THE COMMON GOOD
AND URBAN POVERTY
David Hollenbach, S.J.
Margaret O'Brien Flatley Professor of Catholic Theology
Boston College
In the 1999 Vincentian Chair of Social Justice Lecture,
Professor Hollenbach addresses the commitment to the common good,
which he believes is crucial to the effort to keep the needs of the
poor on the intellectual and social agenda of our country. Citing
the "ethic of tolerance" as a key value of the middle class,
Fr. Hollenbach warns that major social questions call for a stronger
vision of our common life together. He argues that democratic freedom
depends on participation in the communal relationships that give persons
a measure of real power to shape their environment. Those relationships
must include the economy. When we "tolerate" situations
when remedial steps could be taken, injustice is being done and the
common good undermined.
I am
most grateful to St. John's University and to your president, Father
Donald Harrington, for the invitation to address this Vincentian Convocation.
I am truly honored to receive a degree from this distinguished Catholic
University dedicated to Saint Vincent de Paul's conviction that service
of all our neighbors, especially those who are poor, is at the heart
of the human and Christian vocation.
I
will address an issue that is crucial to the effort to keep the needs
of the poor on the intellectual and social agenda of our country,
namely how our commitment to the common good entails special obligations
toward the poor in our cities.
Over
two millennia ago, Aristotle argued that the good of the community
should set the direction for the lives of individuals, for it is a
higher or more "divine" good than the particular goods of
private persons.1 This theme has
been echoed throughout much of the later history of Christian reflection.
For example, St. Thomas Aquinas argued that God's own self is the
highest good we can attain, and that a right relation to God requires
a commitment to the common good of our neighbors and of all creation.2
For Christians, the pursuit of the common good follows from the Bible's
double commandment to love God with all one's heart and to love one's
neighbor as oneself.
Unfortunately,
this ancient theme in the Western and Christian intellectual traditions
is in serious trouble in our culture today. The pluralism of the contemporary
scene, by definition, means we disagree about what makes for a good
life for individuals. So many claim we can hardly be expected to agree
on the good we share in common.3 Pluralism impinges
on us daily as we rub shoulders with those who have different religious
beliefs and cultural traditions, and whose race, ethnicity, or language
is different from our own. Television brings into middle-class homes
images of seemingly foreign worlds of gang conflict, drive-by shootings,
and drug-use. It is increasingly difficult to see these many different
kinds of people as neighbors at all. In fact, when groups of people
are fundamentally divergent in their culture, tradition and way of
life, they can appear as threats to each other. Interaction with them
can appear as a danger to be avoided--more like a "common bad"
than a good to be shared in common. Defense of one's turf becomes
the first requirement of the good life. It is hard to know what the
common good means in such an environment.
THE ETHIC OF TOLERANCE
Some
recent social-scientific investigations have concluded that a lack
of commonality is leading to a "culture war" in the United
States today.4 But the evidence for this is not
compelling. The research of political sociologist Alan Wolfe found
something close to consensus on what is valued most highly by the
middle-class in the United States today. This consensus on the highest
good can be summed up in a single word: tolerance. This
stance of "live and let live" is evident in American attitudes
toward religious belief. The American religious style is a "quiet
faith" strongly averse to religious conflict. Indeed
Wolfe suggests that most middle-class Americans have added an eleventh
commandment to the biblical decalogue: "Thou shalt not judge."5
In light of the terrible bloodshed of past and present religious wars,
this is encouraging. The high value of tolerance is also evident in
middle-class attitudes on a large number of other questions important
to the quality of public life, such as the structure of family life,
gender roles, immigration, multiculturalism, and race. A notable exception
is low tolerance for homosexuality. Wolfe concludes that average Americans
are too non-judgmental to get sucked into battles that might tear
the country apart. We prefer what Wolfe calls "morality
writ small" rather than the larger goals of social justice and
social equality that so easily lead to ideological conflict. From
this Wolfe takes a certain modest comfort, for a real war about religious,
moral, or cultural values would be a very bad thing.6
Just ask the Bosnians, the Serbians and the Croats in the former Yugoslavia.
Avoidance
of conflict has its virtues to be sure. But is it enough? I think
the answer is negative. The ethic of tolerance has
a distinct resemblance to laissez-faire economics. It says "you
can do what you want so long as you let me do what I want."7
There are major social questions today that call for a stronger vision
of our common life together than tolerance can generate by itself.
Let me touch on just one: the struggles of poor African- Americans.
The populations of the inner cores of many large American cities are
heavily African American and they are largely poor. Economic deprivation,
unemployment, single parenthood, homelessness and frightening drug-related
violence mark their lives. Tolerance alone cannot produce an adequate
response to these realities. We need a stronger vision of the common
good to address these issues. Let me explain why.
First,
most middle-class Americans live in neighborhoods that isolate them
from people of significantly different social-economic backgrounds.
This isolation is due to the apparently impersonal forces of the real
estate market, but it is sustained by zoning laws and other boundaries
that are the result of political choice rather than geography. To
challenge these divisions requires an understanding of the common
good that reaches beyond the boundaries between homogeneous groups
of the like-minded and between the middle-class and the very poor.
Second,
pursuit of community by middle-class Americans today takes forms that
deepen the crisis of the inner cities. Suburbanites today often live
in what Robert Bellah has called "lifestyle enclaves." People
in such enclaves find and express their identities in interaction
with other persons with "shared patterns of appearance, consumption,
or leisure activities." These communal relationships are based
on some feature of private rather than public life. The bonds they
forge are more like those among members of the same club than among
fellow citizens concerned for the good of the wider community.8
So most suburbanites are unlikely to translate their need for community
into activities that address the divisions between core cities and
suburbs. In fact the need for community, when expressed in lifestyle
enclaves, can lead to the construction of walls and moats in the form
of bigger and better malls and tougher zoning ordinances. These strengthen
the locks on the gated communities protecting the privileged from
those who are different.
Third,
increased racial tolerance among white suburbanites is not the master
key that will unlock the doors that keep the poor of the inner-city
from sharing in the national wellbeing. Socio-economic class differences
between suburb and inner city are more important in sustaining these
boundaries than are negative racial attitudes. Racial prejudice continues
to be an operative force in American life to be sure. But it is also
clear that overtly racist attitudes have notably declined over recent
decades. This attitudinal change has not been accompanied
by an improvement in the situation of blacks who live in the inner-city.
African Americans at the lower end of the economic spectrum continue
to live in dire straits. Nearly 10 million African Americans live
in poverty. This is close to 25 percent of the black population in
the United States. Blacks are 2.6 times more likely to be poor than
are European Americans. Hardest hit are black children.9
In other words, a large group of African Americans in the United States--those
who have not made it into the middle-class--have not benefited from
increased racial tolerance. The disparity between
the quality of life in suburbs and in core cities is based less on
racial intolerance than on class differences, though race continues
to play a subordinate role.10 The division between
classes is of course a matter of incomes, but it is also manifest
above all in differences in the availability of jobs that pay a living
wage and in the quality of schools. These institutional differences
are linked to rates of labor force participation, unemployment, levels
of drug use, incidence of crime, and levels of single parenthood.
SOLIDARITY AND THE COMMON GOOD
If
intolerance is not the principal cause of urban poverty today, tolerance
is not the principal solution. We must surely continue to pursue greater
acceptance of racial differences. But addressing the problems of poverty,
social isolation and the resulting despair in America's core cities
will require concerted efforts to overcome the economic inequalities
deeply ingrained and institutionalized in the class divisions between
city and suburb. The dominant middle-class morality writ small, with
its preference for just leaving each other alone, is inadequate to
this task.11 Rather, we need a vision of a life
shared across social divides. We need to work to create a society
not marred by the present divisions between privileged suburban enclaves
and despairing inner city ghettos. In my judgment, and I hope yours,
such divisions are bad (a "common bad") and overcoming these
divisions would be a good (a "common good") we could all
share in together. If we are to move toward such a society, we need
to make judgments that distinguish between such bads and goods, not
simply to tolerate them. In Cornel West's words,
we need renewed commitment to "the common good that undergirds
our national and global destinies."12
The
tradition of Catholic social thought can make a significant contribution
to this change of direction. Its understanding of the common good
is based on the recognition that the dignity of human persons is achieved
only in community with others. This understanding has biblical roots
in the notion of covenant--the fact that God called Israel precisely
as a people, not as individuals one at a time. Similarly, the
biblical understanding of freedom, portrayed in the account of the
Exodus, is not simply freedom from constraint but freedom for
participation in the shared life of a people. Liberation is from
bondage into community.13 Individualistic
isolation is finally a prison, not a liberation. Freedom's most important
meaning is positive, the ability to shape one's life and environment
in an active and creative way, rather than the negative state of being
left alone by others.
Pope
John Paul II has stressed this social dimension of freedom in his
frequent discussions of the moral basis of democracy. Democracy requires
more than tolerance for decisions made solo by autonomous individuals.
Democratic freedom depends on participation in the communal relationships
that give persons a measure of real power to shape their environment,
including their political environment. Solitary individuals seeking
to protect their privacy will be incapable of democratic self-government.
Democracy requires mutual cooperation, mutual responsibility, and
what Aristotle called civic friendship.14 In more
contemporary terms, it requires solidarity with the others who live
in our region, our country, and our world.
Pope
John Paul II has defined solidarity as a moral virtue expressed in
"a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the
common good."15 Such commitment to the common
good is directly opposed to the deep divisions of our society, like
those between core cities and suburbs. As the U.S. Catholic bishops
put it in 1986, solidarity requires working for "the establishment
of minimum levels of participation in the life of the human community
for all persons." Put negatively, "The
ultimate injustice is for a person or group to be treated actively
or abandoned passively as if they were nonmembers of the human race."16
Such exclusion is the very opposite of solidarity, for it "marginalizes"
persons and whole groups from social life and from participation in
the common good of the human community.
Unjust
exclusion can take many forms. There is political marginalization:
the denial of the vote, restriction of free speech, the concentration
of power in the hands of a ruling elite, or straightforward tyranny.
But more relevant to the United States today, it can also be economic
in nature. Where persons are unable to find work even after searching
so long that they simply give up, they are effectively marginalized.
The community effectively tells them: we don't need your talent, we
don't need your initiative, in other words, we don't need you.17
Messages like that are built into the institutions and class structures
of American life today. And these messages, more than simple racism,
lead to the drugs, violence and despair of American urban centers
today.
When
citizens acquiesce in (or "tolerate") such situations when
remedial steps could be taken, injustice is being done and the common
good undermined. One can hardly think of a more effective way to deny
people any active participation in the economic life of society than
to cause or allow them to remain unemployed for years, even over many
generations. Similarly, persons who face hunger, homelessness, and
the extremes of poverty when society possesses the resources to meet
their needs are treated as if they were not members of the human community
at all. Citizens who permit or abet such conditions when effective
action could be taken to change them for the better fail to exercise
their responsibility toward the common good.18
The hungry and homeless people in this nation today are not part of
anything worthy of being called a commonwealth.
The
extent of their suffering shows how far we are from being a community
at all. This understanding of solidarity and the common good makes
the fear that we are on the brink of a cultural war that can be prevented
only by greater tolerance seem naive. We live in a dangerously divided
nation. If we are to begin the task of securing even minimal justice,
we need to overcome these divisions, not "tolerate" them.
The poor and marginalized people in our societies are members of the
human community and we have a duty to treat them as such. Nonjudgmentalism
and an attitude of live and let live will simply not do. We need a
renewed commitment to the common good--a good that must be there for
us all, if it is to be there for any of us. When we begin to take
steps toward this shared good, we will be on a path marked out for
us by Ancient Greece, by Israel, by Jesus Christ, and by St. Vincent
de Paul. We will be on the path toward an American public life healed
of some of its deepest wounds.
ENDNOTES
1 Aristotle, Nichomachean
Ethics, 1094b. This is an adaptation of Martin Ostwald's translation
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962). The Greek polis is translated
"state" by Ostwald, but "city" has been used here
to avoid the impression that Aristotle is speaking of the good of
the modern nation-state.
2 Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra
Gentiles, III, 17.
3 See John Rawls, Political
Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 201.
4 See James Davison Hunter, Culture
Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991),
and
Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of
Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).
5 Alan Wolfe, One Nation After
All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think about God, Country,
Family, Racism,
Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and
Each Other (New York: Viking, 1998), 54.
6 Wolfe, One Nation After All,
309.
7 Wolfe, One Nation After All,
63.
8 Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen,
William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits
of the Heart:
Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1985), 335.
9 Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal
of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's "Racial"
Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Civitas Counterpoint, 1997), 28-29.
10 The Public Broadcasting System
television newsmagazine, Frontline, produced an overview of
the emerging class divisions among African American, titled "The
Two Nations of Black America," originally aired in February 10,
1998. It features interviews with a number of members of the Harvard
University Afro- American Studies program, among others. The "Synopsis"
of the show summarizes its argument as follows: "In this Frontline
report, correspondent Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard scholar,
explores the gaping chasm between the upper and lower classes of black
America and probes why it has happened: ‘How have we reached
this point where we have both the largest black middle class and the
largest black underclass in our history?' His personal essay draws
a picture of growing black success along with deepening black despair
and argues that black upper classes now have more in common with their
white colleagues and peers than with those they have left behind in
the inner cities. Reviewing the thirty years that have passed since
the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gates shows that while many
blacks reaped the reward of the civil rights movement and affirmative
action and gained middle class status, just as many were left behind
in an expanding underclass of poverty." This Synopsis and other
materials relevant to the class divisions among African Americans
can be downloaded from the internet at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages.
11 Richard Rorty says this is
his and Dewey's view of the matter: "He [Dewey] assumed that
no good achieved by earlier societies would be worth recapturing if
the price were a diminution in our ability to leave people alone,
to let them try out their private visions of perfection in peace."
See Rorty, "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in
The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and Consequences
in American History, Merrill D. Peterson and Robert Vaughan, eds.,
(Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 273. This,
however, is only one aspect of Rorty's [and Dewey's] public philosophies,
for they both have strong commitments to human solidarity in the context
of democracy. This tension raises central issues about the relation
between private and public life that Rorty fails to address.
12 Cornel West, Race Matters
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 6.
13 See National Conference of
Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice for All (Washington, D.C.:
United States Catholic conference, 1998), no. 36.
14 See Nicomachean Ethics
1167a, b.
15 Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo
Rei Socialis, no. 38, in David J. O'Brien and Thomas A. Shannon,
eds., Catholic Social Thought: The Documentary Heritage (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Books, 1992).
16 National Conference of Catholic
Bishops, Economic Justice for All, no. 77.
17 See the documentation provided
in National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice for
All, chap. 3. The bishops' numbers are for 1986, but the situation
is very similar today.
18 As Michael Walzer put it with
respect to meeting the basic material needs of the poor: "Men
and women who appropriate vast sums of money for themselves, while
needs are unmet, act like tyrants, dominating and distorting the distribution
of security and welfare." Spheres of Justice: A Defense of
Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 76.
*David Hollenbach is the Flatley Professor of Catholic Theology at Boston
College. On Jan 28., 1999, he delivered the Vincentian Chair of Social
Justice Lecture at the Annual Vincentian Convocation. He also received
an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree and was cited by President
Donald J. Harrington C.M. for a "Commitment to truth commensurate
with that which is a part of the University's own Vincentian mission."
Fr. Hollenbach holds a Ph.D., from Yale University in Religious Ethics,
a M.Div. from Woodstock College, an M.A., and a Ph.L., from St. Louis
University College of Philosophy and Letters. Father Hollenbach is regarded
as one of the Church's most influential ethicists. He teaches theological
and Christian social ethics. He is the author of four books and numerous
articles on justice, human rights and the role of the Church in social
and political life. In 1998, he received the John Courtney Murray Award
for outstanding contributions to theology from the Catholic Theological
Society of America.
