CCIH

Notes

The Catholic University and the Common Good 

Address at Loyola University of Chicago

November 6, 2007

David Hollenbach, S.J.

            Catholic and Jesuit universities like Loyola and my own Boston College today face a major challenge: how to retain and strengthen our distinctive identity while educating students for life in a world increasingly aware of its pluralism.  Jesuit colleges and universities, in other words, are sharply confronted with the tension between commitment to sustain and advance the Catholic tradition’s understanding of the human good and their efforts to serve the common good of our diverse world in a truly inclusive way.

            Catholic thought has long held that the common good is the overarching end to be pursued in social and cultural life.  Since education is the activity through which culture is sustained and developed, a society’s success in attaining the common good will be largely dependent on its educational endeavors.   But there's the rub.  Some conclude that the idea of the common good and the reality of pluralist diversity are utterly incompatible.  In such a context, the pursuit of the common good by an educational institution committed to a distinctive tradition may seem self-contradictory.  Thus Catholic and Jesuit education seems to face a stark choice:  either remain rooted in the Catholic tradition and abandon efforts to serve the larger good of our diverse world, or intensify efforts to address the demands of diversity and abandon the Catholic tradition.

My reflections on this tension have been shaped by two experiences.  The first experience arose during several years in the mid 1980s I spent working intensely with the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ in drafting their controversial pastoral letter Economic Justice for All.    From a lot of  travel to speak about the pastoral letter at Catholic and secular universities, to church audiences, and with those concerned with public policy I was led to the conclusion that a central concept in the bishops' letter--the common good--is nearly incomprehensible to most people in the United States.  Americans know what liberty and equality mean, but they are largely in the dark concerning the fraternity or solidarity that leads to active commitment to the common good. This experience had led me to conclude that we are in great need of a revitalized commitment to the common good if we are going to move closer to economic justice in American society. 

The second experience that shapes my thinking arose during four academic terms spent teaching in Nairobi, Kenya, with students from all over sub-Saharan Africa.  This deepened my conviction that developing a plausible understanding of the global common good is one of the greatest intellectual needs in our globalizing society.  While in Nairobi, I have also worked on human rights issues with the Jesuit Refugee Service in eastern Africa.  My encounter with some of the world’s 33 million refugees and internally displaced persons in places like the Kakuma refugee camp in northwest Kenya, where about 100,000 people have been confined for well over a decade, convinced me the developing stronger solidarity cross nation state borders is utterly urgent in our world today. Indeed the many problems faced throughout Africa today are due to the fact that Africa is largely left out of the network of the world's growing integration.  To respond to this, we need a much greater sense of moral interdependence and solidarity—that is to say, we need a deeper understanding of and commitment to the global common good.

The notion of the common good has a deep history in both the philosophical and religious traditions of the West. 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] In a Christian context, St. Thomas Aquinas argued that a right relation to God requires 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 traditions is in serious trouble in our culture today.  The pluralism of the contemporary scene, by definition, means we disagree about what makes a good life for individuals.  Thus, many philosophers argue that agreement on a shared or common good is simply not possible. [3]  In fact, when groups of people diverge in their cultures, traditions, and ways of life, they can appear as threats to each other.  Defense of one’s turf becomes the first requirement of the good life.  Or less ominously, the research of my colleague Alan Wolfe suggests that the experience of pluralism is leading most Americans to place a high value on a form of live-and-let-live tolerance.  We prefer what Wolfe calls “morality writ small” rather than the larger goals of social justice and social equality that can lead to conflict. [4]  In light of the terrible bloodshed of past and present religious wars and ideological conflicts, this is encouraging.

            But is it enough?  I think not.  Let me suggest several reasons why we need a stronger vision of the common good than tolerance can provides.  I will do this in three steps:  first, in relation to the problems of poverty in our cities; second on a more global level; and finally in direct relation to the role of the university.

            First, most middle-class Americans live in neighborhoods that isolate them from people of significantly different social-economic backgrounds.  In Robert Bellah’s terms, they live in “lifestyle enclaves." [5]  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 result from political choice rather than markets or geography alone. Such policies strengthen the locks on the growing number of gated communities that protect the privileged from the poor.  To challenge these divisions requires an understanding that we share a common humanity, and that the well being of our communities reaches across the boundaries between the suburban middle-class and the very poor in core cities.

            Second, though increased racial tolerance is surely needed in our society, it is not today the master key that will unlock all the doors that keep the poor of the inner-city from sharing in the national well-being.  Class differences between suburb and inner city play a major role in sustaining these boundaries.   To be sure, racial prejudice continues in American life.  But the black middle class has been growing and overtly racist attitudes have somewhat declined over recent decades.  Nevertheless, 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.  Such class division is a matter of incomes, but more fundamental are the differences in the availability of jobs that pay a living wage and in the quality of schools.  This deprivation flows from what William Julius Wilson calls “social isolation.” [6] The inner city poor are largely cut off from the possibility of participating in the social and civic life of middle class America.  Addressing such poverty, therefore, means 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.  Such divisions are bad (a “common bad”) and overcoming these divisions would be a good (a “common good” we could all share in together). 

            The tradition of the common good, which is a central aspect of the ongoing tradition Catholic social thought, can make a significant contribution to this change of direction.  In the contemporary context, such commitment to the common good can be described as an expression of solidarity with others. [7]  Such solidarity requires cooperation, mutual responsibility, and what Aristotle called civic friendship. [8]  These responsibilities are directly opposed to the deep divisions between our core cities and suburbs.  Such divisions are the very opposite of solidarity, for they "marginalize" persons and whole groups from participation in the common life of the larger community.  There are so few decent jobs in many urban ghettos that people simply give up looking for work.  As the U.S. bishops put it, they are effectively told by the community: “we don't need your talent, we don't need your initiative, we don't need you.” [9]  This leads to what Cornel West has referred to as the “eclipse of hope”—a “profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair.” [10]  Such messages, built into class structures of American life today, lead to the drugs and violence of many American urban centers today. 

            When citizens “tolerate” such conditions when remedial steps could be taken, the common good is undermined and injustice is being done.  One can hardly think of a more effective way to deny people active participation in the economic life of society than to leave them facing unemployment for years, even over generations.  In a society as rich as ours, such people are effectively being told they don’t count as members of our community at all.  They are not part of a true commonwealth.  As the U.S. Bishops put it, “The extent of their suffering is a measure of how far we are from being a true community of persons.” [11]  If we are to begin the task of securing minimal justice, we need overcome these divisions.  To begin doing so, we need a renewed commitment to a good that must be there for us all if it is to be there for any of us—the common good.  When we begin to take steps toward this shared good, we will on a path marked out for us by the deepest traditions of Western and Christian thought.  We will be on the path toward an American public life healed of some of its deepest wounds.  

The challenge of solidarity and the common good also arises on the international level, as my African experiences have brought home to me.  The much discussed phenomenon of globalization points to new links among nations and peoples that are developing today on multiple levels—the political, the economic (through trade, finance, investment, production, and consumption), the social-cultural (through mass media and the internet), and the environmental. [12]  From the standpoint of the common good stressed in Catholic social thought, some aspects of this thickening web of interdependence must be judged negative, others are positive. The negative face of globalization is evident in the continuing reality of massive poverty in some developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. To be sure, markets and trade can be engines of improved well-being.  But many people, perhaps the majority in the poor countries of sub-Saharan Africa, lack all access to these markets and so do not benefit from them.  The recent review of the policies of the World Bank regarding African agriculture confirms this.  Exclusion and marginalization again appear as the markers of the injustice that causes poverty.

Te key question is thus how to move from patterns of global interaction that leave out whole peoples and large parts of a whole continent to patterns based on inclusion and reciprocity. Pope John Paul II called this "globalization in solidarity, globalization without marginalization."[13]  This is a form of interdependence shaped by what the United States Catholic Bishops called “basic justice.”  In the bishops’ words, basic justice “demands 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."[14]   Inclusion and participation based on equality are the fundamental marks that should be shaping the social, economic, and political institutions of our globalizing world. 

This vision of solidarity also calls for the development of institutions that will enable marginalized people to have greater voice in the decisions that affect them.  For example, the venues where decisions about indebtedness, trade, and other global economic issues are made presently look like clubs whose members are limited to political and economic elites. This has been called "globalization's democratic deficit."[15]  Overcoming this deficit is essential.  Transnational nongovernmental organizations play an important role in pressing for action on these issues.[16]  The university is surely one of the transnational actors that can be a key actor on this front.  The academic community has an extraordinary capacity for global reflection and communication.  Indeed, pursuit of a global solidarity and justice raises intellectual challenges that only universities are capable of addressing.  

This brings me to a final reflection on the role of the university in promoting the common good.  The challenges we face call us to develop new forms of education for public responsibility for the commonweal.  Our society needs young people educated in the public virtue that will enable them to become good citizens, both in our cities and globally.  In the Jesuit context, we call this forming men and women for others, men and women dedicated to the service of the common good.

            Education in virtue sounds like a rather quaint phrase to describe the task of the contemporary university.  Certainly the days when the university functioned in loco parentis in a moralistic way are over.  However, the idea of the common good that is deeply embedded in the Catholic intellectual tradition possesses some distinctive intellectual resources that are much needed on the American university scene today.  I like to call one of these resources the commitment to intellectual solidarity.  By intellectual solidarity I mean taking other persons, societies, and cultures seriously enough to engage them in conversation and debate about what makes life worth living, including what will make for the good of the city and the globe.  Such a spirit goes beyond tolerant non-interference with the beliefs and life-styles of those who are different.   To be sure, intellectual solidarity recognizes and respects these differences.  But it differs from pure tolerance by seeking positive engagement with the other through both listening and speaking.  It is rooted in a hope that understanding might replace incomprehension and that perhaps even agreement could result.  Where such engaged conversation about the good life begins and develops, a community of freedom begins to exist.

            The Catholic tradition, in its better moments, provides some noteworthy evidence that discourse across the boundaries of diverse communities is both possible and potentially fruitful.  For example, in the first and second centuries, the early Christian community moved from being a small Palestinian sect to active encounter with the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.  In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas once again transformed Western Christianity by appropriating ideas of Aristotle he had learned from Arab Muslims and from Jews.  In the process he also transformed Aristotelian ways of thinking in fundamental ways.  The memory of this history as well as the experience of the Catholic church since the Second Vatican Council leads me to the hope that communities holding different visions of the good life can get somewhere if they are willing to risk engaged conversation and argument about these visions.  We desperately need such hope in the public life of the United States today if we are to address the urgent needs of the urban poor of the U.S. and the poor of Africa I have mentioned.  

            The forum for such discussion is primarily the university.   It is the role of the university—above all of the Catholic university—to retrieve, criticize, and reconstruct understandings of the human good.  The Catholic university, above all, should be a place where professors and students bring their received historical traditions on the meaning of the good life into intelligent and critical encounter with understandings of this good held by other peoples with other traditions.             This has direct implications for the role of religion in the university.  Our culture needs much more conversation about the visions of the human good held by diverse religious communities and real intellectual engagement with these religious visions if we are to avoid the clash of civilizations some see taking shape.  The Catholic tradition and many Protestant traditions as well reject the notion that religious faith must be irrational and, therefore, out of bounds within the intellectual forum of the university.  Faith and understanding are not adversarial but reciprocally illuminating.  This means Christians must be prepared to risk their existing self-understanding through genuine dialogue with the other--whether this other be a secular agnostic, a Christian from another tradition, a Jew, a Muslim, or a Buddhist.[17]  It also invites non-believers to place their self-understanding at risk by serious conversation with religious traditions.

            Our society needs much more imagination in its efforts to deal creatively with its problems.  Religious traditions and communities are among the principal bearers of such imaginative sources for our understanding of the human.  They can evoke not only private self-understanding but public vision as well.  Thus for a society to exclude religious traditions from its intellectual discourse would deprive it of one of is most important resources for a shared vision of the public good.  Religious communities make perhaps their most important contribution to public life through their contribution to such a vision of the public good.  If they seek to make this contribution through a dialogue of mutual listening and speaking with others, it will be fully congruent with the life of a free society.  The principal place where this can happen is the university, as the Catholic tradition has long known.

            Finally this intellectual solidarity must be accompanied by a social solidarity that opens the minds of the students and faculty of the university to the realities of human suffering, such as the high levels of poverty among so many in our inner cities, and by the deprivation, refugee displacement and tragic levels of HIV-AIDS infection across much of the continent of Africa. These are but a few manifestations of the long history of human beings' sinful propensity to treat each other in inhuman ways.  The Catholic university is deeply committed the conviction that a Christian humanism is both possible and required by the dynamic of Christian faith itself.  But today the humanism of the Catholic university must be a social humanism, a humanism that addresses not only the heights to which human culture can rise but also the depths of suffering into which societies can descend.[18] 

There are strong currents in American life today that insulate both professors and students from experience of and academic reflection on the human sufferings in our world.  A university that aspires both to be Catholic and to enhance commitment to the common good must do more than include nods to the importance of social solidarity in its mission statement.  It must translate this importance into teaching and research priorities, and integrate these priorities into its day-to-day activities in classroom and library.  To do so will take both the courage and the humility that the privileged learn only when they encounter real people who face poverty and other forms of suffering.

            Commitment to the common good, therefore, should have both intellectual and social impact on our Catholic universities.  Both intellectual and social solidarity call us to develop new understandings that reach across cultures through genuine dialogue with those who are different.  They require a commitment to understanding what the institutions of our globalizing world are doing to the most vulnerable.  They call for the development of well grounded proposals on how to transform the institutional centers of decision-making in our cities and our globe so they serve all members of the human race, not just the privileged.  In short, they call for research and education that take commitment to the common good as their guiding star. 

            The common good, therefore, challenges us to become the kind of university that will be worthy of both deep human commitment and of faithful Christian engagement.  In my judgment, the common good points the way toward a Catholic university that will have a long and bright future.

Notes