In his recent interview with Times of Malta, the Nationalist Party’s new parliamentarian, Albert Buttigieg was direct and radical, focused on his constituents’ concerns with the environment and cronyism. He also sounded quaint.
It was his repeated use of that phrase, ‘common good’. It’s been a while since a politician has underlined it. In the PN’s 1987-2013 heyday, so much was the term used, and abused, it was coming out of our ears.
Today, the term has the odour of the past. It’s ironic, given the increasing appeal to the common good what we find in Euro-American politics, not least on the centrist and radical Left.
Elsewhere, it never fell out of fashion. As Alan Xuereb shows in his recent book, Riflessjonijiet Dwar il-Ġid Komuni (BDL), the concept is fundamental in Western political thought and 20th-century jurisprudence. What legitimates rule of law is influenced by assumptions about what’s good for all of us.
Aristotle defined tyranny as a political system where the state works on behalf of a leader’s private interests. The ‘common good’ points to a way of thinking and debating how the state could work on behalf of everyone’s good.
The common good is obviously a moving target. The classical thinkers, from the Ancient Greece right down to Europe’s 19th century, waxed on about it while finding acceptable things we wouldn’t dream of accepting (slavery, subjugation of women, racism, etc.).
Nonetheless, the concept has thrived. It is foundational for the European Union. It’s finding renewed vitality in an age of acute awareness of planetary crisis. The ‘common good’ provides a political language for talking about shared destiny.
In the ruins left by WWII, Europe faced the challenge of building up a new transnational community knowing the alternative would lead to even more destructive war. The language of nationalism was inadequate. Speaking of the common good was a way of exploring how a new kind of future could be envisioned.
To be plausible, it had to be grounded in what respected both persons and communities. It had to address shared concerns and find ways of enabling people to participate in debating those concerns. It had to affirm long-standing values but not forget that many classes of people needed emancipation from the restrictions of the status quo.
It might sound like political saccharine but in its time it moved mountains. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) was approved by countries with radical differences of political vision. Jacques Maritain, a key force behind the UDHR, remarked: “We agreed, provided you do not ask why.”
The language of common good permits such agreement. It doesn’t presuppose consensus on everything. It provides a prism through we can debate fundamentals: the goods owned by all of us (public monuments, beaches, air); things we consider to be good (secure streets, clean air); what different segments of the public consider to be good (public morality); and what is considered to be good for the public (public interest, reliable information).
In the wake of the term common good come other terms, like public goods, common concerns, common heritage and the commons. It’s a political vocabulary that enables us to debate where the logic of the market applies and where it should stop. Where does it make sense to focus on individuals and where on communities? By what criteria are we to judge something useful?
You can see why it’s a language that attracts the contemporary Left. A centrist like Michael Sandel deploys it to discuss the limits of utilitarianism in bioethics. Others, in the face of a grave ecological crisis, which coincides with a time when political rhetoric sounds increasingly hollow, find in the language of common good a way of articulating a new sense of shared purpose.
Either we learn how to discuss our destiny or we might find we have no future- Ranier Fsadni
Perhaps this sketch is enough to give a sense of what has been lost in Malta once the notion of common good fell out of fashion. We find ourselves facing our own ecological crisis, a sense that collapse is imminent, with no plausible, persuasive way of even beginning to discuss the way out.
Our discussions of any problem tend to be dominated by one criterion to the detriment of others. Faced with the appointment of someone unfit for public service, we’re told that he’s coming for free, as though saving money is all that matters.
Faced with a massive barge suddenly plonked in the middle of a bay, or chairs and tables obstructing a pavement, or loud music going on into the night, we’re told it’s for the benefit of consumers. Faced with environmental destruction, we’re told it’s in aid of economic growth. And faced with the dilemmas of bioethics, we’re told it’s a matter of free choice or who’s suffering.
It’s not that these criteria don’t count. But they’re not the only ones that do. Yet, we don’t have a way of legitimising any other kind of concern. The problem doesn’t involve only the decision-makers. It also afflicts the critics.
We need to recover, relearn and develop ways of speaking of the common good for this century and our destiny within it. There are no substitutes.
The ‘national interest’ is different. It can be exclusive of other nations’ interests. It can be belligerent. In any case, knowing the national interest often depends on access to state secrets. To privilege the national interest above all else is, essentially, to demote public debate.
The ‘public interest’ doesn’t quite cut it, either. It has to do with monitoring the status quo and balance of power. It’s about ensuring transparency and accountability. It doesn’t necessarily include debates about what’s good.
That old chestnut, l-interess tal-poplu (the interest of ‘the people’) is inadequate because it sweeps individual persons and particular communities into a catch-all “people”, whose interests, it turns out, only populist leaders are entitled to decide.
And ‘collective welfare’ doesn’t cut it, either. It refers, essentially, to the sum of individual private interests – usually, themselves reduced to more money in individual pockets. As we know, it doesn’t allow us to discuss common concerns and public goods. If anything, it’s used to shut such discussions up.
Quaint as it now may sound, we need to relearn how to speak of the common good. Either we learn how to discuss our destiny or we might find we have no future.