In an earlier posting, The Liberal Mind: What is politics?, I addressed the obvious question, “What is Politics?”. I covered a lot of ground to start off a line of reasoning tightly tied to my current goal of enriching our store of words and concepts for discussing our moral and social lives. While it’s true that man hasn’t changed in some basic ways, that’s pretty much irrelevant because man is — within some vaguely defined but strong constraints — a self-shaping creature, that is, he shapes himself by responding to his environments, to the universe or even the world which is the universe seen in light of God’s purposes. Man can even shape himself by responding to the entirety of Creation, including realms of abstract being.
We know more about realms of being beyond the simple concrete realms accessible to our Neolithic ancestors and even more than was accessible to our early modern ancestors with their growing stock of scientific knowledge, of historical knowledge, of technology for exploring and exploiting the realm of concrete reality. We are shaping ourselves, however slowly and reluctantly, to a richer and more complex Creation than our ancestors knew about.
We have raised the level and increased the depth and breadth of our conversation with Creation and its Creator. We have a chance to shape ourselves to be richer and more complex creatures than were our ancestors. To a certain extent, we’ve been forced to take that chance.
So, I’ll continue dancing around the question, “What is Politics?” until I’m ready to provide some sort of a broader understanding of this aspect of human communities. In fact, a complete answer would have to first deal with the question, “What is a human community?” I’ll simply assume a naive understanding of community though I’ll be speaking of communities of the sort which are relatively large and complex, communities which have a need to care and nurture for their members and to protect against dangers within and without, say, from internal criminals and from external enemies. This is to point to talk of communities as entities which have need of something akin to an immune system. That means communities which have some awareness, probably a mix of conscious and unconscious, of themselves as communities. For now, I’ll put that line of thought aside but it should be kept in mind.
Does such a community necessarily have something which could be labeled a ‘common good’? Does it even have a unity of perhaps multiple goods which form a single common good? We can perhaps view this as a basket of individual goods which are compatible at least in the sense that different sorts of independent communities can at least share a public square.
Professor Minogue tells us, in The Liberal Mind:
[A]nything genuinely recognizable as the common good so seldom occurs in political activity that politicians have to be calculators. [page 86]
[I also won’t be speaking of turf battles in the attaining of goods by individuals, families, voluntary organizations, local governments, central governments, or other entities. I’ll not speak of either moral responsibility or moral right or efficiency involved in a particular entity or level of government claiming it can best deal with a particular common good or bundle of common good. I will instead stick to the issue: Is there something that can be considered the common good, or even a common good, for larger-scale communities, those with political structures?]
In a world of evolving and developing entities, we should expect that there will be no such thing as a “common good” speaking in the sense of a basket of common goods which cover a substantial amount of what might be called a rich and worthwhile human life. When a common good can be seen, it will likely be a readily perceivable good, such as the need to defend ourselves against invading enemy forces, or it will have disappeared before we know it exists or it might disappear more slowly but the instruments we had created to nurture the common good will have turned into self-serving institutions which simply won’t go away.
The communities of the human race are evolving. Individual communities develop or fail to develop, perhaps simply fail to survive. As a Christian, I believe this to be all directed to the formation of the Body of Christ, where all who belong to Christ will fully belong to that Body while remaining individuals in a manner similar to the nature of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God while remaining individual Persons. We have a desired state of being ahead of us and, even if all men were Christians, that doesn’t really define for us much in the way of an overarching common good. After all, the point of this paragraph is that we must develop into individual persons and retain that individuality for the Body of Christ to be what it is promised to be. Moreover, I’m struggling to speak rationally about the Body of Christ in terms of our modern knowledge of Creation. How could I possibly speak of a basket of common goods which are good for all those individuals and also good for that Body?
It would be hard to believe that many of the things which seemed to be common goods in Elizabethan England would be common goods in 21st century England unless we speak in terms of meaningless generality. Even those which have remained common goods, mostly having to do with physical security and with justice systems, have changed drastically in many ways.
I’ll repeat the quote from Professor Minogue’s The Liberal Mind:
[A]nything genuinely recognizable as the common good so seldom occurs in political activity that politicians have to be calculators. [page 86]
Politicians, said Minogue in the early 1960s, have to be “calculators” to try to handle issues with any alleged “common good.” He has admitted in a forward to the reprint by Liberty Fund that he would not be so optimistic if he were to write The Liberal Mind in more recent years. He was speaking about his general view of liberalism which is that of a political philosopher and, under this rational way of thought, Ronald Reagan was as much a liberal as Ted Kennedy. I’d think it’d be likely he would now say that politicians nowadays, since at least President Johnson in the United States, imagine common goods into some sort of false existence by taking similar or analogous goods which exist in particular forms for, say, Italian-American small businessmen or Norwegian-American dairy-farmers or Mexican-American ranchers or even Anglo-Saxon lawyers and investment bankers. I doubt that Johnson set out to destroy American social order and the American economy and I also doubt his desire to provide benefits for poor citizens was more than the shallow feel-good sort of sentiment. Mostly, he was out to win a game of politics, to grab more power.
Setting up a common good is good politics, so long as you consider politics to be a game of power rather than a means of serving the community. Defining a common good for any rapidly developing human community isn’t easy, if it be possible at all. Certainly, it doesn’t seem doable for a community complex enough to have political systems which wield any true power, even so much as controlling the finances for a small police force and the contributions into a regional school system.
Let me take the example of education, including vocational training. Certainly, this is something of a common good, even a necessity in a complex human community. There is no one educational system, no path of intellectual or vocational development, which is appropriate for all children in all ages of man. Some need to acquire some basic skills and knowledge in various topics, including mathematics, and also some basic skills in self-learning so they can become scientists or engineers capable of dealing with change rather than just having a fixed store of knowledge and skills from their college years. Some students need to learn how to read business contracts and how to write a clear, straightforward business letter. Some need to learn some basic mathematics well enough to read blueprints and specs for a custom designed mold or machine part. And so forth. But I’ve spoken of the diverse needs of some children, and some adults, in the 21st century.
We’re looking at a rather diverse system of needs which imply a great variety of educational goods. The situation gets worse when we admit, as educational bureaucrats refuse to, that some children need to be released from school for a year or more just to let them get the physical movement their bodies crave.
There is no common good beyond the raw need for some sort of a basic education for life in a complex society. That implies governments, as local as possible, might have a role in providing infrastructure which can then be used by, say, parents contracting with individual teachers or groups of teachers which are not public employees. The parents would be providing for the educational needs of their diverse children with diverse environments and diverse opportunities and diverse desires.
There is so much diversity so long as human beings remain true individuals that I’m not even sure if the Body of Christ will have any well-defined basket of common goods. Or perhaps I should say it will be a pretty large and diverse basket of goods.