Come to think of it, even if we could demonstrate to a progressive that his ideas are bereft of common sense, it wouldn't dissuade him from holding them. I say this because we see how easily the left dismisses even mathematics as racist, i.e., as a tool of the patriarchy to oppress peoples of color (and remember, crazy travels at the speed of the left, such that today's absurdity is tomorrow's orthodoxy).
Now, mathematics must literally be the least racist thing in all of existence, being that it deals only with abstract quantities, not concrete qualities. And even then, the left is selective in its rejection of numbers. For example, they literally believe that if there is a statistical disparity between the population of a victim group and its representation in this or that field, it is a priori proof of racism.
But you will have noticed that they never apply the standard consistently. If they are vastly over-represented in a desirable field -- as, for example, blacks in the NBA -- then that's fine. Obviously it is nonsensical to make an appeal to math based upon personal interest, but this hardly stops them. In his Discrimination and Disparities, Thomas Sowell completely dismantles the idea that abstract statistical disparities are a consequence of real racism, but I doubt that any mainstream outfit would even review the book -- any more than, say, a Jewish publication is going to review the catechism of the Catholic Church.
Which goes to the essential point: the progressive left is a religion, not a belief system grounded in fact, logic, human nature, or common sense. And even then, to say it is a religion can't be correct, as genuine religion is rooted in a transcendent reality that is ruled out by the leftist metaphysics.
But this makes the left not less, but more dangerous, because it is animated by religious passion, energy, and impulse, but without religious tradition, proscription, and constraint. This is precisely what makes them so cluelessly sanctimonious and self-confident in their beliefs: like little Greta Thunberg says, those of us who aren't on board with her hysterical fears of climate armageddon are evil. She and her ilk are very much like premodern religious folk who grew up without knowing about the existence of other religions.
In the foreword to Reclaiming Common Sense, Brian Kennedy points out that "For over a century now, there has been a sustained attack on common sense," which is to say, "the foundation of the American founding." In fact, I think the attack has always been present, because it is rooted in human nature, more on which as we proceed. But it was certainly mainstreamed and institutionalized a little over a century ago, with the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912. He was the first president to openly disparage our founding principles.
After Wilson the disparagement went underground, as Democrat politicians learned to conceal their contempt for the American founding and for the average American. Only in the last decade or so is it once again openly celebrated, such that you can't be a Democrat candidate for the presidency unless you enthusiastically embrace the identity politics that is utterly antithetical to our founding principles, i.e., to common sense. As recently as 2012, an Obama had to pretend to believe in traditional marriage, or in the importance of fathers. No more. That's ancient history, before the Great Awokening.
Is it common sense to say that human beings are intrinsically capable of self-government? Cleary not. Consider just Venezuela, which voted for its own demise. No, the possibility -- and desirability! -- of self-government must be rooted in a deeper principle than mere "democracy." Affirming a belief in democracy is totally nonsensical unless you pay attention to the principles that permit it to function, AKA common sense. No founder ever imagined that self-government was possible in a population of individuals who couldn't govern themselves.
Really, this is just an extension of the principle that duties and responsibilities are prior to rights. Note that we do not merely say they are reciprocal, because if this were the case, conferring the right would create the responsibility.
And this is precisely the problem in the rights-obsessed left. The rights embraced by the founders are rooted in nature and nature's God, i.e., in human nature and its author. These rights are not, and cannot be, created by the state, but are prior to it. And each one is attached to an antecedent responsibility, if only because one would have to be a fool to give unalienable rights to a fundamentally irresponsible being! That would be a recipe for tyranny and chaos, not ordered liberty.
Conversely, consider, say, the "right to abortion." Supposing it is a right, what is the corresponding -- and antecedent -- responsibility? Crickets. Likewise, suppose you have a property right in other human beings. What's the antecedent duty? In other word, if you are free and your slave isn't, what is the principle that renders this arrangement just?
Does common sense have a specific content, or is it more of an attitude or approach to life? Yes and no. It embodies certain principles that cannot not be, but also involves prudence, or a practical wisdom that cannot be reduced to an abstract rule. For example, being honest is fine in principle, but not when the Nazi asks if any Jews are hiding in your house. Clearly there must be an antecedent hierarchy of values, such that protecting human life is the higher principle.
At this very moment, we are living through a prudential values dilemma: what is more important, the principle that we should never enlist the aid of a foreign country to investigate the corruption of a presidential candidate, or the principle that no one is above the law? To believe the former is to say that a man can be exonerated of any crime so long as he runs for president after he commits it. Does that make any sense?
Yes, it does. To the left. Which again highlights what was said above in the second paragraph. If a person arrives at a belief without using common sense, you can't use common sense to talk him out of it.
The End for now. I gotta get some work done...
13 comments:
By the way, Douglas Murray's The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity serves as an excellent commentary on the left's total abandonment of common sense in the Great Awokening of the 21st century.
No founder ever imagined that self-government was possible in a population of individuals who couldn't govern themselves.
Hence Franklin's quip, "A republic, if you can keep it." Also the founder's observation (I forget which one; Washington? Can't remember the exact quote) that this nation cannot succeed with anything other than a god-fearing Christian population. Perfectly true, which explains the relentless assault against religion, the family, etc. A people with faith in God who love and support their families is a people who don't need government scolds to control every aspect of their lives.
And this is precisely the problem in the rights-obsessed left.
Notably, the rights they demand are precisely the inverse of the natural rights recognized by the founders. A right to free stuff, a right to murder, a right to control families, a right to be free from speech, a right to unreasonable search and seizure (for the people they don't like), a right to disarm any potential militia, etc. ad nauseum. A right, essentially, to rule over a nation of serfs and slaves in all ways but name, much like any other "democratic" banana republic. Much like Lenin's useful idiots, they never understand that even if they make it into a place of power in such a state, that is the most dangerous place to be.
Hello All
Another good post, albeit a tad bland.
Common sense. Responsibility. God-Fearing Christians. Government. Do you feel a yawn coming on?
All of the above is well and good, agreed. The obligatory sneering at the progressives, OK, check, move on. The mechanics of daily life, we've all seen it and have the postcard.
Let's have some excitement around here. What have you guys got? Amaze me. Miracles? Aliens? Conspiracies? Conversion narratives? Near death experiences? Sizzling romantic interludes? Poetry?
Dr Godwin, how's about you give us a little poetry or an exemplar paragraph of some fiction? Please?
Thank you, Justine Thorogood.
"...But it was certainly mainstreamed and institutionalized a little over a century ago, with the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912. He was the first president to openly disparage our founding principles...."
No, he wasn't. Wilson only pushed open the door that his predecessor had toed open. Teddy Roosevelt was the first President to openly repudiate America's founding principles and ideals, the first to say that they were all well and good for a primitive time, but that as anyone with 'common sense' could see, they had no application in 'modern' times, and in his first address to congress, he said so , said that "the old laws... are no longer sufficient..." and he called for using power to abridge individual rights for the 'greater good', and that if stick-in-the-muds said that the constitution limited that power, well then bully! they'd have to break the constitution in order to fix it.
It's not just ignorant do-nothing wacademics like Wilson, who, lacking common sense, lead us into temptation. TR was a very energetic, very well read, and oozed common sense. The problem is that what's most uncommon about common sense, is its being primarily rooted in what is real and true, rather than in what you really want to be taken as true. Teddy Roosevelt was by most measures, a great man, but as I asked a while ago, "Is being Great all that good?"
"...It was his fellow Mt. Rushmorean, Thomas Jefferson, who said:
"In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution"
But TR would have none of that.
When he found himself in office upon the assassination of President McKinley, unlike his predecessors, TR explicitly refused to allow his powers to be bound by the office of President, and possessing those qualities of greatness that won him admiration and popularity around the world, he used them to resist and burst free of those restrictions, and in so doing he most definitely brought revolutionary change to the office of the President, and to the nature of the government he held such great power over, and those powers of office which he was instrumental is loosing upon the land, have been a plague upon us ever since.
It was Teddy Roosevelt, a republican by the way, who:
* first proposed a national income tax to 'do good' with,
* first proposed imposing American might upon the world stage,
* first proposed a national health care system,
* was the first president to consistently exercise his executive powers outside the defined powers of the office of the President of The United States,
* first proposed, and began to implement, the administrative state, and all the alphabet agencies we contend with today, followed from his innovations with what became the FDA.
He didn't accomplish all of those tasks himself, but by setting them in motion, together with what he did accomplish,Teddy Roosevelt proved that you don't have to be a bad man to do great damage; a great man with little understanding of his true purpose and place in office, can do enormous damage to even the greatest of nations, and Teddy Roosevelt did just that. Barack Obama, LBJ, FDR, Woodrow Wilson were only able to succeed in putting into practice what they have, because Teddy Roosevelt first introduced, legitimized and got the ProRegressive ball rolling for them - without him, they might have remained frustrated, small minded nobodies, harming no one's lives but their own...."
"Does common sense have a specific content, or is it more of an attitude or approach to life? Yes and no. It embodies certain principles that cannot not be, but also involves prudence, or a practical wisdom that cannot be reduced to an abstract rule. For example, being honest is fine in principle, but not when the Nazi asks if any Jews are hiding in your house. Clearly there must be an antecedent hierarchy of values, such that protecting human life is the higher principle."
It's that hierarchy that I think is most important, it's by extending your roots deep into what is above, that enables you to stand your ground in the storm below. Without that, you're liable to mistake flattened and truncated facts, for 'truth'.
It was Kant who demanded that we follow inflexible 'principles' as his Categorical Imperatives, and one of his example assexertions he gave for a truly 'principled person', was the template for the 'when the Nazi asks if any Jews are hiding in your house' question, which, if I remember right, was that if a man who wanted to kill your daughter came to your door and asked if she was home, it was your duty to say yes.
Flattened facts, with no roots in the vertical hierarchy, and of course, as it was Kant who said we kant ever really know reality, taking what you want to be true, as 'true', requires only that you smear enough lipstick on the pig of a lie to kiss it.
Personal testimony is pretty much all that I can offer to "amaze" you, or anyone else.
Well, testimony and an observation.
I'll save everyone from having to read my story and tell you that the four heads that are carved into Mt Rushmore might be looked upon by the people of the First Nations as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Related:
The Seattle public schools published a “K-12 Math Ethnic Studies Framework,” yet another step in a nationwide, decades-long, Progressive effort to dumb down the teaching of math. The program aims to “identify how math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color,” “create counter narratives about the origins of mathematical knowledge,” “demonstrate mathematical literacy by applying concepts to real world problems through dialogue and story telling,” “redefine mathematical learning through cooperative learning, engagement, advocacy, and action,” “redefine mathematical learning through cooperative learning, engagement, advocacy, and action,” and “explain how math dictates economic oppression.”
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness), it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
So special interests gain an unusual amount of influence over our elected representatives with nationally destructive consequences (outsourcing American technology, AI elimination of jobs without alternatives, endless wars, immense national debt passed on to our descendants...) and the People not benefiting decide they’re not getting enough life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.
Nobody here of course. We here are all successful folks who made prudent life decisions.
But out there, statistics are saying that their numbers are growing. Trump wouldn’t have ever mentioned draining swamps or MAGA if there wasn’t concern over the American Dream dying. So are we supposed to just shame and shun them?
Doug Saxum,
We conquered them. They need to get over it. If China does the same to us they can put their own heads on the mountain.
But currently Thomas Jefferson is one of those heads. Not only did he want smaller government vs. Hamilton's larger, but that primary Founder was a labile sonofabitch who owned 600 slaves, with very few ever freed in his lifetime. Witness the power of the white side.
Speaking of mathematical negroes, ever notice that puny little Jamaica, in world class track sprinting, outcompetes far larger nations such as soccer-crazed Brazil, oil-funded Nigeria and even track-technologies USA? Maybe there’s something to be said about Rastafarianism and Patois.
I noticed that Jamaica has a “representative parliamentary democratic constitutional monarchy”, whatever the hell that is. Could this be a superior political technology to what we have here in the USA (two party system mostly owned by Exxon and McDonalds)? Only if you’re into ganja. According to my niece most of Jamaica outside the resort complex gates pretty much sucks. So we move on to the culture. There’s a lot of drive for the youth to apply their energies and talents towards running fast. Which begs the question: just how important is this “culture” of which we speak?
We all learned the hard way that dropping our Founders into Iraq without converting them to Christianity first, was a bad move. Is there a lesson we learned from all that?
You missed the point by a mile.
How much of the bible have you read?
"the four heads that are carved into Mt Rushmore might be looked upon by the people of the First Nations as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."
That native Canadians might have their own interpretation of our monuments on their brothers former lands. Or.... But lo, for there are Christian native Canadians, who will have read Revelations 6 and the great day of their (horsemens) wrath has come, and who can withstand it?
?
Lets hear your explanation.
That's all you got out of the whole bible?
Keep reading and learn some of the Hebrew meanings.
Then maybe I can communicate to you.
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