House of Eratosthenes

The Democrats have a new slogan, the Associated Press reports:

Ned Lamont uses it in his Connecticut Senate race. President Clinton is scheduled to speak on the idea in Washington this week. Bob Casey Jr., Pennsylvania candidate for Senate, put it in the title of his talk at The Catholic University of America–then repeated the phrase 29 times.

The term is “common good,” and it’s catching on as a way to describe liberal values and reach religious voters who rejected Democrats in the 2004 election. Led by the Center for American Progress, a Washington think-tank, party activists hope the phrase will do for them what “compassionate conservative” did for the Republicans.

“It’s a core value that we think organizes the entire political agenda for progressives,” said John Halpin, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “With the rise of materialism, greed and corruption in American society, people want a return to a better sense of community–sort of a shared sacrifice, a return to the ethic of service and duty.”

Isn’t this about the 87th slogan the Dems have come up with? Remember “culture of corruption,” “America can do better,” “enough is enough,” etc.? Maybe the Republican slogan should be “slogans are not enough.”

Then again, maybe they are enough. It now seems within the realm of possibility that Democrats will take one or both houses of Congress in three weeks, even though they are campaigning on not much more than not being Republicans. But the Republicans are campaigning on not much more than not being Democrats. To our mind the Republicans have the better of this argument, but there is something to be said for punishing the party in power if its performance has been subpar.

I was intrigued by this speech using the phrase 29 times, by the challenger to Sen. Rick Santorum’s seat in Pennsylvania. So I scoured the web and eventually found a full transcript on Bob Casey’s campaign website. It’s a damn good speech, neatly capturing everything that has ever appealed to humanity about this “common good” concept. He presents the result in such a way that, if you’re unacquainted with this debate, you’re left thinking “who could possibly argue with that?” In other words, his speech does exactly what speeches are supposed to do.

When I was growing up, most parents believed that their children would have better lives and more opportunities than they themselves had, and we all believed in the promise of tomorrow and a brighter future. A perfect example of that belief was my grandfather, Alphonsus L. Casey, who went to work in the darkness and danger of the anthracite coal mines as a mule boy when he was just 11 years old. The novelist Stephen Crane wrote about miners and mule boys “toiling in this city of endless night.” And he described how mule boys would carry a lamp and “run ahead with the light” in the darkness. Only in a country like America could a mule boy go on to earn a law degree and create a new life for himself and his family, one that would inspire his son to carry a different kind of light as the governor of Pennsylvania.

But something seems to have changed in recent years. Instead of hope, fear threatens to become the pervasive feeling in this country. We now live in a country where, according to a recent Pew study, only one third of all parents expect their children to be better off than they themselves are. And around the world, America is losing the moral authority that has made us the standard for other nations to emulate. Many factors play into these changes. But at the core is something quite simple: Many of our leaders have lost their moral compass and no longer seem to believe that the purpose of government should be to promote the common good.
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The common good must first be based upon a solid foundation of justice. As Saint Augustine taught us: “Without justice, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers?” Justice cannot abide 34 million people in poverty and 8.3 million children without health care. Justice cannot ignore the suffering of millions of parents in this country who have to face the soul-crushing thought that they might have to tell their child to go to bed hungry�or who realize that they simply cannot afford the medical treatment their child needs.

In the month or so since Casey’s speech, it’s been commented-upon here and here.

I’m most impressed by what Bob Casey did not say. If you click open the transcript and read it word for word, you will most assuredly not see something like this: “I have opportunities my parents never had, my parents had opportunities my grandfather, the mule boy, didn’t have. This improvement of each child’s hopes and dreams, over his parents’ hopes and dreams, was made possible by respect for the common good.” Bob Casey does not say that. He does not say “My grandfather was able to make life better for his children, because as a mule boy he had some really great health benefits.” These are things upon which his sales pitch, logically, must depend…those, or something like them. He goes to great lengths to lead his audience to believe these things, but nowhere in the entire speech does he take the responsibility of actually saying that.

He can’t say that, because it would be provably incorrect. The simple fact of the matter is, his idea is nothing new. It’s as old as the hills. Civilizations have risen and fallen on this principle of the common good and the subordination of the individual. Throughout the millenia, the human race has shown a proclivity toward “natural selection” — a tendency to say “Hey, this worked out pretty swell! Let’s do a whole lot more of it!” — and the Common Good schtick has never managed to float to the top. Oh sure, it’s rejuvenated like Frankenstein, repeatedly. It has a lot of appeal for people. But it requires the rejuvenation. Where a civilization prospers, the “common good” is never central to the prosperity; instead, those who seek to promote such a concept, swoop in like long-lost “relatives” discovering the guy who just won the lottery.

A scrutinizing and energetic read over the Wikipedia page helps to provide the reason why the whole deal really isn’t as good as it sounds…

The common good is a term that can refer to several different concepts. In the popular meaning, the common good describes a specific “good” that is shared and beneficial for all (or most) members of a given community. This is also how the common good is broadly defined in philosophy, ethics, and political science. This concept is increasing in popularity as moral vision for the progressive left in American politics. [emphasis mine]

Wikipedia is a resource anyone can edit, and I’m going to leave this alone because it states the essentials accurately. But I have criticism here. It trivializes what is important, and emphasises what is trivial. I’m leaving it alone because I think the way people interpret what they see is the responsibility of the reader, not of the writer.

So let’s allow the definition to stand, but add this comment.

All…or most. That determines everything. Absolutely everything. Substantial numbers among us, on both sides of this conservative/liberal barrier, would agree: If something is good for all of us, let’s go ahead and do it. And we would further agree, if something is bad for most of us and good for just a tiny portion of us, let’s not do that.

What if something is injurious to some among of us, and at the same time, good for the majority of us? I’m not talking about a working, functional, nuclear-powered car that would cause short-term economic hardship to the petroleum industry. Some guy owns a gas station, he’s forced out, and re-enters the business world in a different occupation with more promise. Over the long term, he goes through an adaptive process and ends up the richer for it. That isn’t really “injury.” No, I’m talking about real injury. Like a progressive tax. There’s simply no “upside” to paying a higher tax, even if other people think you “can afford to” pay it.

And that’s what “common good” really is. It’s a rationale for inflicting genuine injury on selected subsets of people which are assured to be in the minority, so the act of injury can find shelter in a democratic process. Taxing smokers. Taxing rich people. Taxing businesses. “Don’t tax you don’t tax me; tax the guy behind the tree.”

Casey talks about principles he learned from living in a family with eight children. But the word atruism doesn’t appear in his speech, one single time. That word would provide the substance for which people are looking, as they lend Casey’s comments their sympathy. That’s what people really value. It means concern for the welfare of others. Like, for example…I don’t care if this proposed tax will never impact me, I don’t care if it will only hit “rich” people who “can afford” it. Punishing people for being productive is morally wrong, so I’m going to oppose it. That. That’s altruism.

The “common good” folks, throughout human history, present themselves as being more altruistic. They never, ever, quite seem to end up that way. There’s a reason for that. What they really want, is a license to determine what the common good really is, and they want this to work kind of like Agent 007’s “license to kill.” The phrase “common good” is carefully constructed to commit, conceptually, to nothing. It doesn’t promise to improve society over the long term, it doesn’t promise not to hurt people. It doesn’t even promise to confine itself to actions most people would like, or even to help more people than it hurts. It doesn’t promise any of those things. If it was capable of commitment to greater aid than injury, on a nose-count basis, it would be called “populism.” But that’s not what it is.

It’s bureaucracy over common sense. And it leads to dystopian societies, again and again. Democrats who want to run on the phrase, probably know this to be true. After all, they’ve chosen to start a debate about “common good” in the fall of 2006, rather than in the winter of 2005. They can’t afford for people to think about it for too long.

Update: The older I get, the more of a link I see between this “common good” stuff, the forementioned dystopian society, and a deterioration in the ability of the masses to think critically. It makes sense when you put yourself in the shoes of the dictator; how do you go about controlling the lives of large numbers of thinking people? You don’t. It’s like herding cats. But when people form their cognitions of reality and their hopes and dreams, based on the cognitions, hopes & dreams of those around them — it has to be much easier.

And so we have “common good”. Once the resources we’ve placed in public trust are marshalled toward that, then reality is no longer entrusted to the common man. There are things you know to be true, with which the public officials agree with you — and then there are the ideas you have for yourself, on which the public servants dissent. The latter of those two, simply don’t matter. Nothing will be done about them.

Lately, we’ve had this hot movie-making trend where you make the dystopian society into a model for George Bush’s America and therefore a model for conservatism. But when you go backward in time, when much more eloquent prose was written about the dystopian society — when such tomes were based on the real-life challenges that faced Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum and Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin, you see that historically such oppresive regimes have been carefully constructed by our liberals. That is to say, our collectivists. Not conservatives, but those dedicated to oppressing the spirit of the individual, subordinating it to the flimsy ambitions of the apparatchiks.

In few places is this more apparent, than in the first chapter of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”:

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The [Two Minutes] Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience…The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even � so it was occasionally rumoured � in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

…Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were � in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less…

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave…The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

Arbitrarilly, let’s just add twenty years to this. What does this look like…a Bush rally, or a Kerry rally? Really?

Undirected emotion flows through a crowd that has surrendered to group-think, and has long ago made a regular ritual out of hating a designated individual with a blind frenzy. They remember that they hate the man…so much better than they remember why, exactly.

Substitute “George Bush” in place of “Emmanuel Goldstein,” and what you’re left with — well, it could be any meeting of any one of a number of leftist groups. It could be a typical radio show on the now-defunct Air America. So what is the ideology of a dystopian society? Millions of people think the above describes conservatism, perfectly. It’s what conservatism is all about. They think that…because they’ve been told to think that. But thinking people, can see the similarities for themselves. And not too much in the conservative camp, has resembled what’s exerpted above. But an awful lot of liberal stuff has. An awful lot.

“Common good”; the Nineteen Eighty-Four novel neatly captures exactly where it gets you. Is this what we need right now? Really?

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Memo For File XXVIIIWednesday, October 18th, 2006

Memo For File XXVIII
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006