Common Sense in Crisis

Abridged, edited, and arranged by Bishop Williamson

Our World Is False...

To state the obvious is today a hazardous venture because modern man does not want to hear the plain truth. To say that white is white or that black is black is almost always to incur the hostility of the "intellectuals" and of public opinion, which they form. One is dismissed as being weak-minded, pre-historic, or in any case out of tune with today's world if one tries today to promote the True, the Good or the Beautiful!

For proof of such a sweeping statement, look at the mass of lies, immorality, and all-round ugliness pouring out of our printing presses (and electronic media)–non-stop illusion, unreality, artful pretending, brazen falsehood, dressed-up appearances, and imagination run riot. These are overwhelming the last pockets of resistance, and the desire for what is illusory, ugly, and sensational is sweeping all before it.

If anyone objects that I am exaggerating because they would say that our own age is no better nor worse than any that went before it, I reply that human beings can get used to anything to such an extent that even the profoundly abnormal can come to seem normal. Furthermore, how could our entire planet be in such trouble if we were not being afflicted by a malady profoundly abnormal, affecting man in his very depths?

...Because It Lacks Common Sense
As one way of diagnosing this malady, I declare that our age is suffering from a massive, world-wide loss of common sense, or, as we may call it, good sense. The nature of man is being hollowed out under our eyes. Men are becoming more and more "the hollow men" (T. S. Eliot).

HEALTHY NATURE OF COMMON SENSE

Defined

Sense

For man's very survival to be at stake, as is the case, what is afflicting him must be attacking his very essence as a rational animal, that is to say, as a material animal with the spiritual faculty of reason. Intimately connected with this material and spiritual essence of man is his common sense, or good sense. For indeed creation is not chaos, but all creatures, animal, vegetable, or mineral, come into being with a nature endowed with a specific purpose or direction or "sense." The world makes sense. Every creature has its own purpose, or sense.

Common Sense

What human beings have is "good sense" or common sense, which is man's in-built ability to guide what he is and does to its proper goal, or, the direct and sane grasp of which way he must go to act properly as a man. As the human mind is designed to grasp reality, so a man's "good sense" discerns how to handle the reality immediately around him so as to achieve his true fulfillment. All of a man's life depends upon this sense of reality in his mind, whereby he orders his life in accordance with the order inside and outside of him.

Common

Common sense defined in this way is a man's mind as permeating all his activity. It presupposes an in-born health of body and mind which gives him a natural grasp on the reality around him. This original health, which goes together with his whole being, a man can either undermine, as so many examples show, or carefully foster and develop.

Observed in Action

In order to illustrate what common sense is, let us observe it in action. As it sets about solving a particularly difficult problem, let us see how it comes up with the "common sense solution."

Simplicity

Is it not our experience that when we have racked our brains over some problem, turning it this way and that, then if the common sense solution presents itself, it suddenly seems as plain as day? Why had we not seen it before? In fact our minds were confusing the issue. With a sense of relief, do we not find that common sense has gone straight to the point, putting everything in its place, restoring balance and order?

Sense of reality

If this description of common sense at work is accurate, then what common sense has to say to us is not immediately obvious; rather it has to make its way up from inside us to reveal to our minds the heart of the matter in hand. In this respect common sense is like the light of the mind, the spearhead of the mind, giving to the mind its sense of reality.

Difference from mind

Such sensitivity to the presence of reality indicates that "common sense" in the full meaning of the expression is wide open to all reality, responding to its presence, and sensing its absence in whatever is illusory or mere appearance. In this respect good sense differs from the mind, which is perfectly capable of taking our illusion for reality, even of preferring unreality.
Experience amply proves this important difference between good sense and, say, intelligence. How many peasants, for instance, have a sure judgment and "good sense" who would not be considered particularly "intelligent"! On the contrary, how many supposedly intelligent "intellectuals" are veritable imbeciles when it comes to judging of real life, be it in personal or family or national affairs!
Unity

Order outside a man

So good sense is constituted by a certain correspondence to reality which gives it its strength and directness, gravitating as it were towards the light, leaving to one side everything not essential. To be so sure of its way, it must have a vision of the unity and hierarchical order of reality as a whole, which is why its solutions leave one in no further doubt.

Order inside a man

This ability to discern the essential order in things outside him in turn presupposes in a man who displays common sense that he also has order, unity, and balance inside him, that he is not divided against himself, with his faculties making war on one another. This requires a health or sanity of the man as a whole. As his solutions are simple and direct, so must he be himself.

Union of mind and body

So it follows that good sense belongs to the human being in the unity of his nature, that nature composed of body and soul. Good sense is neither below nor above human nature; it is neither mere animal instinct below him nor pure angelic intuition above him. It arises from the conjunction of body and soul. It is not disincarnate. Like health, it belongs to the whole man.
In fact the man of good sense, if he has to choose between them, may well prefer the evidence of his senses to the ideas of his mind, because his sensations are real in a way which his ideas may or may not be. This means he will sometimes be accused of being too down-to-earth “and he may be, “but common sense can also rise to sublime heights, as we see in the case of a St. Teresa of Avila.
However, when common sense is operating normally, far from separating the senses and the intellect, it works with both, discerning the intelligible meaning within the sense data. For example, confronted by a picture which is just a scrawl of colors, common sense will say, "That makes no sense!" This reading from within the sense data is how the human mind itself properly works; we come back to common sense being the mind's sense of reality.

Conclusions

Common sense is individual,
From common sense thus arising where body and soul meet, there follow important consequences. First, as a man is the individual who he is by his body (matter) individuating his soul (form), so common sense, engaging body and soul, belongs to be individual man, and will be as diverse as his particular gifts of body and soul.

Traditional,

Second, one man may think without sensing, another man may sense without thinking, but common sense involves both, and where the mind alone may be baffled by a problem, common sense will turn for a solution to past experience, to traditional teaching, and to those extensions of a man's body in which his life is embodied, such as family, homeland, and Church, where life goes on its concrete way. Common sense is thus traditional.

Sane,

Third, common sense, belonging to the flesh-and-blood man, goes together with his being what he is, namely an individual flesh-and-blood human nature that does not wish to be anyone or anything else. Here is a man's mental health, as opposed to that "mental illness" which afflicts so many modern people, who wish to be other than who or what they are.

Moderate.

When the Greeks said, "know thyself," what they meant was that man should recognize his limits and not overstep them. Such arrogance they represented as being immediately punished with madness by the gods above. Thus common sense springing from a flesh-and-blood human nature will recognize its limitations and will observe the Golden Rule of moderation. By so doing, it will enable a man to do what he really can do, as opposed to deluding himself over what he cannot do. Yet in this way the limitations of common sense are not some kind of prison, as the Romantics think, but a solid foundation for a man to reach out to his neighbor, and to reach up to God.

UNHEALTHY CRISIS OF COMMON SENSE

Man Split in Two

If a man refuses to be what by nature he is, what will he do? He will wither. The limitations recognized by common sense mean the possibility of acting within those limitations. If a mind strives to act outside them, it will lose itself in a world of its own fabrication, unreal and inhuman.
And so we come to today's crisis of common sense. When man refuses his flesh-and-blood condition, his spiritual mind scorns his material body, his one nature is split in two, and his common sense is crippled, no longer able to moderate his thought or action. There are plenty of examples of the ensuing lack of moderation, but let us first look at the dualist misconception of man which, by splitting him in two, is responsible for the crisis of common sense.

Unhealthy Roots

The Protestant split

Of course, original sin has always existed, but it has never wiped out entirely the good in man's nature; otherwise man could not have rebounded as he has always done through history. Therefore when Protestantism claims there is nothing good left in human nature, it is denying history, cutting man off from the society around him, leaving the individual soul alone to deal with God, splitting the soul from it embodiment in flesh-and-blood, kith and kin, and fatherland.

The Romantic split

As opposed to Protestantism, Romanticism claims that there is nothing bad in human nature, yet it splits man in two just the same, because it claims that all corruption comes from society, so that the individual conscience is divine, while the source of all evil in a man is his embodiment amongst his fellow human beings. And we are back to the scorn of the body.

Both are unbearable

Thus Protestantism and Romanticism alike split man in two and pretend he has no embodied limitations. It is interesting to observe how both then strive to overcome their unbearable dualism and to restore the unity of man–religious Protestantism by becoming secular, secular Romanticism by turning into a religion, and both by idealizing an unlimited progress of man into a future where matter will be lifted up to re-integrate into spirit. Teilhard de Chardin raised this illusion to its Omega Point!

Unhealthy Fruits

Common sense crippled...

But let us return to the reality of flesh-and-blood human nature and its fragility. Experience tells us that for human beings to live well is the exception rather than the rule. Common sense can always be an element of sanity and balance in a man's life, but it seems to come and go. However, its systematic elimination can come only from a contrary view of man being steadily and widely pushed down people's throats.

...by RATIONALISM

Here is that contrary view: man's observable weakness has no reasonable explanation, so man must become more and more reasonable to overcome the weakness. But flesh-and-blood resists reason. Therefore flesh-and-blood must be discounted. As for the Catholic Church's supernatural explanation of man's weakness by the Fall, it kept man down and kept him dependent upon religious myths and upon his supposed good sense to be able to rise. But that was good only for the "old man." What the world needs is a "new man" to overcome this weakness, the new man of Rationalism.

Dividing flesh from spirit

Rationalism governs the thought and action of modern man. Rooted in dualism, i.e. the tendency of human nature to split flesh from spirit, it makes the link between them as weak as possible, as though they no longer have anything to do with one another. So the common sense that linked them together is to disappear, under pressure from a mind working no longer from sensation, but pre-fabricating its ideas independently of reality.

Rationalism and Revolution

The 19th-century French historian Michelet went to the heart of the matter when he declared that the essence of modern Rationalism lay in its Manichean refusal of the flesh, which is nevertheless the basis of man's communication with the universe around him, and finally with God. Upon this refusal followed the French Revolution's making war on the material embodiments of God and State, namely priests and kings.

Rationalism is unreal.

Rationalism is, at root, the declaration of human reason's independence from its imprisoning flesh and from common sense. Rationalism knows no bounds. Its arrogance is boundless. Henceforth common sense is under steady attack from the politicians and the intelligentsia. These new leaders of the new way of things are drunk with their new power, which they push forward as much as they can get the old checks and balances of common sense to fall away. Of course, "there is not a dime's worth of difference" between modern politicians of this kind. Their differences have no real substance–they have left all reality behind them.
Rationalism loves abstraction.

The list of the lunacies of these leaders of the new society is endless, but a common factor can be picked out: the replacing of the concrete by the abstract, by abstractions, by disincarnate ideas, in which the senses have little further part to play except to provide quantity, number, and statistics for anything measurable by number.

Rationalism scorns humanity.

Hence today's abstract art, abstract music, abstract philosophies, where the human element is emptied out, as in Hegelianism and Marxism, for the mind to feed purely on itself. Where the beings and things in nature used to be the philosopher's friends in his pursuit of a satisfying account of reality, now they are no more than the starting-point for a "philosopher" to construct his own system of "thought" providing the satisfaction of a complicated crossword puzzle.
Rationalism proceeds from a disconnected mind,
Such a radical mutation of thinking is made possible by the human mind's particular ability, once it has drawn its original ideas from reality, to play with them as it will, independently of reality. Here is how so many modern minds are turning from a mental world of flesh-and-blood to a mental world of ideology, in which their ideas have almost no basis in reality, yet are pronounced to be more real than reality! Modern paper currencies with no backing, inflatable at will, correspond to this mental divorce from the real world.

And crushes reality.

Thus the disembodied modern mind acts like a crusher, smashing the world in accordance with its pre-fabricated ideas, drawing on the real world only for those popular instincts, gut feelings, emotional drives, and impure forces which motivate the human being whose flesh has been abandoned by his spirit. Abstractions smash down on Pavlov reactions, leaving men little more than their calculable quantities, neither good nor bad, without value or purpose, for whom the True is what succeeds, Good is what stimulates any reaction, Beauty is what is fashionable.

Science is no help...

Nor are science or technology any help. They are not in all respects bad, but their progress in recent times is in no way human progress, because they do not touch on any properly human problem, because they bracket out all communing of the human being with the reality around him, which is where common sense operates. Modern science is concerned exclusively with measuring the quantifiable phenomena, a process in which observer and observed are strictly indifferent to one another. In a society idealizing the scientific method, common sense with its grasp of unscientific values like purpose and direction can only wither away. Modern science may feed the mind with a certain knowledge, but it starves the soul.
.
..Rather a hindrance

Worse, modern science presents man, as a human being, with a tremendous temptation to power. Modern physics, which are mathematical and quantitative, provide him with an unprecedented mastery of nature of which only supreme good sense will know how to make the right use. But the mastery of nature promotes not its own limitation, but its limitless extension. Thus the more modern science advances, the less good sense is available to guide it towards truly human goals. Gone is the Greeks' sense of moderation. Only one technique holds another in check, like artificial remedies for artificial illnesses. Any balance can only result from this interplay of artificial techniques, because the abstraction or disincarnation of human life has done away with the very notion of a natural balance, as with the common sense that used to sense it.

Unhealthy New Man

The would-be angel turns beast.

But, as the old saying has it, any man who pretends to be an angel will end up a beast. Rationalist man, inwardly split, tries by all rational means to put himself together again until he bumps into the dark recesses and wild forces of his lower nature, that flesh long since left by his spirit to fend for itself. Then the rationalizations become muddy, and mud is rationalized. For example, envy generates "class struggle," fear of suffering and death generates "euthanasia," the sex drive generates "free love," divorce, "trial marriage," and so on. The abstractions dress up the mud, the mud empowers the abstractions, all balance and harmony in man become artificial.

Self-made

A new man is rising up, chasing the old man of good sense off the stage of history. Where that man of good sense was centered by his nature on goals set outside of himself, independently of his own mind or freedom, the new man is entirely self-centered, making himself into his own goal, because he has repudiated any supposedly given nature. Where the man of good sense merely perfected his given nature, the new man makes his own nature. Turning in on himself, he asserts his freedom to make of himself whatever he likes. Is not "You can be whatever you want to be" the message of countless modern advertisements?

Existentialist

Whereas natural man cleaves to his nature, to fulfill it, modern man repudiates his nature, to alter it. The one seeks within himself what he is; the other seeks within himself what to change. In this respect, the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre is the classic modern rationalist. With him the mind reasoning within itself precedes and freely determines existence, which in turn precedes and shapes any essence. I insist on my freedom at all costs to be my own maker, to be the maker of "me"!

Artificial

Make no mistake; today's world is full of men and women striving to be other than what they are, along these existentialist lines. Examples abound. Read T. S. Eliot's "Wasteland" (from 1922; the problem has been around for a while) to meet a variety of modern souls making themselves an artificial personality for personal, professional, or social reasons, whatever. The crusher of rationalism is crushing entire populations.

Alienated

Thus our modern world, where everyone wants to be what he is not, is a mad world of souls alienated from themselves, wholly opposed to the world of common sense.

SOLUTION

Living an ordinary life

What then is the solution? How do we restore common sense? To do so is of vital importance, but there is no foreseeable or artificial solution. We must get back to ordinary living where normal is no more noticeable than the air we breathe. But such naturalness is no longer natural to us in our race towards folly, and it may no longer be recoverable by any normal means. Not even two World Wars could turn us back.

St. Therese's "Little Way"

Then should we despair? By no means. There is a way out. There is only one way out. Supreme good sense is to turn to God, to return to God, Creator and Savior of our nature. To live ordinary and natural human lives, we need no less than the grace that comes down from Heaven. St. Therese of the Child Jesus showed us the way to overcome this crisis of common sense–it is the Little Way, followed to the end.

· Taken from the writings of Marcel De Corte (1905-94).

*

Christmas Day is a suitable moment to recall why we may and should rejoice in the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He and he alone can solve all the real problems of men, which go back to the very beginnings of mankind, and which are graver than ever today.

This is because all real problems of men involve sin. Any purely material disorder only becomes serious if it is in some way spiritual, for instance if a physical illness makes a man curse or bless. And anything spiritual that goes on inside me is only a disorder if it is in some way a sin. For instance Job lamented bitterly his physical afflictions, but his lamenting was not sinful. As for sin, it is a disorder or offence primarily against God, secondarily against self and only thirdly against neighbour.

Therefore all real problems of men which are not merely material problems, are problems of men having offended God. A terrible example is provided by a woman who has committed an abortion. Superficially her problem is solved. The baby is out of the way, and her life is "back to normal". But deep down, either she hardens her heart (and joins in a world coming to hate and suppress Christmas), or she knows and admits to herself that she has done something terribly wrong. Either way something in her is more or less twisted out of true for the rest of her days, and many such women, even if they are Catholics and know by their Faith that God has forgiven them through sacramental Absolution, can still be tormented, such is the wound that the sin has inflicted on their souls. Nor is abortion the worst of sins. Sinning directly against God is graver.

Grim thoughts for Christmas Day ? Yes and no. The problem of sin is grim, but the joy of knowing that it has a real solution is correspondingly great. If the poor girl goes to confession, almost every Catholic priest will do all he can to persuade her that if she is truly sorry for her sin (with a sorrow of Peter and not of Judas Iscariot), then through his absolving her she may not doubt that God has forgiven her. How many penitents then walk out of the confessional with a sense of relief and joy that nothing else can give them, because offending God was at the heart of their torment, and they know that God has forgiven them.
And where did this joy take its beginning ? In the certainty that God took a human nature from a Jewish maiden, lived upon earth and gave us, amongst other sacraments, that of Penance, deriving its force from the merits of his Passion and Death, which he endured only with the help of the same maiden and mother. But how could he have died unless he had been born ? It all began with his human birth from the Blessed Virgin Mary - Christmas.

So the solution of all the world's most terrible problems of my fellow-men and myself is available. No wonder Catholics are joyful. No wonder there is a special joy available even to disbelievers at Christmastime -- so long as they have not yet hardened their hearts.

*