I used to think of “public life” (the life we share with neighbors and strangers, in public space) as the basic concept in the study of politics. I now think a better concept is “common life.” Politics does not equal publicity: it depends also (more?) on what we encounter in silence and in solitude.
From the second of Wendell Berry’s 1979 Sabbath poems. This seems to me like the place to begin thinking about our common life: that our most important connections are mysteries, matters to be approached with reverence and without undue claims to comprehension. This means that we should not fear to ask about the nature of our connections–to push past what’s historically situated or culturally specific, moving toward what’s true–because what we find when we move toward truth will not be the kind of secure, transparent knowledge on which claims of overweening authority can be based.