There is now a fundamental mistrust of the notion of the public, notes the writer, activist, and educator Dougald Hine. We know that whenever we hear talk of ‘we the people’ there are always questions about who is that ‘we’, who decides who it is, and who is on the outside of that ‘we’. The ‘we’ is rarely truly Common. Hine notes that there is a deeper reason for that lack of trust, which is about a failure:

the failure of the project of the public, the promise of liberal modernity to construct a neutral space in which we could meet each other as individuals with certain universal rights.

That neutral public space is a chimera. Not only are there the questions about power and inclusion, but it is a project that tends towards abstraction, centralisation and a fierce repudiation of anyone who resists it. But instead of the idea of the public as that which defines what is shared, what language do we have? And that is where the idea of the Commons, of the Common Good, has been recovered, not least through Catholic Social Teaching. Perhaps our Common Good is more to be found in attending to the particularity of our neighbours, as well as owning the opportunities of our own rootedness in traditions and communities. The Common is not discerned in the abstract but, perhaps surprisingly, through proximity, locality, encounter and, indeed, neighbourliness.

In his book Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek offers an example of the discovery of commonality in the face of this project of the public. A Serb, an Albanian and an Austrian pacifist engaged in a televised debate about Kosovo. After the Serb and Albanian presented their contrary views, the pacifist tried to be conciliatory, enjoining them not to shoot at one another and to resist hatred and vengeance. Žižek notes how the two opponents glanced at one another with shared perplexity and thus solidarity. What united them, Žižek argues, was not that the pacifist did not understand the complexity of the ethnic and religious tensions but their surprise that naively the pacifist had not realised that all of the talk of ethnic myths, passions and histories were of course being consciously manipulated by the politicians. Their ethnic particularities were not the cause of the tension but the excuse through which it could be generated. It is a very negative example, to be sure, but it illuminates something of the way that flashes of solidarity, gestures towards what is Common, are not brought about by a process of abstraction but by moments of encounter between people who are different, acknowledging a deeper truth, and often in the face of shared problems. What the example lacks is a shared will to act upon that solidarity, perhaps because the traditions out of which it was forged – cynical political Machiavellianism – is not a tradition weighty enough – or Good enough – to take them that one step further into common action.

The following essays all seek to explore something of how the Common Good might be discerned and proffer examples of the opportunities and limits of such a notion, offering insights into how we might negotiate the differences between us as part of the way in which we discover and live out something that is Common.

Jenny Leith proposes what might be described as an almost ascetical approach. In a world where we are confidently sceptical about everyone else, and equally confident about our own motivations, she counsels seeking first to rid ourselves of our self-deception and acknowledgement that we might actually come to know ourselves through the labour and joy of encountering the other. For Leith, we need to lay hold of the provisionality of our grasp of the Common Good, expect disagreement, and acknowledge that the purging of self-deception and listening to the other’s otherness is a constant part of the negotiation of truly living in Common. That is, plurality and difference are as much baked in to the concept of a Common Good as are unity and solidarity.

Ten years after writing an article in Crucible about community organising across denominations and faiths, Angus Ritchie asks where we are today. He analyses the rise of contemporary populisms in the last decade and articulates what an inclusive populism might look like, drawing on the experience of the development of ‘organised churches’ in the East end of London. Ritchie argues that the listening, learning and acting that the Common Good requires does not entail a distancing from our own particular faithful traditions but a deeper appreciation of our own roots even as we welcome converse with other rich traditions. For Ritchie, as part of this, there is the necessity of developing institutions, what we might call schools of virtue, that enable us to hold tensions and disagreements well.

If Ritchie and Leith look forward in terms of the practices and processes of discerning the Common Good in pluralist communities, then we could say Frankie Ward focuses more on looking back and up. With the help of Edmund Burke, Ward shows how it is that traditions and institutions (again) form us and how they reveal and carry the Good. She uncovers Burke’s Christian Platonism for which the Good is something beyond us, yet given to us in order that we might participate in it. The vehicle for the transmission of that metaphysical rendering of the Good is the life of community over time. Ward, like Ritchie, is looking for the Common Good to offer us resources in a time of populisms, autocracies and rampant individualism.

Andrew Carruthers, with his experience in the sphere of affordable housing, gives us a practical example of the way in which language and practices of the Common Good can be part of Christian witness in the world. He shows how the idea of the Common Good foregrounds conceptions of the social, and theological accounts of the social, and he offers a helpful critique of recent Church reports. In the field of housing he shows how co-operation can trump self-interest and reveals what deeper goods might be part of a Common Good despite surface differences.

In a personal and inspiring reflection, Jenny Sinclair’s Forum article charts the foundation and development of the charity Together for the Common Good (T4CG) and outlines the contemporary challenges we face. Together, the essays in this issue of Crucible are an impassioned call to work towards our Common Good which is, as T4CG describes it:

the shared life of a society in which everyone can flourish as we act together in different ways that all contribute towards that goal, enabled by social conditions that mean every single person can participate. We pursue this goal by working together across our differences, each of us taking responsibility according to our calling and ability.

The Revd Dr Matt Bullimore is Chaplain of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, and a member of the Crucible Editorial Board