Social Justice and Dry Bones

Our ancestors recognized that we all have sins — wickedness done and goodness left undone. They created space within the calendar cycle — for Jews there are the Days of Repentance leading to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. For Christians there is the season of repentance, Lent. And, in between, should you need a quick moral spruce-up, there is confession and absolution.

Note: it’s a good idea to keep current. Sins, like dirty dishes, do tend to stack up.

Let me emphasize once more that it is our own sins we are to carry, confess to and apologize for. To atone for sins one hasn’t personally committed is a usurpation, a kind of theft, not a healing.

Should we be inclined, like son Peter, to explore grievances held against others, we must accept that apology and recompense can only come from the individual who actually caused us harm.

This is important.

Jesus, for example, was an individual human being betrayed by other individual human beings: Judas, Herod, Pontius Pilate, individual chief priests, the men and women of the mob. Each of them had a name, even if we don’t know what it was. Each had limitations. Each had free will. Each chose.

The story of Jesus’ death — told on Good Friday in the sepulchral gloom of darkened Christian sanctuaries — is usually taken from the Gospel of John and punctuated by that drum beat repetition: The Jews said crucify him, the Jews said, the Jews…the Jews… 

Is it any wonder that, historically, Good Friday services presaged pogroms, or that Easter weekend was a particularly dangerous time for the Jewish communities in Europe? “The Jews killed Jesus,” sounded the cry, and mayhem followed.

Did the Jews kill Jesus? 

Well, no. The Romans killed Jesus, but under every oppressive regime there are collaborators. Had we been present at the time, we might have been able to pick out the Quislings. Possibly by looking in the mirror.

Of course these would have been Jewish because everyone was Jewish—-Jesus, Mary, Herod, Judas Iscariot, Simon Peter, the priests and scribes…

But that isn’t what was meant when European gentiles  sounded the call “the Jews killed Jesus!” It wasn’t about the particular and long-dead human beings who made the choices they made for  reasons that seemed reasonable at the time.  

It was an unanswerable accusation against everyone who belonged to the group called “Jews,” all Jews everywhere and for all time who must carry this stone. Attacking actual Jewish people was thus not considered sadism or thuggery.

It was justice. 

Hitler would later promote a secular version of the calumny, this time undergirded by the supposed fact of the immutable inequality of “races.” Americans forget this — maybe because we want to — but a lot of the so-called settled science on which Hitler based his ideas came from the United States.

During the early 20th Century, the heyday of the progressive movement, Americans on the political left — especially, for some reason, Californians — were really into promoting doctrines of the genetic inferiority of just about everyone who wasn’t a blond, blue-eyed surfer-dude or dudette.

The progressive eugenicists thought the world would be a better place if we just found a way to subtract — you know, gently — black people, immigrant Asian laborers, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, hillbillies, the sexually suspect, poor people, the infirm, the mentally ill…

Eugenics would have been so much wacky Twittering (or the early 20th century equivalent thereof) had it not been for financing provided by the great philanthropic institutions like the Carnegie Institution (founded by Andrew Carnegie, whom we count as a Unitarian), who underwrote the efforts of some of America’s most respected scientists hailing from Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton.

Oliver Wendell Holmes — famous jurist, progressive (and Unitarian) wrote the following,

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes… Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Several feminist reformers advocated an agenda of eugenic legal reform. The National Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the National League of Women Voters were among the variety of state and local feminist organization that at some point lobbied for eugenic reforms.

In 1902, the American Unitarian Association published The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races Through the Survival of the Unfit. The author was David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University. Unitarians like John Dewey and Charles Francis Adams Jr were not only among the staunch supporters of progressive economic and social theories, but were also believers in racial purity, which put them in the vanguard of establishing the American apartheid system known as Jim Crow.

For these folks, as for Hitler when his time came, sterilizing the “manifestly unfit” was not cruelty or sadism. It was science. It was humane. Aren’t there unwanted babies who would be better off unborn? And no one wants to be anti-science, right?

Besides which, mentally ill, handicapped and impoverished people are a burden for the healthy worker. As Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood — a woman who, if not quite a Unitarian or a Universalist, definitely ran in those circles — wrote in 1922, charity “encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it . . . a dead weight of human waste.”

That’s not fair, is it? To make healthy people bear this stone?

The National Socialists in Germany — the Nazis — were aggressively progressive. Hitler’s revolution intended to lift that dead weight of caring for the unfit from the German people, even as he brought them single-payer health care, free national education and social security for the aged and promised liberation from bloodsucking capitalists.

Under National Socialism, gentile Germans had many rights…but these were not the rights of individuals. Rather, they were to have the rights of their group, their “master race.” Within that privileged group, moreover, individuals’ interests were subordinate to the collective interest of  the Volksgemeinschaft, the “People’s Community.” 

Hitler described this ambitious program, by the way, as social justice. 

If that phrase makes you wince, join the club: it’s a shock to see those words used in that context.

But there it is: Social injustice exists when rights are given to groups — royal, noble, rich, white, male, capitalist — rather than to persons.

In the USA, social injustice was exemplified by slavery and the Jim Crow laws,

Social justice was what happened when these unjust laws were eventually changed — by the 13th, 14th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution, and by the Civil Rights Act.

The goal of social justice in the U.S. was, however, to ensure that each of us would receive actual justice, individual justice, the justice that comes when every man and woman is understood to be endowed by her creator with certain inalienable rights, and at the same time expected to follow the same rules.

Historically speaking, human beings have seldom understood justice to be anything other than social justice. Only after the Enlightenment — a mere few hundred years out of millennia of human history — was there broad acceptance of the novel idea that the same law should apply to commoner and king: that it was the individual who was free and responsible for his or her own choices, the individual who must bear the weight of her own — not her group’s — failures.

Perhaps the relative novelty of this notion explains why we retain the impulse to condemn, excuse or define individuals on the basis of their membership in a group. Maybe this is more natural to human thinking: Groupishness might be  our default mode, and when we act according to our groupish instincts, the result will be proudly proclaimed as “social justice.”

I don’t know about you, but I am just as glad that I don’t have to bear the burden of the sins of Oliver Wendell Holmes — just because he was a Unitarian, or Margaret Sanger because she was female — let alone Adolf Hitler just because he was white. Every group that I’ve chosen to belong to — Unitarian Universalist, feminist, progressive, American — has a history that includes some terrible ideas and bad behaviors…but I’ve got plenty of sins of my own to atone for.

Just ask Peter.

Not too long ago, I found myself, for reasons I’ve forgotten, staying at the hotel adjacent to the Bangor Airport. Going down to the hotel bar for supper, I found it was was absolutely stuffed with stranded troops. Their  plane to Iraq had developed engine trouble. Squishing my way through the crowd — wall to wall desert camo — I found myself face to face with a very broad slab of chest. The name tape attached to it bore a familiar surname — actually, a family name. It was my grandmother’s name, my daughter’s middle name, one of the names I thought of as “mine!”