The ‘Common Good’ Is Not

MBD is unhappy with Dan’s treatment of the common good:

[Dan] takes five modern categories: legal moralism, utilitarianism, moral uplift, economic public goods, and Catholic political reflection, and treats the failure of “the common good” to instantly collapse into any one of them as proof of the term’s “vagueness.” That classical vocabulary feels “lossy” when translated into the file formats of post-1960s political idiom is not proof of meaninglessness. The Aristotelian-Thomistic definition is reasonably precise: The common good is the ensemble of conditions under which persons and communities attain their flourishing. That is definitionally not utilitarianism because a person’s good is constitutive of the common good, not fungible against an aggregate.

I disagree, MBD.

The common good is aspirational, not structural. It isn’t a top-down ensemble; it’s an amalgam. The common good cannot be imposed but is rather a blessed byproduct of individuals voluntarily engaging with one another within a structure that least diminishes natural law.

To use a gardening analogy (a popular choice, biblically), the postliberal looks to grow a crop but never bothers to till the ground or fertilize. He will erect chicken wire around his domain; he’ll apply chlorine to anything green or crawling that creeps near (the better to protect his crop, he thinks); he’ll lecture the seeds, lined in rows on the unbroken earth, on why it’s in their best interest to grow (moral instruction). He refuses to permit anything other than himself to act upon the seeds and then blames any and all when his work is consumed by birds. He’s a self-righteous fool playing god.

Let’s get into it on the Catholic reactionaries’ home turf.

St. Isidore’s commission to his fellow bishops at the Council of Toledo was to go and produce schools of liberal education within their holdings — a personal commission outside the state. Thomas Aquinas, used by some of the Vance-aligned postliberal right to argue for absolute executive power, such as by abusing a passage in De Regno, outlines governance structures within the remit of human law (the application of natural law) in his later Summa:

Of these, according to the Philosopher [Aristotle] (Polit. iii, 10) one is “monarchy,” i.e. when the state is governed by one; and then we have “Royal Ordinances.” Another form is “aristocracy,” i.e. government by the best men or men of highest rank; and then we have the “Authoritative legal opinions” [Responsa Prudentum] and “Decrees of the Senate” [Senatus consulta]. Another form is “oligarchy,” i.e. government by a few rich and powerful men; and then we have “Praetorian,” also called “Honorary,” law. Another form of government is that of the people, which is called “democracy,” and there we have “Decrees of the commonalty” [Plebiscita]. There is also tyrannical government, which is altogether corrupt, which, therefore, has no corresponding law. Finally, there is a form of government made up of all these, and which is the best: and in this respect we have law sanctioned by the “Lords and Commons,” as stated by Isidore (Etym. v, 4, seqq.).

Note that democracy’s nature is distinct from tyranny (unlike what postliberals allege when quoting De Regno), and further, that the law depends upon the ratification of both lords and commons — it sounds practically Madisonian.

To return to the garden, Aquinas recommends in Summa that:

Human law may be divided according to the different kinds of men who work in a special way for the common good: e.g. priests, by praying to God for the people; princes, by governing the people; soldiers, by fighting for the safety of the people. Wherefore certain special kinds of law are adapted to these men.

Rather than the supreme executive’s folly, we can understand that the priests, in prayer, fertilize and water the soil. The soldiery protects the shoots from predators and pestilence. And the princes and the people (lords and the commons) go about tilling and seeding the plot in a give-and-take relationship. The harvest may yet be underwhelming, but the likelihood of success over time is far greater as the nutrients of even a poor year return to nourish the next.

But this gives “common good” advocates too much credit. Like tyrants that intone the euphemisms “the will of the people” and “peace, land, and bread,” common-good postliberals are populated by revanchists and misanthropes who would rather complain on X about the decline of Western masculinity than attend church and think of someone else long enough to meet a young woman and volunteer to ring a bell for the Salvation Army.

They should do some common good instead of demanding it of others.