accidentally or arbitrarily juxtaposed alongside each other. Rather, they form a triad in which each term is dynamically related to the others, and any one term is incomplete without the other two.
It’s the integration of faith, knowledge and service that makes for true leadership.
The Society of Jesus has a long history of forming leaders. But at a recent conference held at Santa Clara University, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., (the Superior General of the Society of Jesus) forcefully argued that the kind of leadership most needed in the world today is one that addresses the expanding situation of injustice and inequality.
Kolvenbach said that students graduating from Jesuit colleges and universities should possess three qualities. First, they need to have an authentic sensitivity to the social suffering in the world today. Next, they should have a deep understanding of the causes and conditions that perpetuate that suffering. Finally, they need a firm commitment to working for greater justice, preferably in and through one’s own professional life. How do we actually form this type of leader? Although books abound about leadership today, few focus thoughtfully on the formation of leaders for justice. They deal more commonly with matters of management than with issues of social change.
Nevertheless, over the past decade or so, new thoughts about justice have been tried and tested at nearly all of the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in this country. While still in the experimental stage, a growing consensus points to the kinds of steps necessary to form true leaders for justice.
First Step: Experience
The appeal to experience as the starting point for all knowledge is not a novelty.
Aristotle promoted this idea, and it reappeared in a most powerful form during the period of the Enlightenment, especially in the writing of skeptics such as Hume. We also find a
24
strong concern for experience in the development of American pragmatism as represented by Pierce, James and Dewey. Although these thinkers spoke of experience in significantly different ways, they all agree that it is the touchstone for true knowledge. In the area of justice, the turn (or return) to experience has a narrative quality. It suggests that commitment to justice does not begin with abstract concepts or theories. It means real contact with those who suffer the effects of structural injustice. Basically, the first step toward justice begins with listening to narratives of injustice.
Of course, this contact occurs in a variety of ways. Some encounter poverty-stricken mothers unable to obtain decent health care for their children.
Others will listen carefully to the frustration and discouragement of homeless persons who are unable to find low-income housing in the city. Still, others become friends of teen-agers who, in a blind attempt to find the recognition they never found at home, fall into a lifestyle of gangs and drugs.
What is essential is that there be direct contact with the human face of injustice, a face that, to be sure, will probably expose us to real worlds of pain, but will also reveal the mystery of our common humanity.
No one claims that every single word spoken in these encounters is 100 percent accurate nor that listening to these stories of injustice is the only thing necessary. Indeed, to stop the process at this point would be to romanticize and to oversimplify the poor’s suffering.
But it is also true that without this caring contact, without careful listening, justice will never be adequately achieved. The reason for this is quite simple: Justice is an affect, a basic moral sentiment, a matter of the heart. Primary justice is not so much a theoretical ideal but a basic feeling or sense of solidarity.
Plato and Aristotle knew that the most important element in moral education is not the transmission of moralistic bromides but the careful cultivation of relational virtues such as justice.
Second Step: Understanding
But it is not enough to empathize with victims of injustice. We need to understand the causes and conditions that perpetuate suffering. People become aware of this need only when they realize that society is not immediately transparent to itself.
Only by engaging in serious and sustained social analysis can we begin to uncover the social systems that are at work “behind the scenes.” The challenge is to look beyond surface indicators, such as the Gross Domestic Product or the Dow Jones in order to see how our nation and the world are really doing. Without a critical “habitus” of reflection and without sustained social analysis, a person can never expect to become a significant leader in the pursuit of justice, but only an ideologue, heavy on rhetoric but weak on wisdom.
25
To engage in social analysis does not mean that everyone must become an expert sociologist, anthropologist or economist. “Social analysis” does not refer to a specialized, scientific understanding of social reality (what Aristotle refers to as “episteme”). Rather, it refers to the ordinary exercise whereby the educated adult remains critically attuned to what is happening in society in order to act more justly.
Aristotle refers to this kind of knowledge as “phronesis” or practical wisdom. This “phronetic” approach to understanding contributes to society’s practical rationality in revealing where we are as a people, where we want to go, and how we might live more justly together.
Within this framework, we might rediscover the importance, indeed the urgent need, for research. Although we tend to reduce social justice to activism, such a reductionism is shortsighted and doesn’t really serve the cause of justice.
When action for justice is based on a “thin” or superficial description of social reality, it often does more harm than good. Moreover, many of the major social issues that face the world community today are impervious to simple solutions.
Problems, such as global warming, the foreign debt, our chaotic health care system, etc., require more than volunteerism for their improvement. They require the kind of deep understanding that sound research provides.
Third Step: Imagination
Of course, it’s important to understand the different social problems we face. But our grasp of social reality would be sorely inadequate were it to stop there.
Reality always consists of much more than a series of problems and needs. Reality must also be viewed in dynamic terms of possibility.
Martin Heidegger speaks about the “ontological priority” of possibility. Possibility is the secret heart of reality. There’s nothing inevitable about an unjust situation. There are always new options and avenues available to us, however latent these may be. The exercise of imagination is not about developing grand utopian schemes. It means bringing to fruition those new seeds of justice already inchoately present in reality.
Though utterly essential to leadership for justice, the role of the imagination has been grossly underestimated. The imagination became stigmatized because it was considered to be of a lower order than reason. It was associated with flights of fantasy, perhaps useful for a novelist or science fiction writer, but not for someone seriously concerned with matters of social justice.
Gradually, however, we came to realize the terrible inadequacy of this outlook. Without social imagination, we have learned that justice will never flourish. When imagination is
26
absent, social structures tend to appear more permanent and over-determined than they are.
And there’s a relationship between faith and the imagination. Faith is not so much a set of doctrines as it is a way of perceiving newness at work in history. Faith heals our moral nearsightedness and reveals the threads of grace that are present in the world. Faith enables us to perceive morally relevant features of a given situation that would otherwise go unnoticed. Faith perceives how the “mustard seed,” the “good news,” is already alive and active in our midst.
Fourth Step: Action
All the understanding and imagination in the world, however, would mean very little if it did not finally translate into new forms of communication and action.
And not any action counts for justice. Justice calls for actions that empower and transform, that liberate and heal. This is when we most need profiles of justice; that is, persons whom we can emulate or whose commitment to justice we can somehow imitate or reproduce.
Few of us would risk a new course of action in the area of justice were it not for the well-known witnesses to justice who have preceded us. These are such leaders as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel, Robert Kennedy, Mother Teresa and Oscar Romero. Each in their own true way reminds us that justice is possible and that, no matter how desperate a situation may at first appear, there is always room for creativity and transformation.
Each of these moral models was unafraid to challenge the world as it is. By so doing, each inspires a new vision, helps shape us morally and spurs us on to purposeful action. Perhaps most noteworthy, they first embrace the new path themselves.
If for 450 years Jesuit education has sought to form leaders by attending to the whole person (affectively, intellectually, morally and spiritually), this formation today has become intimately connected to the question of justice.
Tomorrow’s “whole person” will only be in a position to exert true leadership if he or she possesses a well-educated solidarity. Leaders for justice might appear to be in short supply today, but rather than lament that fact, Jesuit colleges and universities, such as Loyola, creatively embrace that challenge.
Daniel Hartnett, S.J.
Daniel Hartnett, S.J. is a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. This piece was first printed in the Summer 2001 issue of Loyola Magazine under the title “Arm-In-Arm for Justice.”
The fundamental proposition underlying Jesuit education is that faith, knowledge and service are intrinsically related. But what does this mean? It means that faith, knowledge and service are not three separate and completely independent aspects of education, accidentally or arbitrarily juxtaposed alongside each other. Rather, they form a triad in which each term is dynamically related to the others, and any one term is incomplete without the other two.
It’s the integration of faith, knowledge and service that makes for true leadership.
The Society of Jesus has a long history of forming leaders. But at a recent conference held at Santa Clara University, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., (the Superior General of the Society of Jesus) forcefully argued that the kind of leadership most needed in the world today is one that addresses the expanding situation of injustice and inequality.
Kolvenbach said that students graduating from Jesuit colleges and universities should possess three qualities. First, they need to have an authentic sensitivity to the social suffering in the world today. Next, they should have a deep understanding of the causes and conditions that perpetuate that suffering. Finally, they need a firm commitment to working for greater justice, preferably in and through one’s own professional life. How do we actually form this type of leader? Although books abound about leadership today, few focus thoughtfully on the formation of leaders for justice. They deal more commonly with matters of management than with issues of social change.
Nevertheless, over the past decade or so, new thoughts about justice have been tried and tested at nearly all of the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in this country. While still in the experimental stage, a growing consensus points to the kinds of steps necessary to form true leaders for justice.
First Step: Experience
The appeal to experience as the starting point for all knowledge is not a novelty.
Aristotle promoted this idea, and it reappeared in a most powerful form during the period of the Enlightenment, especially in the writing of skeptics such as Hume. We also find a
24
strong concern for experience in the development of American pragmatism as represented by Pierce, James and Dewey. Although these thinkers spoke of experience in significantly different ways, they all agree that it is the touchstone for true knowledge. In the area of justice, the turn (or return) to experience has a narrative quality. It suggests that commitment to justice does not begin with abstract concepts or theories. It means real contact with those who suffer the effects of structural injustice. Basically, the first step toward justice begins with listening to narratives of injustice.
Of course, this contact occurs in a variety of ways. Some encounter poverty-stricken mothers unable to obtain decent health care for their children.
Others will listen carefully to the frustration and discouragement of homeless persons who are unable to find low-income housing in the city. Still, others become friends of teen-agers who, in a blind attempt to find the recognition they never found at home, fall into a lifestyle of gangs and drugs.
What is essential is that there be direct contact with the human face of injustice, a face that, to be sure, will probably expose us to real worlds of pain, but will also reveal the mystery of our common humanity.
No one claims that every single word spoken in these encounters is 100 percent accurate nor that listening to these stories of injustice is the only thing necessary. Indeed, to stop the process at this point would be to romanticize and to oversimplify the poor’s suffering.
But it is also true that without this caring contact, without careful listening, justice will never be adequately achieved. The reason for this is quite simple: Justice is an affect, a basic moral sentiment, a matter of the heart. Primary justice is not so much a theoretical ideal but a basic feeling or sense of solidarity.
Plato and Aristotle knew that the most important element in moral education is not the transmission of moralistic bromides but the careful cultivation of relational virtues such as justice.
Second Step: Understanding
But it is not enough to empathize with victims of injustice. We need to understand the causes and conditions that perpetuate suffering. People become aware of this need only when they realize that society is not immediately transparent to itself.
Only by engaging in serious and sustained social analysis can we begin to uncover the social systems that are at work “behind the scenes.” The challenge is to look beyond surface indicators, such as the Gross Domestic Product or the Dow Jones in order to see how our nation and the world are really doing. Without a critical “habitus” of reflection and without sustained social analysis, a person can never expect to become a significant leader in the pursuit of justice, but only an ideologue, heavy on rhetoric but weak on wisdom.
25
To engage in social analysis does not mean that everyone must become an expert sociologist, anthropologist or economist. “Social analysis” does not refer to a specialized, scientific understanding of social reality (what Aristotle refers to as “episteme”). Rather, it refers to the ordinary exercise whereby the educated adult remains critically attuned to what is happening in society in order to act more justly.
Aristotle refers to this kind of knowledge as “phronesis” or practical wisdom. This “phronetic” approach to understanding contributes to society’s practical rationality in revealing where we are as a people, where we want to go, and how we might live more justly together.
Within this framework, we might rediscover the importance, indeed the urgent need, for research. Although we tend to reduce social justice to activism, such a reductionism is shortsighted and doesn’t really serve the cause of justice.
When action for justice is based on a “thin” or superficial description of social reality, it often does more harm than good. Moreover, many of the major social issues that face the world community today are impervious to simple solutions.
Problems, such as global warming, the foreign debt, our chaotic health care system, etc., require more than volunteerism for their improvement. They require the kind of deep understanding that sound research provides.
Third Step: Imagination
Of course, it’s important to understand the different social problems we face. But our grasp of social reality would be sorely inadequate were it to stop there.
Reality always consists of much more than a series of problems and needs. Reality must also be viewed in dynamic terms of possibility.
Martin Heidegger speaks about the “ontological priority” of possibility. Possibility is the secret heart of reality. There’s nothing inevitable about an unjust situation. There are always new options and avenues available to us, however latent these may be. The exercise of imagination is not about developing grand utopian schemes. It means bringing to fruition those new seeds of justice already inchoately present in reality.
Though utterly essential to leadership for justice, the role of the imagination has been grossly underestimated. The imagination became stigmatized because it was considered to be of a lower order than reason. It was associated with flights of fantasy, perhaps useful for a novelist or science fiction writer, but not for someone seriously concerned with matters of social justice.
Gradually, however, we came to realize the terrible inadequacy of this outlook. Without social imagination, we have learned that justice will never flourish. When imagination is
26
absent, social structures tend to appear more permanent and over-determined than they are.
And there’s a relationship between faith and the imagination. Faith is not so much a set of doctrines as it is a way of perceiving newness at work in history. Faith heals our moral nearsightedness and reveals the threads of grace that are present in the world. Faith enables us to perceive morally relevant features of a given situation that would otherwise go unnoticed. Faith perceives how the “mustard seed,” the “good news,” is already alive and active in our midst.
Fourth Step: Action
All the understanding and imagination in the world, however, would mean very little if it did not finally translate into new forms of communication and action.
And not any action counts for justice. Justice calls for actions that empower and transform, that liberate and heal. This is when we most need profiles of justice; that is, persons whom we can emulate or whose commitment to justice we can somehow imitate or reproduce.
Few of us would risk a new course of action in the area of justice were it not for the well-known witnesses to justice who have preceded us. These are such leaders as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel, Robert Kennedy, Mother Teresa and Oscar Romero. Each in their own true way reminds us that justice is possible and that, no matter how desperate a situation may at first appear, there is always room for creativity and transformation.
Each of these moral models was unafraid to challenge the world as it is. By so doing, each inspires a new vision, helps shape us morally and spurs us on to purposeful action. Perhaps most noteworthy, they first embrace the new path themselves.
If for 450 years Jesuit education has sought to form leaders by attending to the whole person (affectively, intellectually, morally and spiritually), this formation today has become intimately connected to the question of justice.
Tomorrow’s “whole person” will only be in a position to exert true leadership if he or she possesses a well-educated solidarity. Leaders for justice might appear to be in short supply today, but rather than lament that fact, Jesuit colleges and universities, such as Loyola, creatively embrace that challenge.