Program: In a bespoke and individualistic age, are we losing a sense of “the common”?

The idea of the “the common” has fallen on hard times. In the nineteenth century, shaped as it was by post-revolutionary enthusiasm for the moral possibilities of democratic life — chief among them being a realisation of anti-aristocratic egalitarianism — the recovery of a proper sense of the common was held out as a kind of ideal, something to which citizens might aspire, rather than something for which they merely settle.

In the United States, the inherent dignity of the common was the creed of radical egalitarians like Mark Twain and Walt Whitman: through their prose and poetry, they sought to make visible what it is that joins human beings, no matter their class or caste or station — what Whitman called humanity’s “common level”. Often times, this amounted to little more than the easy familiarity expressed through casual greetings and the unpretentiousness of bodily needs.

“The common”, after all, holds within it its Latin root, munus, the notion of a duty or debt owed to persons as person. And all the variations on this term that continue to circulate in our language — community, communion, communication, commune, communality — bear the same idea of that which is in-between, that which is shared. “The common”, moreover, is the foundation our claims to justice as fairness, as an expression of the equal (hence “common law”).

And yet not only are our lives increasingly bespoke — tailor-made through the network of algorithms that increasingly envelope us, what Kyle Chayka has called “Filterworld” — but we are also constantly seeking ways of distinguishing ourselves from others. Sometimes this takes the form of individualism, sometimes of polarisation, sometimes of tribalism, sometimes of identity, sometimes of contempt. The things we buy, the culture we consume, even claims of “morality” are used as expressions of status over against others.

What is being lost through it all is our sense of the humanity we share — a humanity whose inherent vulnerability to misfortune, malfeasance and violence makes us dependent on one another (John Rawls called it the willingness to “bear one another’s fate”). But when politics seems now so eager to exploit our differences, to appeal to our resentments, could it be that the enjoyments of culture, the gathering around objects of beauty, could help us rediscover what we have in common?

Guest: Over his forty-year career in the media, Jonathan Green has been an editor, writer, commentator, and broadcaster. He is the host of “Blueprint For Living” on RN. He’s written a wonderful piece in the May issue of The Monthly, titled “A common good: In the age of the individual, are we losing our sense of a shared humanity?”