![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Politics and the Eclipse of "Common Sense"
May. 9th, 2012 11:44 amOne question which is hard to avoid when looking at current politics (at least in developed countries) is: why does one side (usually the "conservative" side) seem so crazy, as though they were dialling in from an alternative reality? It may be blatant, as with many high-profile American Republicans and Rob Ford, or it may be more subtle (why is the Canadian Conservative Party so fixated on extending sentences and increasing penalties when every serious study shows that that Just Doesn't Work?).
If you look at the history of the conservative / progressive split over a reasonable period of time (say, three to five centuries) it's reasonably clear that it would be almost as accurate to label the first group "rural" and the second "urban". Issues may change, but the type of distribution of the heartland of these positions remains fixed: the Cavaliers were country squires (largely) and the Roundheads were largely backed by Cits. (These are broad generalizations: Cromwell was from the fens and there were urban sophisticated Filmerians; but as broad blocks, the rural/urban split applies.) You could say the same of the Tories and Reformers in the mid-19th century fights over the Corn Laws. It's certainly true of the American Red State / Blue State divide and of the relative bases of support for the major Canadian parties. (It can get complicated where there are areas which are "rural" but industrialized, such as some mining districts, where dominant opinion can be leftish -- as with some areas in northern England which support Labour).
However, it's been generally true in the past that it was hard to paint one side as "crazy". There have always been kooks in all areas of the spectrum, but Peel and Disraeli led parties with policies no crazier than those of Palmerston, Gladstone and Salisbury. The "Big Tent" parties of the middle of the 20th century were dominated by leaders with differing opinions but a largely consistent view of the world (many of Nixon's policies with regard to, for example, public health and foreign affairs were more like those of Lyndon Johnson than like anything now supported by the Republican Party).
So where does the current strain of frothing-at-the-mouth crazy come from? Or, in a milder form, bullheaded support for positions which have no substantive support from people who have any knowledge in the areas (climate change, penal reform, public health) and which tend to alienate the voters in the centre whom these people ought to be courting to establish/extend a majority?
I have a thesis. I think these people are relying on "common sense", and we've reached a stage where "common sense" has failed badly, irrevocably, and permanently.
A couple of centuries ago, everyone ran things based on "common sense". Oh, we all knew that our senses couldn't be trusted as regards the non-movingness of the earth, but that didn't affect everyday life much. ("Common sense" tends towards Aristotelian rather than Newtonian mechanics, but that didn't affect many people: only a few people did ballistics or calculated planetary orbits.)
We've had a succession of well-established results since then that violate "common sense" but give us a much better picture of how the world works. Some of these are abstract and don't affect everyday life much (Relativity, Quantum Mechanics: you can use transistors and GPS without understanding the theory). Some of them are practical -- notably well-established results in macroeconomics (restraint in recessions and tariff barriers to protect jobs both sound so sensible), cognitive psychology (just what is the real relationship between consciousness and responsibility?), and climatology (anthropogenic global warming models which involve large cascade effects from small triggers). There are all sorts of studies which show that, in the aggregate, the "common sense" approach of increasing penalties does not reduce problems related to "antisocial behaviour", ranging from Prohibition to the War on Drugs to DUI. Strict child discipline produces worse results than a tolerant and flexible approach.
Then there's a second set of well-established results, which don't violate baseline "common sense" but make things a lot more complex: evolution and modern genetics; reassessments of historical narratives; textual criticism of scriptures, the recognition of contextual and historical complexities in familiar texts. If you grew up accepting simpler versions of any of these (and who doesn't? Even I don't answer my 10-year old daughter's questions with "it's complicated" every time) learning about them can seem just as much violations of one's gut sense of how things are as learning about quantum causality. This second process dates back to the 17th Century: the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes is probably it's starting point. It accelerates in the 19th century when Schleiermacher and Lessing help the whole process along.
For good or ill, there's now a consensus reality established by research which has many, many divergences from one grounded in "common sense". It's still a pretty broad reality: you can accept all of the firmly-grounded research findings and be, say, an orthodox Christian (though you have to have a nuanced view of, for example, inspiration and theodicy, and you're pretty much required to hold with a deus absconditus for the most part) or a conservative as regards school curriculum (there's space to argue for a canon reinforcing and reinforced by a common culture, but you have to be careful setting up your premises).
There's a large chunk of the population which is firmly wedded to "common sense". In their day-to-day lives this may not have massive consequences (depending on what they do), but it produces support for political positions which are not merely reactionary (seeking to put genies back in bottles) but fantastic (ignoring that many of the bottles never really existed in the first place). These people are disproportionately rural (more urban occupations require confronting one aspect or another of the newer worldview) despite that fact that there's nothing essentially rural about the view (there are lots of Torontonians who still support Rob Ford) and disproportionately older.
If you look at the history of the conservative / progressive split over a reasonable period of time (say, three to five centuries) it's reasonably clear that it would be almost as accurate to label the first group "rural" and the second "urban". Issues may change, but the type of distribution of the heartland of these positions remains fixed: the Cavaliers were country squires (largely) and the Roundheads were largely backed by Cits. (These are broad generalizations: Cromwell was from the fens and there were urban sophisticated Filmerians; but as broad blocks, the rural/urban split applies.) You could say the same of the Tories and Reformers in the mid-19th century fights over the Corn Laws. It's certainly true of the American Red State / Blue State divide and of the relative bases of support for the major Canadian parties. (It can get complicated where there are areas which are "rural" but industrialized, such as some mining districts, where dominant opinion can be leftish -- as with some areas in northern England which support Labour).
However, it's been generally true in the past that it was hard to paint one side as "crazy". There have always been kooks in all areas of the spectrum, but Peel and Disraeli led parties with policies no crazier than those of Palmerston, Gladstone and Salisbury. The "Big Tent" parties of the middle of the 20th century were dominated by leaders with differing opinions but a largely consistent view of the world (many of Nixon's policies with regard to, for example, public health and foreign affairs were more like those of Lyndon Johnson than like anything now supported by the Republican Party).
So where does the current strain of frothing-at-the-mouth crazy come from? Or, in a milder form, bullheaded support for positions which have no substantive support from people who have any knowledge in the areas (climate change, penal reform, public health) and which tend to alienate the voters in the centre whom these people ought to be courting to establish/extend a majority?
I have a thesis. I think these people are relying on "common sense", and we've reached a stage where "common sense" has failed badly, irrevocably, and permanently.
A couple of centuries ago, everyone ran things based on "common sense". Oh, we all knew that our senses couldn't be trusted as regards the non-movingness of the earth, but that didn't affect everyday life much. ("Common sense" tends towards Aristotelian rather than Newtonian mechanics, but that didn't affect many people: only a few people did ballistics or calculated planetary orbits.)
We've had a succession of well-established results since then that violate "common sense" but give us a much better picture of how the world works. Some of these are abstract and don't affect everyday life much (Relativity, Quantum Mechanics: you can use transistors and GPS without understanding the theory). Some of them are practical -- notably well-established results in macroeconomics (restraint in recessions and tariff barriers to protect jobs both sound so sensible), cognitive psychology (just what is the real relationship between consciousness and responsibility?), and climatology (anthropogenic global warming models which involve large cascade effects from small triggers). There are all sorts of studies which show that, in the aggregate, the "common sense" approach of increasing penalties does not reduce problems related to "antisocial behaviour", ranging from Prohibition to the War on Drugs to DUI. Strict child discipline produces worse results than a tolerant and flexible approach.
Then there's a second set of well-established results, which don't violate baseline "common sense" but make things a lot more complex: evolution and modern genetics; reassessments of historical narratives; textual criticism of scriptures, the recognition of contextual and historical complexities in familiar texts. If you grew up accepting simpler versions of any of these (and who doesn't? Even I don't answer my 10-year old daughter's questions with "it's complicated" every time) learning about them can seem just as much violations of one's gut sense of how things are as learning about quantum causality. This second process dates back to the 17th Century: the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes is probably it's starting point. It accelerates in the 19th century when Schleiermacher and Lessing help the whole process along.
For good or ill, there's now a consensus reality established by research which has many, many divergences from one grounded in "common sense". It's still a pretty broad reality: you can accept all of the firmly-grounded research findings and be, say, an orthodox Christian (though you have to have a nuanced view of, for example, inspiration and theodicy, and you're pretty much required to hold with a deus absconditus for the most part) or a conservative as regards school curriculum (there's space to argue for a canon reinforcing and reinforced by a common culture, but you have to be careful setting up your premises).
There's a large chunk of the population which is firmly wedded to "common sense". In their day-to-day lives this may not have massive consequences (depending on what they do), but it produces support for political positions which are not merely reactionary (seeking to put genies back in bottles) but fantastic (ignoring that many of the bottles never really existed in the first place). These people are disproportionately rural (more urban occupations require confronting one aspect or another of the newer worldview) despite that fact that there's nothing essentially rural about the view (there are lots of Torontonians who still support Rob Ford) and disproportionately older.
