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Christian Ethics and the Common Good
A presentation by David Hollenbach, S.J.
INTRODUCTION In conversations with professional lobbyists over the past few years, Woodstock fellows encountered a remarkable degree of skepticism regarding the principle of the common good. A number of lobbyists were simply agnostic on the whole question of whether there is a common good and whether we could know it. Voicing that opinion was a conscientious lawyer-lobbyist who spoke at a Woodstock forum last October that concluded a project on lobbying ethics coordinated by Edward B. Arroyo, S.J. (That project produced the book, The Ethics of Lobbying: Organized Interests, Political Power, and the Common Good, published by Georgetown University Press). Afterward, Woodstock saw the need for further dialogue that might not only clarify but also reconstruct this classical theme of social and political theory. With that recent experience in the background, on December 12 the Center hosted an afternoon of conversation featuring David Hollenbach, S.J., theology professor at Boston College and author of The Common Good and Christian Ethics, recently published by Cambridge University Press.
As Father Hollenbach makes clear in his presentation, his investigations into the common good have critical connecting points to Woodstock as an institution as well as Jesuit tradition and spirituality. In his book, the Jesuit points out that St. Ignatius Loyola went further than both Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas in speaking of a common good that exceeded the limits of city and nation. "The more universal the good is, the more it is divine," he wrote in the sixteenth century. Arguably, Ignatius Loyola was anticipating what we now call "globalization." Indeed, this is one of the two social phenomena that Father Hollenbach dissects in his book; the other is the social and economic distances between African Americans in our core cities and affluent suburbanites.
Father Hollenbach's basic argument is that America's prevailing ethic of tolerance, commendable in many ways, is not an adequate response to either of these social challenges. What is required is a renewed vision of the common good, one that underscores the need for not only tangible things like decent jobs, but also less tangible things, namely relationships and human connectedness across socioeconomic boundaries. Here is an edited version of Father Hollenbach's presentation.
My presentation this afternoon is a report on the latest phase of a project that began when I was on sabbatical here at Woodstock nearly 20 years ago. I had just arrived at Woodstock in January 1984, when I received a phone call inviting me to help the U.S. bishops draft their 1986 pastoral letter Economic Justice for All. This work launched me into a still unfolding process of reflection on the basic moral commitments that shape American economic life and culture. One of the results was the book Catholicism and Liberalism produced by a Woodstock project coordinated by Bruce Douglass and myself. But I always envisioned that project as a prologue to the bigger issue of whether the idea of the common good is still viable in the context of pluralism in contemporary America and of global society. The Common Good and Christian Ethics is the outcome of that project.
Here at Woodstock, where the resources of Jesuit spirituality are mined for insight on contemporary social issues, it is important to remember that the idea of the common good was central to the vision of Ignatius Loyola. He wrote that all the decisions of the Jesuit order should be directed "according to what will seem expedient to the glory of God and the common good." This single phrase sums up much that is central to Ignatius Loyola's religious vision. Ignatius, of course, was drawing on ancient sources. Aristotle had long before argued that the good of the community should set the direction for the lives of individuals, for it is a higher or more "divine" good than the particular goods of private persons. This theme has been echoed throughout much of the later history of Christian reflection. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas argued that God's own self is the highest good we can attain, and that a right relation to God requires a commitment to the common good of our neighbors and of all creation. But Ignatius's vision of the common good was extraordinarily expansive in scope. Indeed he saw it as universal, extending well beyond the city-state envisioned by Aristotle, the medieval kingdoms of Aquinas's understanding or the Renaissance republics closer to his own time. The phrase "the more universal good" appears repeatedly in the Constitutions of the Jesuit order as the criterion for decisions in the service of God and the Church. This vision of the more universal common good made Ignatius's first followers among the first Westerners to travel beyond the boundaries of the Europe familiar to most previous Christian thinkers. In this they anticipated at least some of the questions of globalization we confront today.
Despite this noble historical pedigree, however, the idea of the common good is in trouble today - serious trouble. The late John Rawls spoke for many moral and political philosophers when he said that the pluralism of the contemporary landscape makes it impossible to envision a social good on which all can agree. Rawls argued that the Aristotelian, Thomistic, and Ignatian vision of the common good "is no longer a political possibility for those who accept the constraints of liberty and toleration of democratic institutions." Pluralism, by definition, means people disagree about what the good life is, so if we respect their freedom, there seems little possibility of attaining a shared understanding of a common good.
This is not simply a problem for academic philosophers like Rawls. The events of September 11, 2001, have made all of us sharply aware that some people hold fundamentally different visions of how the world should work than we Americans do. Thus it becomes increasingly difficult to see some of the world's people as neighbors at all. In fact, when groups of people are fundamentally divergent in their cultures, traditions, and ways of life, they can appear as threats to each other. Interaction with them can appear as a danger to be avoided - more like a "common bad" than a good to be shared in common. When this happens, defense of one's turf becomes the first requirement of the good life. It is hard to know what the common good means in such an environment.
One Nation, After All? Some recent social-scientific investigations have concluded that fear of such differences is leading to a "culture war" in the United States today. Others have been forecasting that we are headed for a global clash of civilizations that could set the West against the rest in an age of new religious wars.
On the other hand, the research of political sociologist Alan Wolfe has challenged these grim forecasts, at least for the United States. He has found something close to consensus on what is valued most highly in the U.S. middle-class today. This consensus on the highest good can be summed up in a single word: tolerance. A stance of "live and let live" is evident in American attitudes toward religious belief. Indeed Wolfe suggests that most middle-class Americans have added an eleventh commandment to the biblical decalogue: "Thou shalt not judge." Wolfe concludes that average Americans are too nonjudgmental to get sucked into battles that might tear the country apart. We prefer what Wolfe calls "morality writ small," rather than the larger goals of social justice and social equality that so easily lead to ideological conflict. From this Wolfe takes a certain modest comfort, for a real war about religious, moral, or cultural values would be a very bad thing. 9/11 has certainly shown us that.
In light of the terrible bloodshed of past and present religious wars, this is encouraging. But is it enough? I think the answer is negative. The ethic of tolerance has a distinct resemblance to laissez-faire economics. It says, "You can do what you want so long as you let me do what I want." There are major social questions today that call for a stronger vision of our common life together than tolerance can generate by itself. Let me touch on two of them: urban poverty and globalization.
The Great American Divide. The populations of the inner cores of many large American cities are heavily African American and largely poor. Their lives are marked by economic deprivation, unemployment, single parenthood, homelessness, and frightening drug-related violence. Tolerance alone cannot produce an adequate response to these realities. We need a stronger vision of the common good to address these issues. Let me explain why I say this.
First, most middle-class Americans live in neighbor-hoods that isolate them from people of significantly different social-economic backgrounds. This isolation is due to the apparently impersonal forces of the real estate market, but it is sustained by zoning laws and other boundaries that are the result of political choice rather than geography. To challenge these divisions requires an understanding of the common good that reaches beyond the boundaries between homogeneous groups of the like-minded and between the middle-class and the very poor.
Second, pursuit of community by middle-class Americans today takes forms that deepen the crisis of the inner cities. Suburbanites today often live in what Robert Bellah has called "lifestyle enclaves." People in such enclaves find and express their identities in interaction with other persons with "shared patterns of appearance, consumption, or leisure activities." These communal relationships are based on some feature of private rather than public life. The bonds they forge are more like those among members of the same club than among fellow citizens concerned for the good of the wider community. So most suburbanites are unlikely to translate their need for community into activities that address the divisions between core cities and suburbs. In fact the need for community, when expressed in lifestyle enclaves, can lead to the construction of walls and moats in the form of bigger and better malls and tougher zoning ordinances. These strengthen the locks on the gated communities protecting the privileged from those who are different.
Third, increased racial tolerance among white suburbanites is not the master key that will unlock the doors that keep the inner-city poor from sharing in national well-being. Socioeconomic class differences between suburb and inner city are more important in sustaining these boundaries than are negative racial attitudes. Racial prejudice continues to be an operative force in American life to be sure. But it is also clear that overtly racist attitudes have notably declined over recent decades. This attitudinal change has not been accompanied by an improvement in the situation of inner-city blacks. African Americans at the lower end of the economic spectrum continue to live in dire straits. Nearly 10 million African Americans live in poverty: close to 25 percent of the black population in the United States. Blacks are 2.6 times more likely to be poor than are European Americans; hardest hit are black children. In other words, a large group of African Americans - those who have not made it into the middle-class - have not benefitted from increased racial tolerance. The disparity between the quality of life in suburbs and in core cities is based less on racial intolerance than on class differences, though race continues to play a subordinate role.
Beyond Tolerance
. If intolerance is not the principal cause of urban poverty today, tolerance is not the principal solution. We must surely continue to pursue greater acceptance of racial differences. But addressing the problems of poverty, social isolation, and the resulting despair in America's core cities will require concerted efforts to overcome the economic inequalities deeply ingrained and institutionalized in the class divisions between city and suburb. The dominant middle-class morality writ small, with its preference for just leaving each other alone, is inadequate to this task. Rather, we need a vision of a life shared across social divides. We need to work to create a society not marred by the present divisions between privileged suburban enclaves and despairing inner city ghettos. In my judgment, and I hope yours, such divisions are bad (a "common bad") and overcoming these divisions would be a good (a "common good" we could all share in together). If we are to move toward such a society, we need to make judgments that distinguish between such bads and goods, not simply to tolerate them.The tradition of Catholic social thought can make a significant contribution to this change of direction. Its understanding of the common good is based on the recognition that the dignity of human persons is achieved only in community with others. Individualistic isolation is finally a prison, not a liberation. Freedom's most important meaning is positive, the ability to shape one's life and environment in an active and creative way, rather than the negative state of being left alone by others.
Pope John Paul II has stressed the positive linkage between freedom and the common good in his frequent discussions of the moral basis of democracy. Democracy requires more than tolerance for decisions made solo by autonomous individuals. Democratic freedom depends on participation in the communal relationships that give persons a measure of real power to shape their environment, including their political environment. Solitary individuals seeking to protect their privacy will be incapable of democratic self-government. Democracy requires mutual cooperation, mutual responsibility, and what Aristotle called civic friendship. In more contemporary terms, it requires solidarity with others who live in our region, our country, and our world.
Pope John Paul has defined solidarity as a moral virtue expressed in "a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good." Such commitment to the common good is directly opposed to the deep divisions of our society, like those between core cities and suburbs. As the U.S. Catholic bishops put it in 1986, solidarity requires working for "the establishment of minimum levels of participation in the life of the human community for all persons." Put negatively, "The ultimate injustice is for a person or group to be treated actively or abandoned passively as if they were nonmembers of the human race." Such exclusion is the very opposite of solidarity, for it "marginalizes" persons and whole groups from social life and from participation in the common good of human community.
Unjust exclusion can take many forms. There is political marginalization: the denial of the vote, restriction of free speech, the concentration of power in the hands of a ruling elite, or straightforward tyranny. But more relevant to the United States today, it can also be economic in nature. Where persons are unable to find work even after searching so long that they simply give up, they are effectively marginalized. They are effectively told by the community: we don't need your talent, we don't need your initiative, we don't need you. Messages like that are built into the institutions and class structures of American life today. And these messages, more than simple racism, lead to the drugs, violence, and despair of our urban centers.
The Globalization of Solidarity. Let's turn now to a second cluster of issues that call for a revival of the idea of the common good - the growing patterns of interdependence across national and cultural boundaries called globalization. New linkages are occurring on multiple levels of global social life - the political, the economic (including trade, finance, investment, production, and consumption), the social-cultural (through mass media and the internet), and the environmental. Some aspects of this thickening web of interdependence are harshly negative, others are positive.
The negative face of globalization was evident in the consequences of Structural Adjustment Programs of the IMF and World Bank during the 1980s and early 1990s, especially through the conditions laid down for loans, debt relief, and other forms of financial assistance. These policies were based on a conviction that the maximization of individual free choice in the market would generate growth that would benefit all. It has become clear, however, that such "market fundamentalism" (as Joseph Stiglitz calls it) has in fact contributed to inequality and poverty in many parts of the developing world, especially Africa. Such phenomena surely give the term globalization a negative normative connotation. To be sure, markets and trade can be engines of improved well-being. But many people, perhaps the majority in poor countries, lack any access to these markets and so do not benefit from them.
On the other hand, the evolving international human rights regime is a political form of globalization that is having positive impact on the well being of many people. Indeed, I interpret the human rights ethic as grounded in a vision of solidarity and positive interdependence. For the human rights ethos conceives of human beings as, first, members of the worldwide human community with rights that derive from their humanity as such, and second, as members of the communities of existing nation states. This ethos is in effect an appeal for the globalization of citizenship - for granting membership in the human community a higher value than citizenship in a particular nation state, at least in extreme situations where humanity itself is threatened.
In the face of these differing aspects of globalization, the key question is how to move from patterns of global interdependence marked by inequality, domination, and oppression to patterns based on equality, reciprocity, and solidarity. How can we pursue a form of globalization based on solidarity rather than domination or exclusion?
First, there is the requirement of social solidarity, an understanding that sees the most basic requirements of justice in the social sphere as linked with an inclusive understanding of the common good. This will challenge all forms of globalization that reinforce existing patterns of exclusion, whether these be economic, political, or cultural. Positively, it calls for seeking what John Paul II calls "globalization in solidarity, globalization without marginalization." Inclusion and participation based on equality - these are the fundamental marks that should be shaping the social, economic, and political institutions of our globalizing world. They are implications of the notion that human beings can live good lives only when they live them together. Social solidarity is a precondition of basic justice, including the justice of the global economy.
Second, the plurality of cultures in today's increasingly interdependent world calls for a kind of cultural interaction that I like to call "intellectual solidarity." We need more than a tolerance that simply leaves others who are different alone. The negative face of this challenge is evident in the way the strains of globalization are often accompanied by self-defensive religious fundamentalisms and reassertions of ethnic identity. Reactive assertions of identity in the face of globalization are among the key sources of conflict and war today. In a globalizing world we are fated to interact across cultural and religious boundaries. Today the question is whether such interaction will be peaceful or violent, mutual or hegemonic. If it is to be peaceful and mutual, it requires both listening and speaking in a genuine conversation across boundaries that have traditionally divided the world. This listening and speaking is a form of solidarity in the intellectual sphere.
Risking Conversation. The Catholic tradition has long emphasized the contribution of its distinctive tradition to the common good and, reciprocally, the contributions of the larger common good to the good of the Christian community itself. As a result, the Catholic common good tradition possesses some distinctive intellectual resources for responding to the cultural challenge of globalization. The very word "catholic" (with a lower-case "c") implies a community that is universal in scope but does not project a single vision of the good life on others in imperialistic fashion. At the same time, authentic catholicity calls for more than a tolerance that simply leaves others who are different alone. The Catholic tradition has often in the past confronted the challenge of interaction with those who are religiously or culturally different. When the tradition has been at its best, this interaction as been in the spirit of an intellectual solidarity that led both to a widened understanding of what it means to be human and to a deeper understanding of what it means to be Christian.
For example, the early Christian community moved from being a small Palestinian sect to active encounter with the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. In the fourth century, Augustine profoundly transformed both Christian and Graeco-Roman thought and practice by bringing biblical faith into dialogue with Stoic and Neo-Platonist thought. In the 13th century Thomas Aquinas again transformed Western Christianity by appropriating ideas of Aristotle he had learned from Arab Muslims and Jews. In the 20th century, affirmation of modern freedoms transformed the Catholic tradition once again. It is also clear, of course, that the Catholic community has sometimes been sorely lacking in this spirit of intellectual solidarity. One need only recall the consequences of the Catholic stance toward Judaism to recognize how negative the consequences of such domination can be. Similar negative effects were evident in the 18th century debacle concerning the Chinese rites that undercut genuine encounter between China and Christianity, with effects that last to this day.
The achievements of this history have shaped a basic conviction of the idea of the common good that is central to the Catholic intellectual tradition. This tradition holds that cultures holding different visions of the good life can get somewhere if they are willing to risk serious conversation about these visions. This conviction could shape the cultural and religious aspects of our globalizing world. Traditions so shaped would be marked by a willingness to engage all others in dialogue while being unafraid to speak their own deepest convictions with due humility. Injecting such hope in the possibility of intellectual solidarity into the interaction of cultures today would be a signal achievement. It is a form of solidarity and commitment to the common good that is deeply needed in our post-September 11 world.
Third, this vision of the global common good also calls for the development of institutions that will enable economically or culturally marginalized people to have a greater voice in the decisions that affect them. For example, venues where decisions about indebtedness, trade, and other global economic issues are made presently look like clubs whose members are limited to political and economic elites. This has been called "globalization's democratic deficit." Influence in these international organizations by many people whose well-being they affect is at best attenuated and at worst non-existent. Overcoming this deficit is essential and it is clear that transnational nongovernmental organizations can play an important role in pressing for action on these issues. The Catholic community can be one of the key actors on this front and might even serve as a catalyst for other organizations.
In fact, the Catholic community has institutional resources to address these matters that few other bodies possess. The Catholic Church is present in virtually every local cultural, political, and economic situation in the world. At the same time, the church is the largest single transnational body on the globe today. By linking the knowledge gained from its local insertion with its transnational capacity for communication and action, the church could influence global discourse and policy-making as few other institutions can even aspire to do. The well-worn slogan "think globally, act locally" has significant implications for the work of many activities connected with the church - parishes, schools, universities, or social agencies. It has special significance, I think, for those of us who are members of international religious communities like the Jesuits. It has startled Jesuit students that an article I assigned them listed among the most significant transnational actors today the Coca-Cola Corporation, Phillips Petroleum, and the Society of Jesus. It is not only Islamic fundamentalists who possess the resources to influence world politics today. The key issue is whether this influence will be a source of division or of greater justice and solidarity.
The pursuit of the global common good thus has social, intellectual, and institutional dimensions. It calls for a social struggle to move the patterns of global interdependence away from domination and toward reciprocity based on equality. It requires intellectual commitment to listening as well as speaking in a genuine dialogue with those who are different. And it calls for transformation of the institutional centers of decision-making in our increasingly inter-connected globe. In theological terms, it calls us to seek a world of greater communion.