Tag: Contempt

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The Common Good

Now that we have considered the three foundational truths offered by Pope Leo XIV in Magnifica Humanitas, we can begin exploring his five principles of Catholic social teaching: 1) the common good; 2) the universal destination of goods; 3) subsidiarity; 4) solidarity; and 5) integral human development.

“The common good” is a principle going back at least as far as Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). Throughout the centuries, professors, popes, and politicians have debated vigorously over what it means – or they used to. When is the last time you heard “the common good” discussed in a major Presidential debate? According to AI, the last time that happened was 2004, and it was only a fleeting reference.

Pope Leo repeats the definition of the common good offered by the bishops of the world when they gathered over sixty years ago during the Second Vatican Council: the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily (n. 60).

We are not speaking here of a mathematical sum. As Leo describes it, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” The common good is always a “more” that transcends the various individuals and interests. When human beings learn to live in healthy interdependence, new possibilities of flourishing emerge, in a way that benefits each and all of the participants.

Leo was a longtime monk in the Augustinian order. He understands how a community with a shared vision can experience far more abundance than isolated individuals. I got a taste of this myself five years ago, during my three months of sabbatical at a Benedictine monastery. In their case, the shared vision comes from Saint Benedict’s Rule for Monks, one of the most-read leadership books of all time.

If you’ve ever read the Rule, you can see that Saint Benedict (480-547) is both idealistic and practical. He offers adaptability and accommodation to the struggles of some, while drawing from the strengths of all. I was amazed at what a community of twenty monks was able to attain, far beyond what twenty isolated individuals could. I think, by contrast, of what daily life is like for a single parent, or even for a diocesan priest living in relative isolation. For those who stay in isolation, life easily sinks into sheer survival, and any imagination of abundance steadily withers.

The monastery was no Eden. If you know me, you know that I am not naïve about human weaknesses.  I noticed plenty of quirks and faults. The monks were a typical cross-section of the human community: saints and sinners, laborers and freeloaders, listeners and chatterboxes, and everything in between. Flaws and lurking conflicts notwithstanding, it was easy to detect a genuine concern for other brothers and a strongly felt sense of abiding together for the sake of a “more.” It stirred desire in my heart.

The cynic might suggest that this is all well and good for an autonomous community of monks, but impossible in a pluralistic society. How can people with diametrically opposed values possibly share a vision for human flourishing?

Pope Leo insists, “we must not lose hope” (n. 64). So do I.

First of all, if you know Catholic communities, you know that there is rarely ideological alignment! The monastery was no different. You could find a full spectrum of political, ecclesiological, and liturgical views. Very often, they agreed to disagree, while choosing to share a larger vision together.

More foundationally, even the most polarized human beings have far more in common than what we allow to divide us. To overcome the contempt and polarization, Pope Leo calls for a “culture of encounter,” in which we learn how to dialogue with those who are different than we are.

My hero in this regard is Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). He was always eager to learn from people who saw the world differently than he did: his fellow university scholars, the ancient Greeks, and his Jewish and Muslim contemporaries. His tendency was to agree with the majority of what each scholar said, and then draw one or two brilliant distinctions. What especially stands out is how well he represents other people’s views. I have never seen a passage in which he sets up a straw man argument against those he disagrees with. I have never seen him resorting to sarcasm, contempt, or name-calling to make his point. He listens attentively, eager to glean all that that is good and true and beautiful. He discerns and makes distinctions, with full respect for the dignity of each human person.

One of my favorite things to do is to meet human beings who are radically different than I am, to hear their story, and to learn why they are so passionate about something. When they realize that I genuinely want to understand, and have zero interest in condemning them, most of them open up with curiosity and interest. Often enough, they shed tears, accustomed to being pre-judged. Every human has a deep desire to be heard and understood. There is no reason why I cannot seek first to understand someone before I begin to disagree. Moreover, my disagreement will be unfounded if I have not really taken the time to listen.

Here we can already see one common point of a shared vision: the golden rule, as applied to listening and dialogue. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Do I desire others to listen to what I have to say, and to understand what I have to say? Then, surely, I can be willing to do the same for others.

I would also suggest the golden rule in place of the weaponizing of shame and contempt that leads to what some call “cancel culture.” If someone else’s views or lifestyle elicits a strong reaction in me, the easy temptation is to think or speak with contempt, to call names, or to exclude them from a place at the table.  This is not a “liberal” or “conservative” thing. I notice people of all ideologies engaging in this kind of weaponized contempt. I notice myself doing it occasionally. Couldn’t people of differing views agree not to demonize the other? Human beings are not the real enemy.

Committing to listen and understand, committing to allow each other to have differing opinions, not to expect everyone else to be like me—these are all early steps in what Leo calls a “culture of encounter” that allows for healthy dialogue. He is hopeful that encounter and dialogue open up new possibilities for diverse human beings to embrace a shared vision together.

Without encounter, without dialogue, without putting in the effort to seek the common good, human existence degenerates into a power struggle, fueled by fear, suspicion, and contempt. Whoever successfully seizes power gets to oppress and “cancel” those who don’t. They get to gloat in their “winning.” But they will never experience rest or peace because they are always under the threat of being overthrown and canceled by “those people,” who will now feel justified in seeking vengeance. And the cycle goes on and on.

“My brothers and sisters, these things ought not be so” (James 3:10). Humans were gifted with a capacity for communication and speech so that we could lift one another up and experience “more” together—not so that we could tear one another down.

We cannot expect AI to contribute to the common good. Each of those models is trained to adapt itself to what each user wants. Each model operates by aggregating data and using mathematical probability to apply that data to the “dialogue” it simulates with the user. Developers can attempt to keep their models fenced in with rules. Rules are not the same thing as the human perception that something is truly good or truly evil. The common good is not an aggregate of rules. It is a “more” that is achieved when diverse human beings commit together to a shared vision of flourishing in which all can benefit. Each and all of us have a choice to make about whether we will commit ourselves to the common good.

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Descartes’ Demand for Clarity

“I think, therefore I am.”

This is another quote we all heard as children. René Descartes (1597-1650), like Francis Bacon, represents a new era in the West, one which winds up exalting mathematical precision and technological dominance over receptivity, relationships, and human integration.

Many a college philosophy class begins by reading Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. “First philosophy” was, at the time, another term for metaphysics – not in the contemporary sense of pursuing occult knowledge, but in the classical and medieval sense of pondering existence itself; what does “to be” really mean?

Like Bacon before him, Descartes spurns the previous approaches. Rather than taking existence as a given and then reflecting more deeply upon it, he begins philosophy with doubt. He insists upon clear and distinct ideas – the kind brought by mathematics. He opens his musings as a solitary “I.” Can I really trust my five senses? How can I be certain I am not deceived? I seem to perceive the warm fireplace before me or the soft chair beneath me, but those perceptions are not clear and distinct like the truth that 2+2=4.

After doubting that the universe around me, other beings, or God exist, I realize that there is one thing I cannot doubt – that I doubt.  If I doubt, that means there is an “I” who is doubting. Therefore, I exist.  From there, I can reason to clear and distinct ideas about God and the world around me. So goes the reasoning of Descartes.

In his demand for clear and distinct ideas, Descartes prioritizes quantitative analysis over our awareness of what he calls “secondary” qualities – which include the perceptions of our five senses, but also things like goodness and beauty and love.

In the spirit of Francis Bacon one generation before, Descartes seeks power. He expresses his hope that this technical and tactical shift of knowledge will allow humans to become “like masters and possessors of nature.” Perhaps, he suggested in his Discourse on Method, it will even free us from illness and aging.

Can you see the connection with our contemporary culture and our obsession with looking forever youthful, or our exaltation of doing and performing over being and relating? Today, the transhumanist movement seductively offers us the dream of Descartes: we can seize the power to transcend our very mortality by means of technological modifications to our humanity. Terrifying.

I began studying philosophy thirty years ago, and am grateful for many wise professors, not so much for the information they communicated as the shared pursuit of wisdom in a respectful and playful environment. For most of them, philosophy was a way of being, not a collection of ideas.

In 1998, just as I was beginning my graduate courses in philosophy, John Paul II published his encyclical letter Fides et Ratio (“Faith and Reason”). He called for a renewal of philosophy as a shared quest for wisdom and meaning. Human beings, he said, are philosophers (“lovers of wisdom”) by our very nature. We are curious. We desire to seek and to find, only to discover that there is still more to discover.

Genuine pursuit of wisdom, John Paul says, begins not with doubt but with childlike wonder. Nor is it an isolated “I” who thinks, but a “we.” The quest for wisdom is always a communal experience. Socrates did not seclude himself in a dark room; he walked the streets of Athens with other wisdom seekers and engaged in meaningful dialogue. Their pursuit of wisdom was a shared effort, trusting in the complementary gifts offered by community, in which the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

I remember feeling frustrated reading the Dialogues of Plato (which always feature his mentor Socrates dialoguing with others on a particular theme). Just when I thought I was getting the point, Socrates would disprove it, and begin exploring a new line of inquiry. Over time, he and his students would gain some real insights, but the conversation would result more questions than answers. I found that frustrating. In my own way, I was much like Descartes, harboring a felt need for clear and distinct ideas. I didn’t like the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing, the patient waiting for wisdom to emerge.

I even felt a clenching inside when I read John Paul II’s insistence on “the primacy of the inquiry” – that it is more important to keep seeking wisdom that to feel like you have arrived. At the time, I was keenly interested in apologetics. I felt a certain satisfaction in having clear and distinct answers to those who would dare attack my Catholic faith. I was only beginning to realize the reality that God is always greater, that he is always infinitely beyond my limited insight. Life provided plenty of painful opportunities to keep learning humility.

In the last decade, I’ve become much more trauma-informed. I still see the 1500’s and 1600’s through the lens of revolutionary philosophical ideas, many of which caused harm. But now I appreciate how much Europe was experiencing a collective trauma response. It was an era that boiled with contempt and violence – from the polemical divisions of Protestants and Catholics to the ongoing wars with the Turks to the resurgence of slavery and human exploitation in newly discovered lands. When we feel threatened, we gravitate to black-and-white thinking. Then, like Bacon and Descartes, we demand clear and distinct ideas. We are not okay with abiding in a messy in-between. Like Bacon and Descartes, we seize strategies that allow us to feel in control. We refuse to tolerate any experience of powerlessness. In those centuries, many Europeans (by no means all) felt entitled to power and privilege at expense of slaves or indigenous peoples. These days, many Americans (by no means all) feel entitled to live in “the greatest nation on earth,” with little regard for the status of immigrants or impoverished regions of the earth that serve our interests. Deep down, we know that our comfortable and privileged lives come at a cost to others, but we choose to ignore the signs.

Sadly, there are many Christians who style themselves as “conservative” or “traditional” without realizing how very modern their political and philosophical views are. Such is the rotten fruit of fear-mongering and the seduction of worldly power. It becomes black-and-white and “us versus them.” Too many times, such attitudes have allowed the rise of dictators.

When we find ourselves demanding certainty and clarity, we might become curious and ask why it must be so. There are so many different kinds of certainty: the clarity offered by mathematics, yes, but also the certainty of feeling loved and cherished, the security of belonging to a stable community in which everyone matters, or the shared delight in amazing art or music. Perhaps you have experienced what the poet T.S. Eliot describes: “…music heard so deeply / that it is not heard at all, / but you are the music / while the music lasts.”

The human experience is so amazing when we open ourselves to it – all the more so when we learn to trust each other and open ourselves to the mysteries of life with childlike wonder. It can be tempting to grasp at power and control during times of duress. Then it becomes easy to loathe “those people” and view them with suspicion and contempt. The cost of that kind of “freedom” is perpetual hypervigilance. No, thank you.

I refuse to succumb to that seduction. Jesus is the great “I AM.” Therefore, our restless and racing thoughts can be at peace. He holds us all securely in the Father’s love. He delights in every human being, image bearers that we are. He is grieved by all our contempt for each other, but not worried. He is the unconquerable Lamb, once slain, and forever risen. The peace of Christ is not a clear and distinct idea. It’s the fruit of an abiding relationship.