The rationale of common sense

“These are the times that try men’s souls.”

Thomas Paine begins the first of his “The American Crisis” essays with that memorable sentence. It was published Dec. 19, 1776. George Washington found the essay so inspiring that he had it read to his troops before they crossed the Delaware River for the battle in Trenton later that month.

The essay does not carry Paine’s name but “By the Author of Common Sense,” with “Common Sense” being the title of the widely-read and influential pamphlet for which Paine was already famous.

But was it common sense to go to war against Great Britain and its powerful army? And gamble on establishing a new government? That depends on how common sense is defined.

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense,” Gertrude Stein said shortly before her death in 1946. At the time, Ed Sullivan was still on the radio and would not reach television audiences until two years later. Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, would not be born for another 38 years. By Stein’s reasoning, there’s even less common sense now. But that means less of … what?

“Common sense is not so common, ” Voltaire claimed, which puts a positive value on the phrase, but also renders it meaningless.

Ralph Waldo Emerson supposedly described common sense as “genius dressed in its working clothes,” but his friend Henry David Thoreau had a more skeptical perspective: “Common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.”

Mark Twain put a finer point on that negative interpretation when he reportedly defined common sense as “the ability to look at the earth and see that it is obviously flat.”

But if asked, many people today would probably describe common sense positively as a kind of sound practical reasoning and decision-making ability, based on self-evident facts, that most people share. That broadly fits with common sense realism, a school of thought that developed during the Scottish Enlightenment and influenced some intellectuals associated with America’s founding.

In his book “The Cave and the Light,” Arthur Herman argues that common sense realism was so popular in America because it has “a built-in democratic bias”: It belongs to the rich and the poor, the educated and uneducated. “In a democratic America … common sense would have to rule.”

An enthusiastic proponent was John Witherspoon, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, president of Princeton University and a mentor to many prominent figures, including James Madison. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and John Marshall were also among those associated with common sense realism.

Of those impressive figures, only the cantankerous Adams did not own slaves.

Herman writes that common sense realism “collapsed on the issue of slavery,” arguing that reasonable people who relied on “common sense principles” could see slavery leading to disaster, but were unable to avoid it. “It took Abraham Lincoln,” he writes, “to realize that abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison had seen a higher truth that a common sense man like Stephen Douglas failed to recognize.”

All times, to some degree, try men’s souls.

People sometimes use common sense as a rationalization for short-sightedness, self-interest, callousness, even cruelty. To Albert Einstein, common sense was no more than “the collective prejudices acquired by the age 18.”

Thomas Paine, whose name is most readily associated with common sense, was also concerned with the common good. In his book “Rights of Man,” he says a country can be proud of its government when even the poor live decent lives, when the jails are empty, when the streets are free of beggars, and when the aged are cared for. (Also, the taxes are not oppressive.)

A deist, Paine was a harsh critic of Christianity, but his view has similarities with the vision of society that Pope Francis described in his Feb. 11 letter to the U.S. bishops on immigration. “The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all … welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable,”  the pope wrote.      

He goes on to urge the bishops to meditate on “the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” exemplified in the parable of the Good Samaritan.

The parable illustrates a simple idea: One loving God is the creator of the whole human race, so the concept of neighbor extends to everyone, especially those most in need.

That’s just common sense.

Carl Peters is former managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.