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U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has written a book, a neo-progressive manifesto that dismisses conservative realities – the free market, for instance -- as “cults” or heretical departures from the political cult of neo-progressivism. His book is titled Crisis of the Common Good and is certain to be received with worshipful hosannas by the legacy media’s leftist chorus.
The title of the book is itself a knockoff of Robert Reich’s earlier work entitled The Common Good. Most of what is praiseworthy about Murphy is derivative. Murphy’s book is subtitled, The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America.
In a confessional sense, Murphy does not address in his book in what sense the neo-progressive movement has “broken” America. But then, the book is not a confessional. It is a tangle of wormwood eaten, boastful, and dry as dust campaign solicitations.
The expression “the common good” has a long and honorable literary lineage. “I have seen Americans making great and sincere sacrifices for the key common good,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “and a hundred times I have noticed that, when needs be, they almost always gave each other faithful support.”
The expression “common good” is useful when it describes voluntary efforts on the part of good people to support those in need, and the need need not be exclusively monetary. To move what is called by Christians caritas from the personal religious realm to the public political realm diminishes to some extent the virtue of godly love. St. Thomas Aquinas understood caritas to mean “the friendship of man for God.” It was, he wrote, the most excellent of virtues, in accord with 1 Cor 13:13 (’but the greatest of these is love’).
Once doing good is no longer a voluntary affair exercised by individual good people towards those in need the goodness is diminished; it becomes an undifferentiated good performed by political operatives for, to put it bluntly, self-inflating reasons. Politicians, we ought always to remember, are not “gods” of the polis.
“Let the good you do be done in secret, so that your giving may be in secret and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” is an admonition unpracticed by politicians operating in the political realm, where virtue is not its own reward. Politicians generally ask others to contribute money to their reelection efforts so that, parceling out the money, they may be bathed in a derivative virtue. Murphy does this often and well in his new book.
Some reviews of the book have been justly critical, others unintentionally amusing.
The book touches on a lamentable decline of civic virtue and shared purpose in the United States over the past fifty years. Murphy attributes the decline to six “false cults”: profit, globalism, technology, consumption, credentialism, and corruption, forces that have resulted in communal fragmentation, the “undermining of democracy”, the newest Democrat Party campaign catchphrase, spiritual rootlessness, and a “winner takes all” political process that has empowered the wealthy and well-connected, according to Amazon’s Political Wire.
Murphy here is biting off considerably more than he has chewed in his book, though all of these talking points have been mentioned by him countless times on his campaign trails.
Publishers Weekly kindly characterizes the book a “sharp but uneven analysis.” Murphy is praised for his insights into alienation and economic disparity, unoriginal talking points. However, the publication notes, some historical examples and policy proposals are “unevenly developed.” The review “highlights Murphy’s personal anecdotes, such as his son’s youth hockey experience and a meeting with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, as effective illustrations of broader societal trends, though some historical references are considered shaky.”
The review does not touch upon Murphy’s fairly recent separation from his wife and children as an instance of spiritual rootlessness or the “quiet desperation” that, Henry David Thoreau tells us, is the lot of most men. People who frequent their mail boxes often, Thoreau tells us, “have not heard from themselves in a long while.”
St. Augustine, still bathed in paganism despite the efforts of his Christian mother to bring him to the faith, prays to the Christian God to lead him from erotic temptation – “but not yet.”
Augustine and Thoreau are mentioned here only to demonstrate that the concerns tormenting Murphy are not new. They are as ancient as sin and redemption.
A personal narrative such as The Confessions of St. Augustine written by a re-Christianized politician would be most welcomed in our age of rootlessness and spiritually murderous quiet desperation, but Murphy’s book, much too self-celebratory, is not it.
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