Common Good - The Lost Jewel

From both sides of the Atlantic, observers have commented on the results that are becoming obvious within each society of the loss of people's vision that they live in a community and accept that there are limits to the freedom of  behaviour because of their respect for others.

From the United States, Rod Dreher sadly surveys the evidence that Americans have taken personal liberty to an extreme. Hi finds this especially obvious ahead of the mid-term elections: He writes:

The general feeling seems to be that personal liberty now trumps all other issues.

Who really believes in the common good anymore? We have become an atomized nation of individual consumers who believe our preferences must be indulged no matter what. It’s true of the Right as well as the Left. The main reason it’s so hard to talk about the common good is that so few people are willing to recognize an independent authoritative standard for determining that good.

He gives examples of how no one wants to be inconvenienced, even because of their own action or decision.

Think of a liberty that you would be willing to give up for the sake of the common good. Hard to do, isn’t it? We Americans have come to think of “the common good” as “maximal individual liberty.” In fact, individual liberty is a necessary condition for achieving the common good, and for that good to have meaning (because freely chosen). But in America today, it has become our idol. It has become the end of our politics rather than a means to an end. It is so in our personal lives, so why shouldn’t it be in our public ones?

 All politics is about balancing the rights of the individual against the community. Too much collective power is oppressive; too much individual power is anarchic. In a democracy, we will always be struggling with this tension. What has changed, I think, is that we have come to a point where people no longer think of the common good. This is Dante’s great lament about Tuscany in his day: that people only thought of the good of themselves and their own party or tribe. The result was chaotic, and tore at the fabric of society. This is where we are headed.

In Britain of the 1980s,  "modernity was defined by the energy of the entrepreneurial individual, set free from the bonds of tradition or social responsibility", according to Jeremy Gilbert, who is at pains to plot of path for good governance that would counter the worsening consequences of social irresponsibility arising from the breakdown of a spirit of community.

In many places in the West, a new society is apparent, one where people are merely consumers trying to maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain. An effort to apply the concept of the common good will provide the needed balance in materially rich but spiritually poor societies of the First World. Further, that renewed appreciation of the fundamental principles of good governance within "advanced" sovereign states will inspire people in the rest of the world to conduct themselves as a community, rather than join the race to the bottom, which would be unrestrained freedom and total disregard of the role of government in enhancing the general welfare of all citizens.