Individual Choice and the Public Good
Working toward the public good is always a thoughtful exercise in working with limits and possibilities. However, burdened with excessive emphasis on empiricist materialism and statistical determinism, real possibilities may not be encouraged. Professor Raghavan Iyer writes, “Seemingly transfixed between political amorality and administrative rationalization, we are far removed from both classical and modern conceptions of political wisdom, and they may seem to have little relevance to the facts.” p. 154 Parapolitics.
At root is the issue of free choice with the power of quickening technological determinism. Emmanuel Mesthene writes, “Given the inadequacy of old formulas, it may be that inquiry into the problem of human choice and effective citizenship in a technological society is more fruitfully conducted in terms of the kinds of commitment that individuals living in such a society are called upon to make. As at once individuals and social beings, all of us eventually come to some balance, appropriate to each of us, between the relative degree of commitment we are prepared to make to private and public goals and values. Each of us must achieve a symbiotic relationship between our private and public selves…” Technological Change, 1970, p.88.
Sociologist Raymond Boudon concludes, “In my view the time has come to bridge the rather absurd gulf between the image of man as a rational being and master of his destiny–an image inherited from the Enlightenment and reinforced by economic theory–and that of man as a passive being flung about at the mercy of the elements which sociology propounds. I am convinced that man’s real image is different. I see it as a cross between the limitations of individual circumstance and the possibilities opened up by free will.”
Iris Murdoch writes, “Man is not a combination of an impersonal rational thinker and a personal will. He is a unified being who sees, and who desires in accordance what he sees, and who has some continual slight control over the direction and focus of his vision.” p. 40 Sovereignty of Good. As such the human being has a self-reflective capability associated with the ever unfolding potentials of the mind warmed by the heart. Plato suggests the immortal soul is always attracted to the “good” but must struggle whole-heartedly with the cave of ignorance and lesser loves. Every human being, Plato tells us, can uplift their aspiration and attention, combining Eros and reason, to turn toward the illumination of the “good”. See Plato The Republic.
Each person is their own philosopher: exemplifying a love of wisdom while letting go of false identifications and partialities. As the philosopher Robert Crosbie writes, “Higher planes of our being cannot be found unless they are sought.” One cannot expect to go from punctuated emotions to universal inspiration, but can gain glimpses through carefully and slowly inching one’s way using innate reasoning abilities, aided by universal ideas, in creating uplifting thoughts and wholesome choices in daily life given the limitations of circumstances.
Participating in a moral community allows for lifelong learning and testing the symbiosis of our private and public selves. Eros can combine with fellowship so as to draw human affinities while softening the mind. Public reasoning enables mutual understanding and making new, possibly more rounded and unifying conceptions, of different standpoints.
The polis is the classical archetype for testing one’s ideas in public life in a moral community. “The Greek idea of the polis was originally seen as a community of men, a society of moral and rational agents. If every man has some innate recognition of the true and the good, enriched by active participation in a theater of political interaction, then a community of citizens is a moral community. It necessarily rests upon and reinforces social sympathy born of self-awareness and shared consciousness of the “species nature”, the common humanity and essential similarity, of human beings in diverse roles and situations. With this perspective, it is possible to derive a viable conception of the common good or public welfare from the individual’s pursuit of the good.” p.4 and p.5 Parapolitics.
Through contemplation and meditation, shutting off the buzz of sensory allurements in the mind, a person can gain a critical distance needed from the flow of events to become an engaged yet detached participant in “the polis”. To fix or improve a car, one needs to get out of it. To develop our potential and contributor to the quality of life for each and all, one needs to structure a time and place where one can leave the flood of worldly circumstances and social media demands on one hand and the passions and partialities of one’s own mind on the other. One must hit the pause and refresh button to approach clarity of mind, even a sense of humility. Over time these practices can quicken our perceptions about how to use ourselves as agents for the good.
Tolstoy wrote that if criminals collude about the bad, why can’t people collude about the good? Thus, “Parapolitically, the needless oscillation between coercive establishment and anti-establishment politics may be avoided by realizing the ever-present possibility of interstitial politics. This encompasses those pivotal points in political structures which reveal the potential or free space in human encounters is always greater than the bounded, visible arenas of political activity. Paradoxically, institutional limitations might suggest human possibilities when limits (in a Pythagorean or mathematical sense) are properly understood. Critical distance allows perception of vital points and hidden interstices through individuals may sense the undefined ontological plenty within which defined politics occurs. Great opportunities lie before statesmen and citizens at every turn, but they can only be seen and seized with calmness and clarity, nourished by a reasoned conviction of the supreme potential of all men (and women) to participate in a truly universal vision.” p.352 Parapolitics.
Thomas Paine “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
