The One of the Many: America’s Struggle for the Common Good by Martin E. Marty
This book, written by Martin Marty, was published 23 years ago but it could have been published today with equal if not greater relevance to the moment we’re living in. It is a short book of about 240 pages. Its essence could be boiled down to an even shorter book, really an essay. Whatever the length, it is powerful and relevant.
I took away three related thoughts:
- The importance of telling and understanding each other’s stories, personally and as special interests, alongside the importance of recognizing the importance of pursing a unifying common good.
- The concept of affection. The value of “having affection” for one another and how that is different than love; it is not as strong as love but terribly important.
- The concept of kinship or kin.
Marty explores the different pulls of “pluralism” and allegiance to the common good. He contrasts the unum and the plures.
There has constantly been in our country tension between the two. Alexander Hamilton in 1802 expressed his fear of the influx of foreigners who must “tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; and to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important. And whatever tends to discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency.”
Our other founders, Franklin and Jefferson, offered similar testimony in defense of the unum, of sameness.
We face the question: How do individual special interest groups themselves co-exist and how do they make contributions to the common good? What we’ve seen in Lebanon and Bosnia to this very day alerts us to the dangers of tribalism, unchecked by republicanism—that is a commitment to see how we do achieve the common good.
One writer came upon an interesting metaphor—the porcupine—to depict civil association. This is a model that allows for both the need to “hover together” and the need to “draw apart.” This metaphor describes citizens in their national and sub-national groupings and as individuals.
James Madison in Federalist No. 51 speaks clearly to the rights of factions and common interest. He recognized the importance of individual factions but he did not want those members to lose the sight of a theme that brings together everyone against the goal of “justice as the end of government.” Justice is a unifying theme for a cohesive sentiment.
Marty wisely writes that “intimate communities, because of the closeness and commitment that they express, depend upon love. Citizens, however, cannot express sentimental attachment or personal affection for all fellow citizens and societies conceived as civil association. They certainly will not credibly display love, because of the impersonality of the bonds of association and the heterogeneity of those who are encompassed by them.”
Here is where the concepts of association, affection and kinship come in. I turn to Procter & Gamble. I’ve often described it as a community, and I still do. Having read this book, I believe that the concept of affection is a very good description of how P&Gers feel about one another. So is kinship. Fellow P&Gers are kin.
Family reunions, just like P&G reunions, bring together kin and affection. They draw on the notion of the “binding tie of cohesive sentiment,” which Felix Frankfurter enunciated.
As I wrote at the beginning, this book was written 23 years ago. It was meant to address the need to resolve the tension between particular interests and factions with the need to pursue the common good. At this moment, I believe we have in Joe Biden a President who instinctively is primed to unify the interests of individual factions, many of whom have been deprived of justice, with the pursuit of a common good, of a binding sentiment--justice and opportunity for all—which can unify us.
Marty’s book serves to illustrate that the search for this unifying end point has been a perpetual one in this country and, indeed, in the history of the world. Despite the challenge, it should not stop us from continuing to pursue it. I feel confident it will be pursued under the current administration. Now, may it only be realized. We need a unifying common vision o
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