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8. Social life

Man is not fulfilled on his own; he is a social being. His development as a person has an essentially interpersonal aspect. By nature, he is not isolationist, being neither materially nor psychologically self-sufficient. He satisfies his material needs more easily in collaboration with others, in a situation which ideally allows each one to contribute his or her particular talents to a cohesive social life, and to benefit from the contributions of others.

Man's spiritual needs are also more easily satisfied in association with others. Our human capacity to discover and even to "create" values leads naturally to the desire to communicate them, in a relationship of dialogue. Adequate enrichment of the mind can scarcely ever be achieved without contact and contrast with other minds; the same holds for the experience of goodness. The life of almost everyone is marked - usually in a very positive way - by the interpersonal experiences of family, friendship and marriage.

Friendship is a special interpersonal relationship which links two or more people in a particular awareness of shared values. Communion between friends, usually supported by a strong factor of liking, can flow and grow even without vocal dialogue. The urge to share, to accept and be accepted, the need to come out of ourselves so as to be happy, the sadness at a friend's absence, the joy at his or her presence, the impact of the personal uniqueness of our friend (considered to be as valuable as, or even more valuable than, our own uniqueness), the sense of personal incompleteness without our friend, the readiness to receive him into one's innermost life in such a way that he now seems an integral part of ourselves ... Any philosophy of self-sufficiency must face these and other challenges posed by the human phenomenon of friendship.

On a broader interpersonal level, the stronger the sense of shared values among people in general or among those who make up a particular group, the deeper the dialogue and the better the basis for social cohesion. A relationship of trust in social life becomes practically impossible without an awareness of values held in common.

When the overriding concern in a society is the economic sharing of material goods, it is hard to avoid seeing others as rivals. A more truly human society can emerge when others are seen as a source of values - to be discovered, admired, protected; and as collaborators in a team venture.

Without this challenge of social life - in communion, collaboration and appreciation towards others - , people do not achieve fulfillment. Society finds its justification not only in a logical distribution of work and roles, or in the need for a minimum of civic order. It must also be directed to the personal fulfillment of each citizen.

The structure of the human community

Any truly human society must be made up of free and responsible people, who work and live together, collaborating in justice under a legitimate authority, and inspired by love or at least by respect and mutual appreciation.

Freedom and Responsibility. Freedom is understood in its true nature as a value, and can be adequately exercised in a way worthy of man, only when it is accompanied by responsibility. A sense of responsibility should guide every free action, being a proof of respect toward the same value of freedom present in the life of others. In fact, freedom without the corresponding responsibility is always a pathological freedom. Whoever claims a freedom free from responsibility shows that he neither understands nor really loves freedom.

It is interesting to recall the title of one of the best known works of Karol Wojytla: Love and Responsibility. "Freedom" and "responsibility" are necessarily connected. The title of Wojtyla's book suggests that responsibility is not to be measured in terms of freedom only, but that in interpersonal relations - relationships which are authentically human - it must equally and perhaps preferentially be measured according to love.

Education. Individualism can only find an artificial and external harmony between personal and social education. Social education for the individualist means learning how to advance oneself in life, as cleverly and effectively as possible, weaving one's intricate way among rivals.

A properly assimilated personalist philosophy [1] finds natural and internal harmony between the development and fulfillment of the individual, and his role and responsibilities in society. Growing appreciation of others and concern for them is a standard of personal development. Work is a means not only of personal advancement but also a contribution to the common good. Social duties are not just obligations, but also values (truthfulness, honesty, justice, service ...) to be responded to.

"If there is an essential equality between men that challenges all empiric inequalities, it is equality of vocation, not of leveling; it must open the possibility to everyone of an equivalent destiny, on the condition of a similar effort by all" [2]. This is a fundamental principle that should underlie all education.

It is logical that education for social life be aimed at preparing each individual to be able to perform work that is useful for the overall whole. This aim, however, does not reach far enough. From the anthropological-personalist perspective we have adopted, readying people for service is an important function of education, but it does not suffice. It would not even be enough to provide young people with cultural formation apt to broaden each one's personal horizons, offering a certain knowledge of the values of literature, art, etc. The fundamental capacity that human education must communicate is that of appreciating values in others. Without this capacity it is not possible to develop the basic virtues that turn life together into communion and make a society truly human and humanizing [3]: respect, understanding, admiration (without either envy or jealousy), emulation, gratitude, generosity, friendship, team-spirit, collaboration, sense of complementary roles ...

From a personalist point of view, life and commitment in society must indeed be marked by service, which could well be taken as a personalist "motto". However, service itself will not be really personalist if it is not accompanied by appreciation of others.

When education in the awareness of just responsibility has a personalist base, it fosters a desire to give to others what properly belongs to each one, also because it would be contrary to our own growth to keep it. True civic education should help people understand and assimilate a sense of interdependence: their shared duty towards the common good.

Work. Ecologists rightly criticize the destructive effect that men's work has so often had on the environment; and they lobby for working conditions that will protect our surrounding heritage. Their criticism does not go far enough. What needs to be remedied is the destructive effect of many forms of work not just on the environment, but on people themselves. To say that our work should tend to "humanize" our environment is a mode of speaking. The positive aim it expresses will only be achieved if work tends to humanize us; which means to fulfill us as people, along the lines of fulfillment we have been delineating.

What is the intrinsic justification or aim of work? To earn our living? Fair enough. To make a lot of money? If that becomes the goal, a person may turn from a type of work he enjoys to one he doesn't but which pays more; then it is not clear that his choice is really fulfilling [4]. As a means to prestige? If all a man looks for in his work is prestige (or, in less elegant terms, vanity and self-importance), then his work has no real value in itself; and so, if there was no one around whose admiration seemed worth working for, then his work would be valueless and inherently boring.

In Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons", there is an episode where Thomas More is trying to convince the ambitious young Richard Rich to keep out of politics: "A man should go where he won't be tempted" ... He suggests that Rich become a teacher instead. More insists: "Why not be a teacher? You'd be a fine teacher. Perhaps a great one". - RICH: "And if I was, who would know it?" - MORE: "You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public, that ..." Rich was not convinced [5].

In fact some people might be prepared to reduce their public still further, being content to play for their own applause, with themselves as the audience to please. If a person in such a case is hard to please, he will probably be a perfectionist [6]. If he is easy to please, he is likely to be lazy as well as conceited. In any case, there will be no enrichment from outside. Interiorly he may feel his Ego grow, without ever asking himself is he is growing.

"The artist works to express himself, the worker works to maintain himself", can be an irritating statement to all who are not artists. It offers a clue, however. Every job is potentially a work of art, a means by which a person can express himself. We are all artists. Every worker can be an artist, once he becomes aware of a value potentially present in his work - which can be extracted from it by his own intention and effort.

To be of real worth, work - whatever its human standing - must have some value and purpose, proper and intrinsic to itself [7]. Thoroughness, order, method, attention to details, "doing a good day's job", are all qualities that a person can put into his work (he must put them; otherwise he won't find them there). Earning his living, developing his character, maintaining his family, are also values that should be present and that a person needs to keep before him; otherwise he may be overcome by the monotony of repetition. Repetition of values does not decrease the values (rather the opposite); but it can blunt the sense of value possessed by a superficial person.

It is hard to discover the full value of your work, if you lack a sense of community or solidarity with others. The intrinsic value of work after all does not stop with enrichment just to the worker, but extends also to the building of the community. Work too needs broader horizons. True self-realization through work can only come if the personalist spirit that motivates it manages to overcome the confining limits of self-concern and self-satisfaction, substituting the nobler satisfaction of contributing to the social whole, to others.

In other words, a fuller sense of value in work calls for "a reappropriation of the idea of work as a contribution to the good of all and not merely as a means to one's own advancement. If the extrinsic rewards and punishments associated with work were reduced, it would be possible to make vocational choices more in terms of intrinsic satisfactions. Work that is intrinsically interesting and valuable is one of the central requirements for a revitalized social ecology. For professionals, this would mean a clearer sense that the large institutions most of them work for really contribute to the public good. A bright young lawyer (or a bright old lawyer, for that matter) whose work consists in helping one corporation outwit another is intelligent enough to doubt the social utility of what he or she is doing. The work may be interesting - even challenging and exciting - yet its intrinsic meaninglessness in any larger moral or social context necessarily produces an alienation that is only partly assuaged by the relatively large income of corporate lawyers. Those whose work is not only poorly rewarded but boring, repetitive, and unchallenging are in an even worse situation. Automation that turns millions of our citizens into mere servants or robots is already a form of despotism, for which the pleasures of private life - modest enough for those of minimum skill and minimum wage - cannot compensate" [8].

It is not a question of fostering an exaggerated altruism; and less still of trying to impose an adequate distribution of roles, assigning to each person the work for which he is considered to be best fitted. Professional work of whatever type is a means of self-fulfillment and, as such, must be the object of a free personal choice. Ideally each person should have the freedom to choose the type of work to which he will devote himself. But it is important that in the initial formation received - at school, in university, etc. - he is helped to consider his future work not only as a legitimate means of self-fulfillment, but at the same time as a way of promoting the fulfillment of others.

Work conceived and lived this way certainly implies reaching beyond ourselves and so achieving truer personal growth. Can we reach farther still in our work? Can we broaden out our working horizons to discover even greater values? Thomas More spoke of having God as an appreciative "audience" to one's work. If what he said can be taken seriously, then any work could be imbued with an unlimited sense of meaning and value. Most of us would like to find some real "greatness" in our life and work. Modern psychologism tries to convince us we are wrong, offering us contentedness but not greatness. "To try to relate 'ultimate concern' to everyday behavior would be exhausting and nerve-shattering work: indeed, it could effectively inhibit less grandiose kinds of work ... In the workaday world, there are no ultimate concerns, only present ones" [9]. But surely it is the absence of greatness which drains everyday behavior of real vitality and leaves us exhausted? And how can present concerns appear as "great" unless they can be related to an even greater ultimate concern? Indeed, can any thinking person be really content without possessing some sense of ultimate concern or greatness? Yes, ultimate concerns, ultimate values, do keep floating somewhere on our horizons or in the back of our mind. However it is not yet time to consider them in our study, or to broach the question whether anthropology can legitimately consider the possibility of a transcendent dimension to life.

Politics. Politics in the true sense of "the art of government" is already debased in meaning if it is understood just as a power-struggle; or, more abstractly, as a system of procedural rules which allows individuals to enter into fair competition for posts of power, at the same time as it enables the electorate in a democracy to have a say in who will hold these posts.

Politics, as a career, is in the line of medicine or teaching. It is - it should be - a service profession. The politician's calling is one of special public trust. He is chosen or appointed to direct government to the service of the good of the people, the "common good". If his dominant aim in entering politics is to enhance his ego with a sense of power, he may or may not come to be considered by others a successful politician, but he will remain a reduced man.

This does not have to happen. The person who follows a political career is certainly seeking to exercise part of that authority with which government must be endowed. But authority can be understood and sought not principally as an embodiment of power, but as a means to advance the rightful good of one's country and its people. A person who understands this as the true nature of authority can approach politics in an authentically vocational sense.

Dedication to politics offers a pitfall not unlike that which can accompany the pursuit of material wealth. Power can no doubt be regarded as a "value". Yet, unless accompanied by those interior qualities which by themselves confer moral authority, it has no place among values of the spirit. Power is real enough; but, like material values and perhaps more than any of them, it tends to foster illusions. To have power and be able to make it felt can create a sensation of being superior to others, more "fulfilled" than they are. It remains an illusion, however, just as much as the illusion that being richer makes one better as a person.

Only whoever accepts the responsibility - towards others - of authority, can see its possession and exercise as a service of something higher than self. This makes it possible to follow an outward and upward path, no longer simply of self-assertion but of true self-realization, a large part of which is effected by the desire to contribute to the good of others.

There will never be an end to the debate about modes of government or about the political or economic system that works best. Men find it hard to shake off the utopian dream of "systems so perfect that no one will need to be good" [10]; yet no system is likely to work justly and well unless it is managed by people who are not only competent but also honest. The founding fathers of the American republic commonly held, in the expression of James Madison, that "to suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea" [11]. Many centuries earlier Thomas Aquinas pinpointed the issue more precisely, making the good order of society depend indeed on the people at large, but above all on those governing: "the common good of the state cannot flourish unless the citizens be virtuous, at least those whose business it is to govern" [12].

Honesty - in politics, business, professional activity, and indeed in all human dealings - understood as an aspiration toward fulfillment, badly needs to be fostered in our contemporary world. Honesty may not be the best policy if one's overriding value is material advantage, but dishonesty is the surest way to lose self-esteem. Whatever its value for external success, honesty remains an absolute requirement of personal worth.

The dishonest man knows in his heart, if he can still reach and read it, that he is not worthy of real esteem. He should realize that those closest to him (spouse, children, real friends) also know this, and that if he is envied (for he will not be admired) by some around him, such envy comes from people whose esteem is not worth having.

Some people are too proud to be cheats, simply because it would wreck their self-esteem. There may be a certain pharisaical ego-centrism in this motive, but it at least keeps a person open towards a value which is fundamental for both personal and social life. Hence it is no exaggeration to say that all openness toward real values has collapsed in the dishonest man who prides himself on his dishonesty.

Justice and law. "If there is justice, and if law is based on a discernment of what is just, dialogue can begin and benevolence can appear; so we come to what is ours in common. The first form of culture is law. Its effectiveness means that barbarism has been overcome: men have always been civilized this way" [13].

No society can be healthy unless it is inspired by a sound concept of justice embodied in an adequate political and legal system which can effectively protect rights and equitably resolve conflicting claims. The more the mass of citizens esteem and love the values of justice (without remaining at a level of simple acceptance and obedience to its demands), the healthier the society. A sense of the dignity and the rights of others engenders a basic love for justice. At one extreme this can favor a readiness to acknowledge when you are wrong, to apologize, to make up and give back. At the other extreme, when, despite everything, claims have been taken to a court of law, this sense can facilitate the acceptance of hard but just judicial decisions.

If the efficacy of the law depends totally on law-enforcement agents, then something is wrong either with the law or with those who are obliged to accept or fulfill it.

The norm of justice is "to each his due". This is a principle very different from that of egalitarianism: "to each the same" [14]. Egalitarianism would appear to have gone from a period of considerable strength as a political-economic program into sudden decline. Yet it still dominates much of modern education. Practical reasons (the need for trained teachers, equipment, examinations) will certainly oblige many educational systems to offer the same basic curriculum. From the personalist point of view, however, education must aim at eliciting or bringing out the distinctive personal qualities of each student, at the same time as it teaches each to appreciate the different qualities of others. Education is not defective if it promotes differences - which it must inevitably do. It is defective if it does not seek to foster a positive appreciation of these differences on the part of those being educated.

The common good. A society cannot survive without some sense of common values. But values can no longer be common when each individual claims the right to define them as he wishes [15] or when they are simply understood by each as "whatever makes me feel good". Then they cease to constitute a common language of communication, or to form reference points and sources of unity. The individualist, whose ideal society is totally at the service of his own advancement, has little notion of a "common good" and little interest in it. With the personalist it is different. The sense of values, the concern to respond to them and see them grow, the awareness of how they can be incarnated in others - all of these are factors which help him understand that social life itself can evolve in a way that facilitates (or hinders) the presence, discovery, and communication of values; and therefore the enrichment (or frustration) of each and every one, including himself.

To the personalist who possesses this awareness, the "common good" appears as an exceptional value in itself. It represents the order within which the rights, interests, and development of each one are best harmonized and favored. When this order can only be achieved (as at times is inevitably the case) through individual interest yielding to the higher common good, then this yielding not only seems reasonable in terms of the common interest, but takes on the character of a personalist value in itself, through response to which the individual's good is even more powerfully realized. Besides, there is no possibility of any deep or enduring self-respect without a sense that one's own life is beneficial also to others.

Human rights. Human rights is one of the anthropological issues most frequently invoked and debated today. A person deprived of his human rights is a slave. A person who is unaware of his human rights is easily exploited. A person who invokes human "rights" which are really human wrongs may harm himself (the "right" to take heroin, for instance), or harm others (the "right" to corrupt minors).

To have the power to do something is not the same as to be entitled to do it. More than two thousand years ago, Socrates already combatted the Sophists who held that "Might makes right". The human quality of society ever since has grown - or been undermined - according to the respect, or to the practical contempt, shown for the principle that right cannot be equated with power, or power with right.

Two major questions arise in the matter of human rights: their definition or specification, and their justification or basis. The issue of their definition concerns both what they are and who can define or detail them. As regards what or which are the basic human rights, one can quickly list a number about which there is no great likelihood of disagreement: the rights to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness; the rights to free choice (of state of life or religious faith), to free expression of political or other opinion, to due process before the law ...

As an initial list, it appears fairly simple. Yet we can already discern the underlying complexity. For instance, while we all have equal claim to these rights - precisely because they are human rights - , we cannot claim to exercise all of them in an absolute or unlimited way. My freedom of action, after all, can very quickly cut across the freedom of action of others. Then either I voluntarily curtail my own freedom, or reach an agreement with others for an acceptable mutual curtailment, or else the law steps in and imposes some sort of workable arrangement on all of us. Otherwise social life is not possible, and freedom can defeat freedom. I am free to drive on either side of the road, or never to stop at an intersection; but if I claim a "right" to that freedom and begin to exercise it ...!

Who is going to define and specify human rights? Does anybody have the right to do so? Yet a free and democratic society can scarcely be maintained unless young people growing up are informed about the nature and extent of their basic human rights. For this reason at least, some definition must be offered. Is everyone to define his own personal rights - as would be the logical opinion of those who hold that each person is a self-defining subject (with the basic right of self-definition) regarding the whole of his life? Whatever about the survival of human society on such a basis [16], it is surely evident that with such an approach one is no longer talking about human rights, in any real sense, but simply about my rights? This is the temptation of the individualist, who finds it hard to be in favor of human rights at all.

We leave the reader to supply his answers to the many important questions that can arise here, and turn to the other major issue concerning human rights, that of their justification or basis. There is little to say. What can warrant the attribution of the term "human" to a particular right? After all, human rights are not the same as legal rights or moral rights or acquired rights ... A person's entitlement to a human right does not derive from some positive legal instrument, such as a will or a contract, nor does it depend on other formal proof. His claim to the right rests on a very simple fact - that he is, and that he is human [17]. This establishes his right and makes it inviolate. Human rights are not conferred (although their exercise may be protected or restored) by civil law, or act of Congress, or declaration of the United Nations. Legislative bodies or parliamentary majorities can recognize or deny the existence of human rights, but they do not and cannot create them. They can refuse to acknowledge them, prohibit their exercise, expunge them from constitutions. They cannot really abolish them, for they exist prior to all legislatures and constitutions.

Democracy implies the free interplay of individuals, groups and parties, seeking a public mandate from the electorate to pursue specific policies in governing a country within the established constitution or order. A new group or party can obtain a majority, and with it the mandate to govern. But nothing in their mandate authorizes them to deprive any minority of their human rights, or indeed to change the definition or nature of human rights. Human rights are not a product of democracy. They antecede it, and are in fact its only lasting guarantee. To accept the principle that human rights are to be subordinated to democratic processes, which could therefore change or abolish them, is to negate the very idea of human rights which by definition are prior to and independent of any positive law; it is to dehumanize and decivilize both democracy and society, and to leave the individual citizen without any inherent protection against eventual abuses of the law.

It is not in the personality but in the humanity of each individual that human rights are grounded. Each human being, independently of age, health, mental condition, etc., is an inviolate subject of human rights. To exclude any human being from the attribution of human rights is not only to "dehumanize" him, but is a step toward the dehumanizing of the very world we live in.

Notes
[1] For the difference between individualism and personalism, see Appendix II.
[2] Emmanuel Mounier: Oeuvres, II, p. 509.
[3] We could draw a distinction between society, when people simply coexist in a state perhaps of mere mutual tolerance; and "community", when they really live together, where each one, a defective person, grows by learning to appreciate others, who are also defective people. Community involves giving and accepting; it calls therefore for mutual openness, and a readiness to combat the human tendency to envy which we have already noticed and to seek mutual and full enrichment and development.
[4] From the subjective viewpoint, "job satisfaction" is certainly a major measure for gauging the intrinsic value of work. Money, for instance, is a value extrinsic to work itself. No matter how much money a person makes, if his work does not possess any intrinsic value to his eyes, he may esteem the salary it brings him - but will be bored and perhaps disgusted at the work itself. He may have "salary satisfaction", but not job satisfaction. Nevertheless it remains difficult to convince people today that salary or "power" are not the decisive measures in evaluating a job. And yet a bartender or barber who is interested in people and enjoys talking with them, in all probability gets much more satisfaction out of his job in its everyday details than a business executive who only enjoys himself and perhaps his power to command people and situations.
[5] Among other defects, Rich was vain. Vanity tends to make a person measure his worth by the esteem other people have for him. The proud man is content to admire himself, with or without good reason. The vain man is content only if he enjoys (so at least he thinks) the admiration of others.
[6] having fallen victim to that perfectionism which sees duty more as a challenge to one's own capacity (and its fulfillment as a condition for increasing self-esteem) than as a truly human response to values.
[7] "Perhaps work that is intrinsically rewarding is better for human beings than work that is only extrinsically rewarded": Robert N. Bellah et al.: Habits of the Heart, p. 295.
[8] Habits ... op. cit, pp. 287-288.
[9] Philip Rieff: The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 54.
[10] T. S. Eliot: Choruses from the Rock.
[11] quoted in Habits ... op. cit., p. 254.
[12] Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 92.
[13] R. Yepes: Fundamentos de Antropología, p. 312; cf. ibid. 297ss.
[14] Or in its communist expression: "from each according to his capacity; to each according to his need".
[15] something characteristic of modern "liberation" movements. "The meaning of liberation is that the individual is free to build his own philosophy and values, his own life-style, and his own culture from a new beginning": The Greening ... p. 241.
[16] John Paul II wrote: "When freedom is detached from objective truth it becomes impossible to establish personal rights on a firm rational basis, and the ground is laid for society to be at the mercy of the unrestrained will of individuals or the oppressive totalitarianism of public authority" (Evangelium Vitae, no. 96). "If there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism" (Centesimus Annus, no. 46).
[17] a human right "is quintessentially general or universal in character, in some sense equally possessed by all human beings everywhere, including in certain instances even the unborn": Encyclopaedia Britannica.