Arthur Camins reflects here about the importance of the common good. He writes about a society in which we care about one another, as opposed to a me-first individualism that currently commands our public discourse.
There is a play on Broadway right now and in touring companies outside New York City called “Come from Away.” It is about 9/11. It takes place in Gander, Newfoundland, when airplanes were ordered not to enter American air space, and the town of 9,000 people discovered that it had 7,000 guests for several days. They provided them with foood, places to sleep, and friendship. They asked nothing in return. Not me-first but “here is help, here is welcome and respite for the stranger.”
Camins writes:
“Without one another we are diminished. The more we have others around us, the stronger we can become. That is the idea of the common good.
“It’s not a uniquely American idea, but it is one with which many of us identify.
“Republicans in Congress have a different idea. It applies to guns, health care, retirement, and education.
“Their value is a strain of individualism that stands in opposition to the common good. Their strategies are: Promote fear and undermine public confidence in government as a vehicle to keep people safe. The goal is the further enrichment of the already privileged.
“The Second Amendment was written to address maintenance of state militias (albeit, in part, to capture escaped slaves), not individuals with rifles. Fomenting fear of rampant crime and with it, the incompetence of government to protect people has become the go-to strategy to increase gun sales. It has been remarkably successful.
“Similarly, conservative efforts to replace Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and public education with individual vouchers appeal to the value of individualism that is in opposition to common-good collective solutions that depend on honest, effective government. Once again, the conservative strategy has been to undermine confidence in government by defunding it and thereby making it appear incompetent. Then, fear and just-worry-about-me individualism kick in as self-preservation.
“Conservatives have been remarkably successful, as Republicans are now dominant across federal and state governments and public confidence in government has declined…
”Progressives, need not shame individualism, but rather reframe it. That is, we become our best selves through others. We can only become our best selves when we are all safe, healthy, well-fed, and well-housed. We can only learn to be our best selves when we are educated with the benefits of diversity and equity. Hopeful, but hard.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good essay, but I wonder if maybe the war is already lost if we have to explain to people why they should care about other people. Children are born understanding this. How do we lose that?
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No, that’s learned behavior taught by caring adults. You only have as much love to give away as was given to you.
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Can’t agree with your last statement at all, bethree5.
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No, what’s learned is how to be fearful and, hence, selfish, manipulative, narcisstic, etc. Allowed to grow with proper care, human beings (like all mammals) are social creatures who instinctively care about the needs of others. It’s only when traumatized that we become like cornered, wounded animals (because that’s exactly what we are).
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I’m with bethree. Babies will seek out and respond to interaction with caregivers but will give up when they cannot elicit a response. Ever heard the term failure to thrive? Has no one ever had to encourage a toddler to share or watched a toddler trying to stake out their own identity/territory when they begin to realize that “others” are not just there to serve their needs? Has no one ever seen the autistic like behavior of children raised in some eastern European orphanages who have had little contact with care givers beyond the most basic? We need to interact or be able to elicit interaction in order to survive, but we do not come automatically concerned for the “common good.”
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Speduktr – what are you saying that’s different than what I’m saying? Right, babies’ natural instinct is to seek out social connection. It’s only when they are denied that connection that they learn to be anti-social. We don’t need to learn to be social – it’s instinctive. So long as that social need is met, we grow up concerned for the common good. We learn through negative experience not to care about other people (although, even then we still really do).
It’s an important distinction because it’s trauma that leads to anti-social disconnection, and so many policies these days (both parties) are causing so much trauma, from war to poverty to poor health to environmental disaster.
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The social connection a baby seeks is very self serving and instinctive. There is certainly no sense of “common good” or even of giving pleasure to someone else. There is no consciousness of “common good.” It is to meet their own instinctive needs. We learn and develop more sophisticated and positive forms of interaction if we are raised in an environment conducive to positive social interaction just as we learn negative patterns through poor modeling. I’m sure the scientific understanding has moved far beyond these early experiments, but I still remember the ones done with infant monkeys raised on surrogate mothers. The infants raised on wire mothers developed aberrant emotional responses. Those raised on softly padded “nuturing” mothers developed more normally. The initial emotional attachment/bonding was important, but learning to behave in socially acceptable and even altruistic ways requires learning. We have a (instinctive) need for early emotional attachment which is critical to normal emotional and therefore social development. Our capacity to consider the needs of others over our own develops over time. How far it expands and how it is demonstrated depends on the society in which one lives.
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Well that was an interesting exchange, thanks! But I see I took things off on a tangient. Dienne said “but I wonder if maybe the war is already lost if we have to explain to people why they should care about other people.” Am reading another post today reminding me of this comment. There are so many basic, obvious goods we find ourselves explaining — defending — to ‘other people’ these days! I don’t think we’ve lost a war, but we’re definitely fighting one.
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We have just begun to fight.
Thanks to teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, and more on the way.
Remember in November
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“There are so many basic, obvious goods we find ourselves explaining — defending — to ‘other people’ these days!”
A lot of people just seem to pick up a string of oft repeated talking points (me included) and spout them without ever having really thought about them. I guess its perfectly understandable. I know I have some really uninformed opinions about some topics; rather than spouting the current narrative, I need to learn to keep my mouth shut and listen although those uninformed opinions do give people with some expertise a chance to set the record straight. 🙂
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I found this article to be interesting: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/03/26/12-rules-spitting-poor
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We the people are losing ground with every assault on the common good. The Democrats need to stop acceding to conservative ideology and demands if any remnants of the common good are survive. Those that support the common good must actively resist and fight back with our voice and our votes.
David Shulkin was just fired from his position leading the VA. He has stated that he was fired because he resisted privatization of the VA services, something Trump promised he would never do during the campaign. We are losing ground daily on preserving any vestige of the common good. Democrats need to present a united front, but this will not happen because there are too many in the party that favor individualism over the common good as well.
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Its not even that they favor individualism.
It’s that they favor corporatism, which completely swallows the individual.
Ironically, even the Libertarians don’t really favor individualism because in a system with no regulations, a few individuals and/or corporations inevitably take over and effectively make everyone else their indentured servants.
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Obmacare is a good example.
It’s basically corporatism.
It puts the interests of the insurance companies and big pharma above those of the individual.
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Which also describes the pre-&-post-Obamacare employer-provided & private healthcare system.
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Agreed
Healthcare in the US is corporatist.
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The reason I pointed out that Obamacare was/is corporatist is because the Democrats sponsored it.
It might be “better than nothing” but so is a ham sandwhich.
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SDM,
As usual, you are RIGHT!!!!
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There’s a myth, a fear among some of the gun nuts in America that if there’s ever a “major collapse” of any kind, then people will quickly turn on each other and fight and kill for food and other basic resources. If that were true, then we would have seen Puerto Rico literally eat itself alive after being decimated by the Hurricane. Even now, with so much of the island still without power and other basic needs, the people there still endure and work TOGETHER AS A COMMUNITY for the benefit and survival of all. Other examples like that abound. The only ones we have to fear are those who live in fear of “the other”, of any other who is not them which ironically includes those who are just like them.
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“GrossDomestic Product”
We focus on the “common goods”
Like iPhones, cars and “stuff”
And relegate the “common good”
To unimportant fluff
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Perfect.
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From a twitter by Marco Rubio: “I made fun of philosophy 3 years ago but then I was challenged to study it, so I started reading the stoics. I’ve changed my view on philosophy. But not on welders. We need both! Vocational training for workers & philosophers to make sense of the world.”
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2018/03/29/rubio-changes-tune-philosophers?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=b70af13901-DNU20180111&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-b70af13901-198488425&mc_cid=b70af13901&mc_eid=f743ca9d07
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Too bad he won’t refuse NRAmillions
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Robert Reich has a slim volume “The Common Good.” He talks about it on YouTube and CSpan.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiE1uOXopLaAhUO7FMKHXnUAeYQtwIIMzAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DJ2XFfh6BDv8&usg=AOvVaw0-Z6YVcaB9FxhevAcWbhhM
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I do hope that play sweeps across the nation and opens up a much needed discussion about what it means to be human.
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Like!
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I never thought I’d see the day when Laura Ingraham would eat her words, but a 17 year old just made her do it.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-guns-boycott/ads-pulled-from-ingraham-show-after-she-mocked-parkland-survivor-idUSKBN1H52ZX
Poor Laura. So misunderstood.
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On Thursday, Ingraham tweeted an apology “in the spirit of Holy Week”
gag
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“Wholey weak” is more like it
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At least Ingraham can take some comfort in the (alleged) statement by Pope Francis that “there is no Hell”.
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Apparently the way to get her to tweet an apology during Holy Week is to threaten the health of her bank account and her celebrity.
Being exposed as a shameless self-serving bully and hypocrite?
No problem. It’s a question of one’s core values and priorities.
When you worship at the altar of Mammon it’s not hard to “[s]hut up and dribble” out self-wounding inanities.
Because, when all is said and done, who’s gonna defend all those Benjamins she loves so much?
Get rheeal…
😎
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I can’t see why anyone would ever have advertised on her show to begin with. It’s not like we didn’t already know the sort of person she is. She just made that a little more clear. Not much, but a little.
It’s actually funny that she was claiming someone else was “whining”.
That’s all she ever does.
That’s what her nasal speech IS: whining.
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Yeah, it’s our choice, not my choice.
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As a form of government, democracy is historically recent and liberal in its concept of shared power. Direct democracy, as the Athenian Greeks understood it, was defined by its etymology; “demos,” which means the people, and “kratein,” which means to rule.
Representative democracy – a republic – is based on the idea that ‘the people’ choose their government leaders. Both forms of democracy are founded on the principle that government – as Lincoln put it – is “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
More than 2300 years ago Aristotle wrote “the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution.” Aristotle understood that education was important to the maintenance of democracy, and he grasped well the concept that the “character of democracy creates democracy.” Long before public education existed, Aristotle argued in favor of it, writing that “it is manifest that education be should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private – not as at present, when everyone looks after his own children separately.” Continuing with this line of thought, he wrote that in a democratic form of government, each citizen “is a part of the state [the community], and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.”
In America, The Founders envisioned a democratic society “in which the common good was the chief end of government.” They agreed with John Locke’s view that the main purpose of government –– the main reason people create government –– is to protect their persons through –– as historian R. Freeman Butts put it –– a social contract that placed “the public good above private desires.” The goal was “a commonwealth, a democratic corporate society in which the common good was the chief end of government.”
In the early years of the Republic, Horace Mann saw public education as “the balance-wheel of the social machinery” in a democratic society. Others have agreed. For example, University of Chicago social scientist Earl Johnson wrote – like Aristotle – that “the supreme end of education in a democracy is the making of the democratic character.” Gordon Hullfish and Philip Smith considered the development of critical intelligence –– “reflective reconstruction of knowledge, insights and values” –– essential to the maintenance of a democratic society. And John Dewey subscribed to the belief that “the democracy which proclaims equality of opportunity as its ideal requires an education in which learning and social application, ideas and practice…are united from the beginning and for all.” In other words, “the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.”
Conservatives do not agree. They emphasize private economic freedom over the public good. They desire an educational system and a conceptual view of citizenship that are historically dated (tracing to, perhaps, the medieval era) and expressly contradictory to those of the Founders. The modern conservative approach to education is based on the “free-market” ideas of Milton Friedman; vouchers, tax credits, competition, charter schools, accountability and efficiency, and merit pay. It’s the exact opposite of “E Pluribus Unum.”
In a democratic republic we need active, responsible citizens who can think critically and reflectively. Most importantly we need a citizenry competent in democratic understandings and skills; a citizenry that is committed to the core principles and values written into and derived from the United States Constitution.
But look what’ve we got. A Republican-controlled Congress that just delivered more supply-side tax cuts to the wealthiest and most powerful citizens. A large group of voters who are antagonistic to the core democratic values on which the nation is based. A president* who refuses to disclose his financial interests, who openly ridicules democratic principles and debases those who support them, and who was elected* with the assistance of foreign intelligence agencies.
The core mission of public schooling should be citizenship education. And what could be more important in a democratic republic than to promote the “character of democracy?”
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“More than 2300 years ago Aristotle wrote “the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution.” ”
This is why educrackers want to teach only 21st century skills. Otherwise, kids may grow up thinking, they should listen the wisdom of some ancient Greeks instead of their state legislators.
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Thank you, democracy. Another response to a post that deserves to be the post itself.
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Ancient Greeks are so yesterday.
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Sadly, Poet, it appears that this is the prevailing mindset. Those who ignore the past are fated to relive it.
PS: Thanks for your contributions. I always enjoy your submissions.
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