“I have never found the name of a voter called ‘Common Good’ in the electoral register.” This was the quip of a former Nationalist Cabinet minister during a media discussion on the subject quite a few years ago.
Was this a cynical or a realistic comment?
He did not say that there is no such thing as the common good. He was only reflecting the situations he met during his house visits. No one ever asked him about what one could do for the common good but many people tied their vote to the good that could come their way by voting one way or another. Many attach a price tag to their vote and auction it to the highest bidder.
Can anyone blame the voters considering that our culture has put a price on everything, even on human life itself?
People’s value is now calculated according to their ability to produce and their social status, gauged according to the things they buy or consume. Homo Sapiens has been definitively replaced by ‘Man the Producer’, who doubles up as ‘Man the Consumer’. Those who do not score high on these two indexes are considered to be a burden on society and thus expendable.
Quite naturally, this attitude has to be garbed in the branded clothes of political correctness. If the burden has the form of a foetus, disposing of this ‘collection of cells’ is hailed as reproductive rights enjoyed by liberated women who are the absolute possessors of their bodies. If the burden takes the form of an old and infirm person or one with a severe disability, society extols their right for a dignified death (please don’t mention euthanasia!).
Within this world view of ‘produce and consume or be bust’, the poor are responsible for their own poverty. Shaming them is the best way forward. Is not the consistent shaming and demonising of single mothers in our country a clear example of this attitude?
The theft of social benefits by some should undoubtedly be condemned. But, truth be said, it is much smaller than the loss the country suffers from tax evasion by businessmen and self-employed professionals. However, a society dominated by right-wing liberal values considers them as useful entrepreneurs while single mother are considered to be useless scum.
There has ever been a society that speaks of human rights as much as we do but there has never been a society that excels in double-speak as much as contemporary society does. This is so because our discourse about human rights is warped by an excessive emphasis on individualism at the expense of the common good.
Pope Francis highlighted this reality during his address to the European Parliament on November 25. After noting that today there is a tendency to claim ever broader individual rights, he pointed out the underlying mistaken notion of the human person based on extreme individualism. In line with this anthropology, the Pope says, men and women are seen “as detached from all social and anthropological contexts, as if the person were a ‘monad’, increasingly unconcerned with other surrounding ‘monads’.”
According to this concept of human beings, so widespread even among us, “the rights of the individual are upheld, without regard for the fact that each human being is part of a social context wherein his or her rights and duties are bound up with those of others and with the common good of society itself”.
This viewpoint is totally alien to the Christian ethos. Fortunately, more people are today noting that humanity’s future does not augur well if it continues to pursue the path of unbridled individualism in politics, the economy, popular culture and other sectors of human activity. Politicians who pander to individualism will probably achieve short-term electoral gains, but since they are bereft of a long-term vision of a truly human society, their political legacy will be meagre, at best.
• What Newsweek columnist Robert J. Samuelson wrote about American society, that the choice of a more contentious society where groups selfishly protect their own benefits is a bad choice, applies to Malta as well. The bio-ethicist Daniel Callahan says that the replacement of the current “ethic of individual rights” with an “ethic of the common good” is the only solution for the crisis in contemporary societies.
If the burden has the form of a foetus, disposing of this ‘collection of cells’ is hailed as reproductive rights enjoyed by liberated women
I am definitively not proposing an either/or situation: the rights of the individual or the needs of the community. Pope Francis, in his speech to EU parliamentarians, adopted an ‘and… and’ strategy, stating: “that it is vital to develop a culture of human rights which wisely links the individual, or better, the personal aspect, to that of the common good, of the ‘all of us’ made up of individuals, families and intermediate groups who together constitute society”.
There could be short-term tension between the two rights, but any long-term dichotomy between them leads to a disaster. Pope Francis is right to assert that “unless the rights of each individual are harmoniously ordered to the greater good, those rights will end up being considered limitless and consequently will become a source of conflicts and violence”.
Violence many times takes the form of exploitation, social division and poverty. Isn’t the shameful exploitation of hundreds of foreigners in Malta, for example, a clear sign of a society rabid with extreme individualism? Dozens positioned at different levels of authority must have known about this exploitation; but they willingly closed their eyes and happily filled their pockets. I suspect that this malady is so ingrained that nothing, bar perhaps the offering of a lone sacrificial lamb (a big ‘if’), will be done.
Catholic social teaching, which is a body of doctrine whose aim, according to Pope Benedict XVI is “the attainment of what is just”, proposes a political project that shuns short-term egoistical gain in favour of one based on confidence in human beings. In this vision, humans are not seen as just producers or consumers but as people endowed with unique dignity who are so intrinsically linked with others that the collective political answer to Cain’s question to God in Genesis should be: “Yes, we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers”. This is what common good is all about.
• Following last week’s commentary I was contacted by Dawn Stacey who confirmed that she legally changed to being a woman in April 2013, and that in August 2013 she, for some time, opted to present publicly as male for complex and distressful reasons, unfortunately trivialised by the New York Post. Her dramatic and touching story is worth reading: http://lifeafterdawn.com/2014/07/09/as-i-was-saying .
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt