Tocqueville famously said, “I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.” It's a good insight to a country that once put its emphasis on common sense realism. Yes, the intellectuals can explain things better, but it does not mean they have the depth to understand Truth. Take Rousseau, Marx, Foucault—good intellectual masturbators, bad lovers of Reality. In fact, the intellect is quite the trickster and can take us further away from Reality.
I'm reading this short, but interesting book by Robert Curry called Common Sense Nation. So what exactly do we mean by common sense? It's true some may say what's common sense for you is not the same for me (especially if you studied in a left-leaning humanities department). In capturing the what we believe to be fundamentally true—or the axioms necessary for us to reason—we are pulling from and formed by many sources. Some of us these apriori sources are from lived experience, tradition, sentiments, observations, and culture. There are also the more innate sources of our conscious if we are open to our deeper instincts and intuitions. All of these aspects are prior to even philosophy—consider this the basis of Reason (of the whole person) verses reason (as just the intellect).
And just because you can't really say it eloquently, does not mean you don't know it elegantly. I recall Rudolf Steiner, having been born into a working class family, never lost his appreciation for the lives of the common folk and for what he called the “peasant wisdom.” He often saw more wisdom in the peasantry than he did among intellectual elites, where he found too much arrogance and a lack of open heartedness and simplicity.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila says it best: “Reality can not be represented in a philosophical system.” Or at least not the way philosophy is depicted these days. There is a way to philosophize that goes beyond mere intellectual rumination—where we turn our view towards the totality. Josef Pieper discusses this as a philosophy with a Christian orientation—which was never based on a system, but a Person:
“Christian philosophy is more complicated because it does not permit itself to arrive at "illuminating" formulations through ignoring, selecting, or dropping certain areas of reality; and this is because, placed in a fruitful state of unease through its glimpse of revealed truth, it is compelled to think more spaciously and, above all, not to be content with the superficiality of any rationalistic harmony.”
But the bad news is we eventually got away from sensibilities that were common, and educated people in more sophisticated theories of rationalistic harmony—and often even disharmonious. Take today, the individual with agency and universal values as objective truths have been undermined by the idea that we are impotent to external forces (the “system”). We are all now just victims of social constructions. The only way out is to dismantle the system, and subjugate the individual to the new utopian power grab.
Curry lists out some of the self-contradictory premises that has resulted from postmodernists, which in turn, often creates problems not based on reality...
- On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.
- Values are subjective—but sexism and racism are really evil.
- Technology is bad and destructive—and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others.
- Tolerance is good and dominance is bad—but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows, and opposing views are not tolerated.
Friedrich Hayak once said, “The savage is not solitary, and his instinct is collectivist.” The irony of “progress” through postmodernism is that is has turned us back, away from our common sensibilities and without the gratitude for the fruits it bore. Moreover, collectivism is contrary to common sense realism, as it counters the spontaneous creative order and wisdom in existence. The new borg is taking shape, and soon resistance will be futile.