Lanka Citizen

Priority: Individual good or collective good?

by citizen-ordinary

This is the part II of an article written in response to the proposals made by the Leader of the Opposition, Ranil Wickremesinghe recently inviting public discussion on what should be the ‘podu yahapatha’ or the common good of Sri Lanka. The proposals yet to be published in detail at the time this article was written, in essence reportedly suggest that our common good should be based on democracy and the market economy. (pl. see Divaina, 21/01/2005).]

In the first part of the article ( pl. see citizenlanka.blogsome.com - ed. ) , I suggested that in determining what is our common good, the crucial issue is whether our understanding of our good life is one that gives priority to the individual good or the collective good.

I want to suggest that when we say that in the industrialized West, the market economy is the basis of the common good, what we, in fact, mean is that it is the individual good and not the common good that is given priority in the collective life of those countries. The belief underlying taking market as the determining principle of the economy is that individuals freely determine what is good for themselves in the exchange in the market place. Here, the good of collective life is conceived as the sum of the goods of the individuals who make up the community. The chief concern of such an understanding of the ‘common good’ is the ‘welfare’ of the individuals through the provision of individual goods. Hence, when we propose the market economy as the guiding principle of the common good, the underlying idea is that the individual good is supreme and not the common good.

The individual good, as it is concerned with the urgent needs of life and self preservation often go against the interest of the collective or the public good, and hence itself cannot be the public good. In other words, accepting the market as the governing principle of the economy cannot be the basis of the collective good except by interpreting the collective good as the sum of the individual goods.

Hence, in discussing what should be our our podu yahapatha, we need to discus whether we accept the idea of the rational, autonomous individual who freely chooses his individual goods in the market place as the basis of the common good, which is, ironically, equivalent to saying that there is no common good but only the individual good. We need to ask whether the right thing to do is to place the individual good before common good or the public interest . It is not the least reason for such a questioning, that unhindered individualism and the predominance given to the free market bode no good for the common good is borne by that, as commonly observed, they produce alienation of individuals from the collective life resulting in much discussed forms of social dislocation found not only in the Industrialized West but also in the industrializing East.

In a world characterized by individualism, politics becomes not an end with intrinsic value but simply a means to assure `welfare` to the individuals in the community by determining government policy. The ‘minimum state’ or the ‘welfare state’ as different understandings of liberalism would have it, is the instrument of such a politics. Thus, the dominance given to the market in an economy makes the idea of democracy itself hollow reducing politics to looking after individual welfare, and citizenship to exercising one’s voting right to elect mangers to run the welfare programs for the individual benefit. Politics thus becomes the business of politicians, bureaucrats and technocrats. Citizens become the recipients of welfare, and consumers and voters. Civil society individuals who seek the restriction of the state to its necessary minimum considering the state as the threat from which the individuals need to be protected, demand for themselves the political power, which they want to deny to the state. Interest groups and lobbyists take precedence over citizens.

I want to suggest that the stronger understanding of our collective concern with politics is that it understands that politics requires an attention to the good of collective life conceived of as other than the sum of the goods of the individuals who make up the community. Without an overriding sense of the common good and a politics based on that, the ordinary citizens have no say in how their lives are governed. I also want to suggest that our common good needs to be based on the political equality of citizens, democracy, not simply in the form of electoral representation, but a democracy where citizens can actively involve themselves in determining what is good for us as a collective. It is in developing such an understanding of our collective life which actively involves citizens beyond electoral politics and therefore being passive recipients of individual welfare whether under liberal or socialist rhetoric, that lies the possibility of developing a Sri Lankan ethos.

Economy or Politics: Which comes first?

Therefore, it can be argued that establishing a market economy is not a prerequisite of democracy. It is rather the place we assign to the market economy in our understanding of collective life that will define our democracy.

We have to accept that entrepreneurship can be utilized for the common benefit and that markets are immensely productive but if we are to preserve our humanity, we ought not allow the free play of elementary human desires at the market to determine how we understand ourselves as human beings. If we want to excel as human beings we cannot allow the market to dictate terms to us, but instead we must use the free play of market forces to our collective benefit in areas where it is appropriate.

Instead of allowing the economy to decide our politics we should make our politics determine the nature of our economy. No politician true to his vocation can seriously say that economics takes priority over politics without losing his credibility as a politician. What we need is to make our democracy work politically. It is politics that reflect the public interest unlike a pre-determined economic model prescribed by technocrats and only ideologically taken to be a collective good but not in practice. This is borne by that around the world, under the neo-liberal market economy the very idea of citizens having their say and act in determining their own collective good has come increasingly under siege. If people have the opportunity for active involvement, to have their say and to act in public life they will be able to choose the economy that they consider is compatible with their aspirations.

It is the public that should determine how to organize our national economy, and what should be considered private goods that are appropriate to be left to the relative free play of the market and what are the public goods that should be collectively managed as to ensure our collective well being. For example, it is not politicians with their pre-determined neo-liberal ideological myths of the virtues of a free market, but the ordinary public, the citizens who use public transport who should collectively determine how we should run our public transport.

Our present understanding of democracy is that we periodically elect representatives to govern us and in the interim we hand over our responsibility as citizens to politicians, bureaucrats, technocrats, civil society individuals, interest groups and lobbyists. This form of representative democracy we inherited from the British needs to be moulded anew into a vibrant public democracy to suit our national ethos. If to invite the public to debate the collective good is to give them the opportunity to participate in determining the collective good, in other words, the first move in the direction of a genuine democratic practice, then we need to take such an invitation to develop a new political culture, to its logical conclusion, by developing a rich public life beyond the level of election rhetoric, where in all matters of collective life, the public is purposively given the opportunity to get actively involved. It is of such imaginative mind and action that true statesmanship is made.

We have to agree that the key to developing a new political culture for the new generations to come is to move away from the rancorous nature of much of politics which has become the bane of Sri Lanka lately, and engage in political dialogue and conversation based on civility. The civility we need to inject into our political life has to be based on the respect for the other whose different opinion we must try to understand as presenting us with a different perspective of the world we commonly share, which appears true for him or her just as much as our own perspective appears true for us. The real political issue is to develop a common understanding out of such diverse perspectives on our common world to make our collective life stable and peaceful.

(For some of the ideas in this article, the writer is indebted to Benjamin R. Barber’s book Strong Democracy, University of California Press )

Originally published in The Island (http://www.island.lk/2005/02/09/features1.html)

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