The Good in Common

WALK ALONG THE STREETS OF ANY Canadian city for a few minutes and you’re inevitably presented with a conundrum. There at the front entrance of a store or on a busy pedestrian corner is a homeless individual seeking help. All at once you are confused – to help or journey by?This isn’t a post about poverty, but it is about Canadian citizens being confronted with the troubling possibility that our systems of compassion are failing. Author Robert Bellah put it poignantly regarding the American context: “… the difficulty of being a good person in the absence of a good society.” Either way, whether we withhold money from that homeless person or provide some spare change, we inwardly understand that neither option is the best one. In Canada – a compassionate nation – we come to see that our systems and institutions of well-being are failing, and because they are, we are faced with countless individual decisions every day to fill the gap.Whether it’s about poverty, post-secondary education, Indigenous people, or trying to launch a startup business, we eventually come face-to-face with the idea that our “good” society might not be so great after all. At some point we bought into the idea that “loving our neighbour” meant government taking care of them exclusively. For a time it appeared to work, but then financial struggles came; we forgot to collectively fund our compassion. Where we had grown content with pursuing our individual options free of society’s greater challenges - poverty, climate change, political dysfunction, or growing deficits, to name a few – we’ve now come hard up against these realities in ways that face us everyday. We failed to comprehend that in granting the unending requests for cheaper credit, and the diminishing of corporate and personal taxes, that the bank balance for our public life together was in arrears.Ultimately, we come to our greatest difficulty: by increasingly losing trust in our institutions, we are losing the capacity to care for ourselves in significant fashion. Thus personal acts of charity replace what once were more equitable government programs. The declining public support of research regarding climate change gives way to blue boxes. Self-help employment programs emerge when meaningful work across the various economic spectrums declines through a lack of oversight and pivotal investment.And so we are left with the homeless person before us, and the ethical decision as to what to do about his or her condition. Somehow the greatness of our society seems diminished each time we are confronted with such choices. We know we can make differences individually, but we also understand that only the collective actions of all citizens through their shared institutions and initiatives can address the myriad challenges before us. To solve our daunting problems, or even deal with the sense of hopelessness inside of ourselves, it is necessary that we enhance and improve our capacity to think and act through our institutions.It would be correct to say that we form our institutions, just as they have formed us, and our outlook on life. Today we are tempted to believe that all we require are committed individual actions, governed by some fair-minded rules and regulations, to solve our problems. Except that we aren’t. Added to such commendable efforts must come the collective resources of institutional support. If the greatest problems that confront us are collective in nature – finance, government, poverty, corporate – then only a gathered response from all of us will overcome such challenges. Social commentator Dennis McCann said it suitably:

“It is central to our very notion of a good society that it is an open quest, actively involving all of its members. The common good is the pursuit of the good in common.”