The Individual Good vs. the Common Good

Someone has said that after all other motives for art have been discarded, the only one left was self-expression. The Greeks were motivated by the idea of beauty as perfection. The Romans were into gritty realism. The glory of God motivated Christendom art. In fact, most medieval artists didn't even sign their art. The Renaissance recovered the Graeco-Roman portrayal of man but, in the light of Christendom, saw him as made in the image of God. The Romanticists were motivated by nature as the ideal place for man.

Things start to fragment from there. After Christendom the center doesn't hold. Without a conception of the glory of God and man as made and then remade in God's image, man is set adrift. When there is no king in Israel, everyone does what is right in his own eyes. Man's view of himself and the world begins to depreciate until the only thing left is money and experimentation.

Patrick Deneen the author of Democratic Faith (click on the blog title) said in a Mars Hill Audio interview (volume 91) that when he asks his students to define democracy the most common set of answers has to do with the freedom of the individual to pursue his preferences. This is democracy as self-expression.

Deneen points out that this is much different than what Aristotle meant when he defined democracy as "rule and being ruled in turn." Everybody took a turn, even the poor, in Athenian democracy. Today, with the church relegated to the margins of society, it's up to the individual to find or make his own meaning.

The church has been told that it can make no claim on any world except its own. The individual is left to himself. He wanders with no commonly held view of human nature. There is nothing intrinsically bad or good for him. There is only what he wants. In this way, there is no common good there is only the individual good.

Instead of democracy preserving the common good, it is reduced to protecting our individual conceptions of the good. This means the individual can do anything he wants as long as he doesn't physically harm is fellow man. The liberty to swing my fist ends at my neighbors nose. This impoverishes democracy by handing it over to our appetites for sex, money, and power. "It's just business" is really insidious when you think about it.