In my early days as an aspiring theologian, fresh out of undergraduate studies, I was keenly interested in the idea of social justice. It is hard to deny that we are by nature designed for community, and thus inextricably interconnected. In the light of this reality, the biblical call to do justly cannot be observed passively, i.e. not harming others, but must be seen as an active call. Each act we make (or moment of inaction) and each decision we make has consequences for others and we bear some measure of responsibility for these consequences, even if they are unintended or undesired. I don’t mean to commend a lifestyle of constant hand-wringing or agonising over each act we undertake, as this can lead to a sort of paralysis or worse still apathy. Rather, I believe we are called to pursue a life of communally guided formation and submission which can lead us into increasingly positive choices. Along these lines, the key concern is not: how can I avoid oppressing a textile worker on a distant continent by shopping at the GAP; but rather how can I further the thriving of my neighbour by supporting their work. This sort of thinking does lend itself to localism, as the consequences of our actions are far more transparently evident when dealing more directly with out neighbours, but this is not exclusively the case.
Lately though, under the influence of the “Edinburgh-school” Christian ethicists, Michael Northcott and Oliver O’Donovan I’ve been drawn to a model of justice which is not only practice-oriented, but also one which is sensitive to the span of generations. You can read previous posts I’ve offered along these lines, when I suggested that political conservatives would do well to be attentive to the act of actually conserving something; in a series I did summarising and interacting with Oliver O’Donovan’s common objects of love; and in my reflections on Edmund Burke’s political philosophy. After several years of reflection on ecological ethics from the perspective of Christian theology, I’m convinced that any model for justice that is focused purely on one moment, or even one generation, is fatally flawed. Now that biblical scholars have laid to rest some of the more unhelpful eschatologies of the 20th century, it is time to turn our moral reflection to the future generations that God’s will continue to sustain on this earth either with our help or–with what seems to be our present preoccupation–our hindrance.
It is certainly the case that preparing for the future requires a different sort of moral reflection than our acting in the present moment, but there are plenty of resources there to aid us. This generation’s obsession with engineering-oriented science makes concepts such as the precautionary principle seem inaccessible. In spite of this though, we must begin to open our minds to the possibility that the slowing of technological achievement and economic growth in the present may be what is morally necessary to promote the flourishing of future generations.
This is, as Oliver O’Donovan observes in Common Objects of Love, the meaning of the fifth commandment:
The paradigm command of tradition is, ‘Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which hte Lord your God gives you.’ It appears to our eyes to be concerned with the duties of children, but this is a mistake. The duties of children are purely responsive to the duty of parents to be to their children what their parents were to them. This is a command addressed to adults, whose existence in the world is not self-posited but the fruit of an act of cultural transmission, which they have a duty to sustain. The act of transmission puts us all in the place of receiver and communicator at once. The household is envisaged as the primary unit of cultural transmission, the ‘father and the mother’ as representing every existing social practice which it is important to carry on. Only so can community sustain itself within its environment, ‘the land which the Lord your God gives you.’ No social survival in any land can be imagined without a stable cultural environment across generations. By tradition society identifies itself from one historical moment to the next, and so continues to act as itself.
H/t: Brad Littlejohn for typing the quote out.