Revisiting the Common Good

In this article, kindly reproduced from a recent Theos seminar, Anna Rowlands explores the renewed interest in the common good, and why it is both a very (frustratingly?) elastic idea and one that refuses to go away. She looks at its Christian lineage and suggests that it is an essential idea to help us address the most challenging issues we face today.

In his 2009 Reith lectures, the public philosopher Michael Sandel offered a compelling defence of the idea of the common good. Sandel is one of a number of thinkers and political actors who have appealed for the return of the common good. From European left-wing populism, to the UK Green party, to Conservative populism in Hungary and Poland, a putatively buried idea has risen, but without much agreement on what it might mean – in fact often with quite opposing meanings attached.

In his final Reith lecture Sandel painted a vivid picture. Over the past half a century we have drifted in our public life from civic virtue and solidarity traditions of citizenship, toward the idea that we are basically consumer-citizens. Sandel thinks we’ve refashioned education, health, governance and indeed democracy itself in this way. We haven’t done this just because the market came to dominate everything and we had no choice. It’s just as much about the fact that we lost confidence in how to handle ideas of moral value in public life. It was a relief to think that non-judgemental processes of individual choice, technocratic process and gentle ‘nudging’ behaviouralism could steer us a course.

Sandel applies this critique equally to both mainstream Left and Right. In 2009 Sandel’s view was that the consumer-citizen could not be the basis of civic virtue or a rich political common good. And our attempt to suppress questions of moral value in our public lives wasn’t working: moral disagreements were springing back at us from the shallow grave we tried to bury them in.

Sandel’s reply was this: we need to return to and pay proper attention to the idea of the common good, as a language of moral value, moral dispute and common striving. We must resurrect ourselves as citizens and once again recognise that questions of ecology, of inequality are moral and spiritual questions, that in turn inequality makes harder the existence of credible intermediate spaces of social encounter (as my former PhD student Andrew Grinnell says, ‘places we can show up’, or as Hannah Arendt would say, places we can appear to each other – where I hear what you hear, see what you see and vice versa). Without these spaces of face-to-face encounter, embodied listening and response, we cannot build the basic things that nurture public life: trust, altruism, solidarity. The absence of these things – trust, altruism and solidarity – isolates us and destroys a sense of common life.

In the next few minutes, I want to agree with everything Sandel says, apart from the fact that Christians do not begin their thinking about the common good from an identity as state-citizens alone but from a dual citizenship – an account which stretches the meaning of the common good in helpful and fairly demanding ways.

Christians have common cause with Sandel, but a different story to tell and a wider and more demanding conception of where that might lead. Christians cannot simply swap faith in the market for faith in state citizenship, period. It’s more complicated – and hopeful - than that.

I’ll make that case briefly by suggesting what’s distinctive about a Christian common good approach:

1. The first distinctive hallmark of a Christian conception of the common good is that it is a ‘realist’ one. What I mean by ‘realist’ is that the common good for a Christian is quite simply, first and foremost, God. God is our first and ultimate common good, and the goodness of God is a present reality sustaining every moment of our lives. The good is therefore a historical force, the very possibility of history itself, it’s not just a concept. It is a life we are created to be drawn into – an existing good, common to us all, and we have a shared responsibility to struggle in history against all that frustrates that good being a felt reality for all.

This has the advantage of meaning that the common good isn’t grounded in our actions alone, or lost entirely when we fail, even if we fail for a whole generation. This realist foundation is what holds open the future in the grimness of the present and means we can face it with some real hope.

So, in the first instance it means we are called to recognise ourselves already placed and graced within a dynamic reality of a pre-existing good. As such, we are co-creators, participants within an active process of the good in history, called to respond to and witness to all that is good, and to lament, rage and struggle for that life. That’s the meta-story. Citizenship is one part of that life of participation, co-creation and struggle.

Beginning here matters for many reasons – one of which is that it allows us to fail, repent, forgive, start again. The other is that it allows for a vastly plural range of social practices that uphold the common good, not just active state-citizenship, and not just things that are dependent on us being recognised as a state-citizen. In a UK and global context, it is worth remembering many do not have the luxury of state citizenship. Christian common good thinking has something to say to the lives of all those in every kind of territory, not merely its citizen members.

So, what are some of these wider practices? Well, that takes us into a second dimension of the Christian scriptural account of the common good.

2. In the Early Church there was a strong tradition of appealing to Matthew 25 as the common good text. If you want to know what the common good looks like for a Christian then start here: it means contingent, bodily practices of care for those you share space with, those you encounter in your life – it means feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, comforting the sufferer and mourner, hosting the stranger and so forth. The best citizens are those who know how to mourn, weep, rejoice, and to do so for themselves and in accompaniment of others. These are unashamedly civic practices for the Early Church.

Equally emphasised is a duty to ensure, as Psalm 24 has it, that the goods of the earth are distributed to all, justly. So this isn’t charity versus justice – a lazy dismissal of Christian ethics often made. It’s both-and, and more… The scriptural and early church vision of common good includes practices of care and service, public debate, education and formation of character, contemplation and prayer, care of the wider creation and so forth.

Prayer as a common good practice is part of our training in how to pay attention to the world, not a distraction from it. Prayer is part of how we learn to place ourselves and see ourselves placed. How to learn what deserves our attention and what does not. In practice, living out a Matthew 25 set of common good practices can and does bring many into a degree of conflict with state authorities: prisons, refugee care, care of the ageing and hunger are exactly on our public policy frontlines. Christian common good thinking spotlights these.

3. A third emphasis is found in the writings of St Paul. For Paul the common good is the body of Christ, made up of the diverse skills, gifts, talents, enfleshment and callings of each of us, participating in a life of loving God and loving neighbour. This Pauline imagery is important because it stresses that the common good is not for the Christian like a seminar room discussion where the core task is to reach intellectual agreement and then cascade that agreement downwards. It is not unity by agreement. Nor is the common good like a manifesto, disappointingly it is not a list of fixed commitments I can rattle off for you. It is something that comes about within a social body that can find some real unity within its plurality.

Striving for the life of the common good requires a participating community that values difference – of gift, of calling, of culture – and crucially creates spaces and initiates processes in time where these can speak to each other and become something greater than the sum of its parts. This is not a crude multiculturalism or relativism but something much richer, more joyful and more demanding.

A Matthew-25-and-Pauline-shaped common good is discerned, known, loved within communities of diverse peoples who have access to the means of survival and flourishing, and equal chances to participate. It implies historical communities capable of repenting their past in the hope of a better future. In the present moment, it is as good as the good experienced by those struggling most, most excluded, vulnerable or without hope. It begins with a preference for their flourishing, for in theirs lies ours.

This implies that we should be asking:

• What forms of community life do we think can give expression to such co-creative processes?
• How do we name the various structural and mindset challenges that block, frustrate or limit such visions of the good?
• What do we believe are the enduring forms of power, violence, force, dispossession, need, manufactured vulnerability and hopelessness that are expressions of the lack, suppression and refusal of the common good in our midst?
• What practical processes in public policy and at grassroots levels can open a space for institutional renewal beyond the consumer-citizen logic, but also beyond the state-citizen logic too?

A final footnote: Pope Francis, operating from that ‘realist’ mindset, reminds us that we should assume that the common good is already alive, and probably in places we might not expect, but that it needs networks of connection - a trellis structure - to grow and connect from healthy roots outwards and upwards.

Pope Francis has also talked about being brave enough to name the fact that striving for the common good means a willingness to face suffering and walk the costly path of accompaniment – there is no renewal of solidarity and trust without that. Only then do we really get to a place beyond the consumer-citizen model, beyond relationships of mere supply and demand, into the deepest places of human freedom.

Michael Sandel does glimpse this too, I think, when he says towards the end of his Reith lectures that the basic things that build the common good and strengthen it are not finite resources that can be used up but things that multiply with nurture and practice. The conditions for the nurture of these is where the moral conversations – across and between traditions - needs to lie.

Reproduced with kind permission from a recent Theos seminar: Mixing religion and politics: rethinking the common good - Theos Think Tank - Understanding faith. Enriching society.