Excellent Blog Post from Edward Feser on Catholic Social Policy

Read it here.

I'm fairly confident there's nothing I've ever written on this blog which isn't in keeping with the philosophy outlined here.

I like this passage: Just as one can be excessively attached to one’s own family or nation, so too can one be insufficiently attached to them. This vice is exhibited by those who think it best to regard oneself as a “citizen of the world” or member of the “global community” rather than having any special allegiance to one’s own country. It is the idea of a “world without borders” and a “brotherhood of man” – hence fraternity construed as an ideal of universal brotherhood to replace family loyalty, patriotism, and other local allegiances.

This is what Feser has to say about social justice, the deity of so many Catholic today:

The currency of the term “social justice” originated in Thomistic natural law social theory. It is often attributed to the great Jesuit natural law theorist Luigi Taparelli. It has to do with the just or right ordering of society as defined by strong families and cooperation between husband and wife in carrying out their respective roles for the sake of children and elders, solidarity and cooperation between economic classes and other social groups, and scrupulous attention to subsidiarity in the state’s relationship to the “little platoons” of society.

What today goes under the label of social justice – what self-described “social justice warriors” agitate for – is precisely the opposite of all of this. It entails sexual libertinism and abortion on demand, the feminist demonization of “patriarchy” and of traditional family roles, the incessant stirring up of tensions between economic classes and racial groups (e.g. the daily Two Minutes Hate directed at “one percenters,” “white privilege,” etc.), the relentless smearing of one’s country and its history, socialized medicine and socialized education, and so on. This might be liberty, equality, and fraternity after a fashion, but it is the destruction of subsidiarity, solidarity, and family and country.

When will true social justice be achieved? Only when this evil doppelgänger is defeated. Indeed, one is tempted to parody the line famously attributed to Diderot, and reply: only when the last socialist is strangled with the entrails of the last sexual revolutionary. That’s meant as a joke, of course. Revolutionary bloodlust is itself yet another malign legacy of the French Revolution, which every conservative and natural law theorist ought to condemn. But all the same: Écrasez l'infâme.