Personal Destiny & The Common Good

This a bit long but I think an important topic anyway, especially in light of our country's current financial turmoil.

Plus it outlines an interesting convergence of listening, reading and talking that I have been a part of in the last 24 hours.

Stephen and I heard a great interview yesterday on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. Neal Conan interviewed Peter Gosselin, a national economics correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and the author of High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families.

Also yesterday my sister and I were conversing (long distance) on the topic of “individualism” in America and how that fits in with the idea of community and the common good.

Then today I read a portion of an interview of Joe Biden by Katie Couric. In this part of the interview, Biden stated “the people who do not need a new tax cut should be willing, as patriotic Americans, to understand the way to get this economy back up on their feet is to give middle class taxpayers a break.”

Upon hearing this and thinking of my conversation with Kay, I thought about a portion of the TOTN interview where Gosselin takes us back to our countries beginnings. Here is an excerpt from the forward to Gosselin’s book High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families.

(emphasis mine)

To begin to understand this paradox—how the United States as a whole could have grown richer while individuals and families have become financially less secure—and to begin to see whether the American promise endures, it is useful to look to the past, in this case to the distant past, New England in 1620. In that year, as the small sailing ship the Mayflower rode at anchor off the coast of Cape Cod, William Bradford and his fellow Pilgrims faced a crisis: Winter was coming on. Blown off course by storms, they would have to settle far north of their intended destination. And they faced the unexpected prospect of mutiny. Although most of us think of the Mayflower colonists as a tight-knit band of religious dissenters, in fact many on the ship did not share the Pilgrims' religious views; they had been recruited only to help finance the voyage. Now, some of these "Strangers," as the Pilgrims called them, muttered about going their own way, threatening a potentially fatal schism. So Bradford called a meeting. The result was the Mayflower Compact, a terse but unequivocal agreement to "combine ourselves together into a civil body politic" that would create such laws and regulations "as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience." Forty-one of fifty men on board signed on behalf of themselves, their wives, and their children.

The colonists who founded Plymouth Plantation were in the New World for all sorts of reasons—some to pursue religious beliefs, others to seek fortune, still others to enhance what fortunes they already had. And they were a people not much given to compromise. Yet under the pressure of brutal necessity—as many as half would die within a year—they agreed to yield some part of their individual autonomy to the group. More important, they agreed to a certain mutual responsibility for the well-being of one another, even if meeting that responsibility might sometimes clash with their private interests.

This implicit bargain lay at the heart of virtually everything that followed. The Revolution, the Constitution, the rise of a huge and diverse nation, all rested upon a common understanding: The new society would be dedicated to individual, not collective, dreams, but everyone would nevertheless accept some responsibility for each other and for the common good.

Strangely, however, over the past twenty-five years or so, the bargain struck aboard the Mayflower and extended forward through almost four hundred years of often turbulent history has begun to unravel. The basic social contract on which American society has always rested—no matter how imperfectly—has begun to change. The inherent balancing of competing interests that lay at the heart of the bargain has been upset.

The old idea that, even as we pursue our personal destinies, we owe an obligation to each other, to a "civil body politic," and to a "general good," has been shunted aside. In its place, wrapped in the economic doctrine of free markets and the moral precept of personal responsibility, stands a new first principle: Each of us is now expected to forge our own future, free to rise or fall as our talents and luck may dictate.

Any thoughts?

The interview with Peter Gosselin can be heard here