The common good is a collective project, one we take on within a complex system of government, with separated powers.
In yet another post (of several) trying to end the debate about the common good simply by reasserting that the people who are credited with reintroducing this perennial political term to the lexicon are bad bad bad, Dan makes several allegations. On the term “the common good,” Dan quotes Erick Erickson’s assesment about the origins of the recent common-good debates:
It is everywhere because the Vice President and the online army that defends him have decided individualism has gone too far and that we all need to dissolve ourselves into the collective, which they have taken to calling the common good.
What?! The vice president has invoked conceptions of the common good as a restraint on excessive liberal individualism. This is a mainstay of conservative rhetoric and observation. Hayek said that “unrestrained individuality may pose a genuine threat to social stability.” Vance has cited Catholic social teaching, which has no such calls for self-dissolving. At times the vice president, as he will himself admit, has said even harsh things about his allies “ruthlessly” seizing the institutions. Buckley also used to talk about this magazine’s mission as one of displacing liberal dominance in “big targets” like “both political parties, the Soviet Union, elite universities, Hollywood and more.” I’ve never seen him call for “dissolving ourselves.”
Dan writes of my post:
The air of revolution around Michael’s question — “they wonder why some are looking for an American political vocabulary to reverse these trends?” — only makes me more skeptical. So does Michael’s straw-man invocation of Anthony Kennedy, as if an Earl Warren protégé is the dashboard saint of pro-life originalists and of National Review for social experiments that had even John Roberts sounding like Russell Kirk. When I am told in CAPITAL LETTERS that there is no time for the old verities of patriots and constitutionalists, or that we should condone things done for their “vandal effect,” I worry for the future of the republic I love.
Dan, respectfully, I wrote no such thing.
(1) I never implied that Anthony Kennedy was a dashboard saint of pro-life originalists. Although, yes, I certainly do think a Supreme Court justice appointed by the freedom con president par excellence is more relevant to American political discourse than anonymous trolls on Twitter that Dan takes to be his interlocutors. Kennedy was building on a growing and influential tradition, including Justice Frankfurter’s earlier line about “the ultimate mystery of the universe” being beyond law. And it seems to me that many self-identified conservatives are responding to common-good discourse by rephrasing his view that individual rights include defining your own concept of existence. This self-definition idea is influential enough that a justice considered very conservative, Justice Gorsuch, was able to endorse law that protects self-definition in those terms in Bostock. My argument is that a recovery of the common good is a necessary criterion for containing the excesses and absurdities hiding under the banner of individual rights, in which I presume we are all engaged.
(2) What I rebuked in CAPITAL LETTERS was not “the old verities of patriots and constitutionalists” but gender ideology and any other equivalent forms of absurd license dressed up as individual rights.
I’ll reproduce those sentences here to let readers decide for themselves whether you have characterized them correctly.
As soon as men decided to define their own existence as “women,” lawyers got to work making sure the law vindicated their right by recognizing them as women. When individual liberties have degenerated so badly into such costly lunatic license, I’m not surprised that a young generation of conservatives is rising up, like Jack Aubrey in the film Master and Commander, speaking of duties, responding to deflections about who gets to define common goods or the corruption of power, to shout “WE DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR YOUR DAMNED HOBBIES, SIR!”
I also don’t recommend laws for their vandal effect; I merely speculated that some do. Perhaps in charity I should speculate they believe lex magister est — the law is a teacher, and they don’t want it to fall silent on an important truth.
And just for fun, I’ll take up a constantly reiterated question from the comments section: Who appointed MBD to determine the common good for all of us?
NO ONE. I haven’t volunteered for such a role. The common good is a collective project, one we take on within a complex system of government, with separated powers. I haven’t even run for dogcatcher. I’m simply a citizen who had the benefit of a college education that included solid courses in classical philosophy and a brilliant course in medieval philosophy. (Thank you, Professor Sullivan.) I’ve also read lots of late-19th-century papal writings on these matters and so am able to provide a definition of the common good at a high level of generality, just like I can reproduce a brief definition of justice from Saint Thomas Aquinas: to each his due. By writing these definitions in public, as a contributor to this magazine, I have not implicitly made a bid to dissolve all political offices, concentrate absolute power in my person, and govern by my whim. If you like your doctor, you can keep him. You can safely return home to your families, and you will find I haven’t switched your dog’s food, changed your sheets for you, or aerated your lawn. I hope this clarifies what we’re doing here.