The path to equality: charity or justice?

It’s a strange thing about justice, the way it never fails to divide people.

If you haven’t noticed this yet, try introducing social justice as a topic of conversation at a dinner party. All that quietly spoken ‘good’ conversation, so dear to gentlefolk at table, suddenly disappears from sight, taking humour with it as a hostage. Blood pressures mount, voices are raised. Only the most experienced hostess can save a dinner party after that.

Strangely enough, it’s never like this with charity. Whole dinner parties can safely engage on the subject of charity – blood pressure normal, voices low, humour intact.

Yet justice and charity have a lot in common. They both focus on the poor and oppressed. They both provide an outlet for liberal endeavours, and they are both endorsed by the Christian gospel.

Mind you, when you read those same Christian gospels, you are left with a distinct impression that if Jesus had only been satisfied to stick with charity – if he had stayed with healing the sick, for instance, and not got himself entangled with the authorities over their oppression of the poor – it seems highly likely that he would have avoided being crucified.

One reason for all this has to be that charity does not feel the need to ask unsettling questions.

We can practise charity without ever disturbing our own comfort zone, or threatening those of others. Charity can even permit us to feel superior to those who benefit from our largesse. It can allow for a kindly rationale to explain their unhappy lot; they are not good managers, they have no sense of consequence, and (in less benign moments) they are simply lazy.

The beauty of charity is that it does not talk equality. It is not committed to change. It does not ask, why?

That’s the heart of the matter. Justice, faced with poverty and oppression in the world at large, and with the ever-widening gulf between rich and poor at home, feels impelled to ask the question, why?

Justice talks equality. It is committed to change, therefore it is dangerous. Archbishop Helder Camara, speaking from experience in his diocese in Brazil, put it this way: ‘When I give food to the poor, they say I’m a Christian. When I ask why the poor have no food, they say I’m a Communist.’

I am committed to justice. Over the last 30 years I could almost be described as a perennial protester, one of that proverbial mob whom manipulative provocateurs are always looking to rent.

Perhaps this has its roots in my Irish ancestry. Much more open to examination at the conscious level is the desire to counter an overwhelming sense of powerlessness in the face of hunger and oppression in the world.

And, getting back to the Christian gospel again, I believe it is impossible to be a follower of Jesus Christ and not get entangled with the authorities at some time or other on behalf of a sister or brother.

In the past, we were a lot more certain of where justice lay; the fact that virtually everyone now thinks Vietnam was a mistake, and we have all seen former supporters of the tour scrambling to shake hands with Nelson Mandela, can be something of a trap.

I will always be grateful to an unknown woman. In 1981 I was part of a march of several thousand, walking through Christchurch from Cathedral Square into Worcester Street, chanting an anti-racial jingle, buoyed up by solidarity with others and my own sense of virtue, when I looked up at a line of buses held up by the march. For a split second I made eye contact with a woman of my own age on a waiting bus. That woman seized the moment. If we were 40 years younger, she might well have employed a less delicate method, but in a flash, she instinctively reverted to the past. As our eyes met, she poked her tongue out at me.

All of which now belongs to another world. The year 2000 could be a hundred years removed from 1981. The events that took place in Seattle a few months ago put paid to all that. They raised the curtain on the future.

Thousands upon thousands of people converged on Seattle to challenge the representatives gathered there for the World Trade Organisation. Organised and purposeful, they came by plane and bus, they hitched across America, they drove in their cars from east to west and from south to north, not all with the same agenda, but all with the same intent. They wanted to be heard.

And they surely were. The amazing thing is that the only people who seem ot have been surprised by the sheer number and determination of the protesters were the WTO delegates themselves.

You have to ask, where had they been? Had they never heard of the internet?

Were they so removed from what was happening all around them, so complacently arrogant about the new economic order they were setting up, so locked into their own secret negotiations, so unconsciously contemptuous of the opinions and misgivings of ordinary people, that neither they, nor their extravagantly paid advisers, had ever surfed the net?

Because, by and large, it was this new medium that made the difference. Not even the Mayor of Seattle was aware that, through the internet, some 1200 householders in his city had thrown their homes open to the invaders.

Here in Aotearoa we might have no expectations of the Mayor of Seattle, but we do have expectations of Mike Moore, after all, he still has the mud of the Waimakariri on his boots. But no, not even Mike. If ever a group of technocrats needed to be taught a timely lesson, it was the members of the World Trade Organisation.

After that experience, any similar body in the future, national or international, will ignore public opinion at its peril. Faced with events such as these, Shakespeare would surely describe the coming century with Miranda’s exultant cry from The Tempest: ‘O brave new world!’

Pauline O’Regan is a Sister of Mercy and a vocal advocate for justice and the rights of the poor.