Common Sense at 250
Idly browsing social media is not a total waste of time. Now and then, some post that offers no particular insight by itself will set your thoughts on a certain track, leading you to read something you should have read years ago as part of a general education, but never did. You think; you read; with luck you come out wiser.
So it was in mid-January as I was scrolling through X over my morning coffee. A tweet from the Department of Homeland Security scolded Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for having released 470 criminal illegal aliens back onto the streets of his state instead of helping ICE to detain them. "It is common sense," said DHS. "Criminal illegal aliens should not be released back onto our streets."
Of course not; but the phrase "common sense" snagged my attention. I am a big fan of common sense and too frequently find myself lamenting the paucity of it in today's social and political discourse. No, race and sex are not "social constructs," they are biological realities. Yes, criminals and lunatics should be humanely incarcerated where they cannot harm the rest of us or each other. No, the world's civilized nations should not throw open their borders to settlers from the uncivilized zones.
Kipling's poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings is an old favorite satirizing the utopian pretensions of the progressives of his day:
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
The pundits whose writings I turn to most eagerly are those who write with common sense — my colleagues here at Chronicles magazine, for instance. Wait, though: wasn't that phrase foundational to our country, to these United States? Didn't Tom Paine's pamphlet Common Sense inspire our Revolution and subsequent Independence? Had I read it? I had not. Nursing my cup of coffee that mid-January morning, I blushed with solitary shame.
Just then, the sylph of Coincidence fluttered by. Looking up Paine's pamphlet on reference websites I learned that its first edition had been printed in Philadelphia on Jan. 10th 1776 — a quarter-millennium ago to the week! The printing was of 1,000 copies: they were all sold within days. I went directly to Gutenberg.org and read the entire pamphlet. Then I hiked down to my local public library and learned from a biography by Craig Nelson that Common Sense was America's first bestseller, with as many as 250,000 copies sold in 1776.
The author of Common Sense was a key figure in this country's Revolution, much more so than I had previously appreciated. (Although it is probably not true, as once thought, that Paine coined the name "United States of America.")
Like most Enlightenment intellectuals Paine was keenly interested in "natural philosophy"" nowadays called "science." Why should not society and politics be explained by laws like those that Isaac Newton and others had recently discovered, revolutionizing European thought? In his great pamphlet Paine yoked its title to those same laws, urging readers to examine the Colonies' connection with Britain "on the principles of nature and common sense."
That connection is, however, very much of his time. It would be harder to make today, common sense in the sciences having suffered some cuts and abrasions during the 20th century. For example, we have since 1905 had the Special Theory of Relativity to tell us that with the best possible means of propulsion, a trip to a solar system beyond our own would take many years of the astronauts' lives; and that on their return to Earth they would find the home planet and its inhabitants older not by those years but by decades, perhaps centuries. Quantum Mechanics likewise defies common sense, as in the case of Schrödinger's cat, whose state of unobserved quantum superposition keeps him both alive and dead simultaneously.
Even mathematics, queen of the sciences and best-loved child of pure logic, scoffs at common sense. The Banach-Tarski Theorem of 1924 assures us that a solid sphere — no cavities or fissures — can be divided into a finite number of pieces which can then, without deformation, be reassembled into an equally solid sphere twice as big. (Or a trillion times as big, whence the title of Leonard Wapner's 2005 pop-math classic The Pea and the Sun.
So common sense does not embrace all of reality, as Thomas Paine thought. (Although Bertrand Russell did not quite, as a theologian charged in 1915, say that "common sense is the metaphysics of savages.") It is, however, still superior to superstition, prejudice, wishful thinking, and the other errors Paine deplores in Common Sense. Theoretical science and math may occasionally offend the gods of the copybook headings, but in our social and political concerns those deities should reign supreme.