The Blessed Augustine once wrote: "What is the state without justice? A band of robbers." Even now, fifteen centuries later, many people will, I think, readily recognize the force and accuracy of this judgment. But let us note what he is about: An ethical judgment about a small group of people is applied by extension to the state.
It is in our human nature to make such judgments: to apply ordinary, individual, human values and standards to larger social phenomena and associations of people, up to and including the nation and the state as a whole. And many instances of this transference can be found in writers through the ages.
The social sciences however, and particularly the more modern of them, strictly forbid such extensions of meaning. Only economic, statistical, demographic, ideological, to a lesser extent geographical, and - very dubiously - psychological procedures are held to guarantee the serious scientific character of research into society and state, while the evaluation of political life by ethical yardsticks is considered totally provincial.
...It is hard to understand the arrogant insensitivity of the modern trend in the social sciences: Why are the standards and demands so necessarily and readily applied to individuals, families, small groups, and personal relations, rejected out of hand and utterly prohibited when we go on to deal with thousands and millions of people in association?
...It is very human to apply even to the biggest social events or human organizations, including whole states and the United Nations, our spiritual values: noble, base, courageous, cowardly, hypocritical, false, cruel, magnanimous, just, unjust and so on...And clearly, whatever feelings predominate in the members of a given society at a given moment in time, they will serve to color the whole of that society and determine its moral character. And if there is nothing good there to pervade that society, it will destroy itself or be brutalized by the triumph of evil instincts, no matter where the pointer of the great economic laws may turn...
