Buch The Common Good in the 21st Century

Thinking about the common good requires the identification of those associations whose "good" is to be promoted: forms of association such as anthropologists attribute to tribes, or communities as described by St Paul, or the middle classes in European urban development, or the models of the state and states as conceived by Hegel as absolute spirit or "mortal god." (The fact that the gods of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Hittites, Greeks, and Romans died is more significant than how they came into the world.)

For believers, not just in the Pauline community, the common good focuses on the claim of validity of their own religion, and each individual is encouraged to implement and strengthen this claim by sacrificing their own life, since life is not the ultimate prize, but rather the afterlife. For burghers who lived under the protection of the lord of the manor (Burgherr in German), the common good is the preservation of this protective space and protection from the arbitrary ambushes of private feudalism (or capitalism today), as the common good can be seen as the implementation of a law to which all citizens subject themselves in all aspects of their lives. This creates freedom for all in the acknowledgment and implementation of the law that applies to all and operates for the benefit of all. This can be seen in the expression Stadtluft macht frei* today this understanding of freedom is still conveyed in the general recognition of traffic regulations, as observing these rules enables the free use of the roads in the first place. For members of tribes and believers, the common good is thus something you are prepared to sacrifice your life for.

For citizens, the common good means freedom for all citizens.

For the student nation (medieval Landsmannschaften or fraternities), which was organized like a state, and which includes all the communities in its territory, the common good can be seen as an unconditional mission against the destructive power of time, against the fury of oblivion. It was and is a question of ensuring perpetuity—at least a millennium—through greatness, power, and glory.

The common good of all nations together is the preservation of humanity against the blind actionism of evolution. The latter's failed endeavors increase our amazement at what has been achieved to date, that is our amazement at the power of spirit, thus metaphysics in the face of the arbitrary rule of natural laws.

Thus the common good is described:

1. In the sense of evolutionary fitness, as an advantage created by the readiness to die in order to be remembered, and that means becoming an example of the recognition of the claim that your community is everything, through your readiness to give up your life for it;

2. As the guarantee of citizens' freedom under the rule of legal equality that applies to all and operates for the benefit of all;

3. As a service to the transgenerational guarantee of permanence, in order to escape the meaningless logic of creation as destruction (supposed "creative destruction") by enacting perpetuity (in institutions such as museums, archives, the hermeneutics of conservatism, the emotional attachment to monuments, and the guarantee of permanence as exemplified by graveyards and Germany's Basic Law, Article 79, section 3 [the eternity clause], or the takeover of ongoing costs in industry, known in German as "eternal costs" [Ewigkeitskosten]).

To summarize: today, the common good is that which gives members of a community the freedom to develop their individuality, or constitutionally enables the community to live with a multiplicity of religious convictions without the competition that results in obliteration. This means that the common good applies to the development, education, and encouragement of individuality. This is neither dialectical play nor an insistence on paradoxes, since identity (that is, what is common to the members of a community) can be achieved only through the acknowledgement of those from whom one wants to differentiate oneself. In fact, the formation of identity as a goal of education and encouragement means, in complete opposition to the traditional definition of extraordinariness or superiority, the permanent obligation to and acknowledgement of other people, as only by doing so is the particular singularity of those constituting the difference possible.

Successful communities are either associations of those prepared to die, or of highly developed individuals who feel obligations to shared responsibilities by virtue of their autonomy. Natural involuntary communities are unstable because they lack the ability to adapt to changed circumstances. Every individual's early socialization takes place in such involuntary communities, which we call cultures. However, from a certain level of the individual's development onwards, the collective's identity is no longer in a position to support him or her as an individual: once the individual can recognize the logic of the decline of rigid communities, his or her superior knowledge obtained through individuality forces the community to make changes in the name of guaranteeing the common good, that is the survival of the community. Advanced individuals must thus put aside their traditional cultures if, for example as scientists and artists, they want to acquire the knowledge that qualifies them to look at their own community or culture from a detached, outside point of view. Since 1400, it has been the Europeans' unique characteristic to be expected to and to be able to practice natural philosophy (today's natural sciences) and the septem artes liberales (today's arts) no longer as members of a tribe or a particular culture, since one practiced and still practices chemistry (whether as a pharmacist, an alchemist, or a chemical engineer) not as a Jew, a Chinese person, or a Christian, but simply as a chemist, that is within the new communities of universal civilization and no longer within local cultures. This way of pursuing the common good of humanity—a random and thus highly fragile product of evolution—focuses on truth as a basis for tackling life's challenges (pain relief, reducing the burden of work, preventing the natural, sometimes fatal struggle for scarce resources).

The constitutional principle that everything, even property, can only be justified by a commitment to the common good, implies therefore that the individual's pursuit of happiness can only succeed under the supremacy of the common good—what Jeremy Bentham called the greatest good for the greatest number. Thus, general egotism does not create the altruistic collective unconditionally, as the first generation of classical political economists assumed. Regulations must be implemented, under which egotism can flourish without risking the destruction of weaker egotists by more radical ones, as this would mean the end of the pursuit of happiness for all, and would thus be a counterproductive destruction. Since time immemorial, meaning both logically and naturally, democracy has been considered a guarantor of upholding the pursuit of happiness, that is the pursuit of meaningful life in the daily fulfillment of the duty of asserting a law that applies to all and operates for the benefit of all. This means the duty to be just. Accordingly, in democracies and constitutional states the common good is the all-encompassing commitment to justice.

How far this notion of all right-thinking people has vanished today can be demonstrated in the most banal of everyday incidents. In almost every restaurant, even the most expensive, guests are subjected to inconsiderate, musical noise. When asking for this nuisance to be switched off or at least turned down, one receives the response that other guests like this musical embellishment. When the other guests deny this, the staff refer to the boss's orders that every guest has to put up with it, even though the latter thinks he's guaranteeing the existence of the restaurant in the first place by paying money for the food. In shopping malls, music pounds simultaneously out of every store, each with their own program that music psychologists say removes customers' will to resist, thus rendering them easily gullible when it comes to making purchases. The director of a chemical factory justifies the consumption of unsafe riverbank filtrate taken from a nearby industrial site as drinking water by referring to his own family, who would also have to consume this water if they lived nearby. In short, the Kafkaesque vision of justice as an arbitrary power that affects everyone seems to have prevailed even in the case of high-level legal judgments. It is a fine confirmation of humanity's hope that the common good will triumph as justice.

* Stadtluft macht frei [city air makes you free] refers to a German medieval legal principle, whereby serfs were deemed free of their former masters' ownership if they succeeded in living for one year and a day in the city. [translator's note]

Translated from German by Philippa Hurd