By Winslow Myers
The term “common sense” is often evoked by President Trump, though his “common” sense can seem grotesquely solitary and unique, as for example when he cruelly shut down the USAID program, increasing disease, malnutrition and death for people in faraway places with desperate needs.
Or when he blamed the Washington plane crash on DEI initiatives. Even that eccentric assignment of blame already seems almost quaint a few weeks later as his “common sense” upends 80 years of NATO consensus and, in an inversion of truth worthy of Orwell, he blames Ukraine for causing Russian aggression. While Trump may not be a warmonger in the usual mold of a number of recent U.S. presidents, he admires dictators and shares their brutal, transactional temperament.
His autocratic instincts are running roughshod over core conceptions of American identity, including the difficult balance of three co-equal branches of government, equality under the law, protection of minorities, the free press, and leading the free world against totalitarianism. His administrative minions (or is he their minion?) want to abandon Jefferson’s noble ideal of freedom of religion in favor of (white) Christian nationalism.
The contemporary meaning of “common sense” could use some examination. What principles might become essential to maintaining and enlarging our shared sense of reality, not only within our borders but beyond them?
Get any group of ordinary people together anywhere in the world and they would exhibit agreement, a common sense, that nuclear war was not a good thing and arms control treaties are a useful preventative. At the same time the “common sense” of establishment strategists in the nuclear nations seems to be exactly the opposite—build more and more weapons until the system breaks down into the very war nobody wants and nobody can win.
Same with the other biggest challenge the planet faces together: two contending “common senses.” One common sense asserts that untrammeled markets, narrow self-interest and growth all lead to greater prosperity. Drill, baby! The other common (and scientifically proven) sense is that untrammeled, narrow self-interest and growth are withering the biosystems which are the only possible true source of our prosperity.
During the American revolution Thomas Paine, an Englishman, penned a fiery and popular pamphlet entitled “Common Sense,” making the case for American independence. The pamphlet accelerated our Revolution. As our foundations are being shaken, is there an opportunity for a worldwide “peoples’ common sense” to emerge? What would be its outlines? What would its leaders look like?
The late Alexei Navalny, in his superhuman defiance of tyranny, was a modern-day incarnation of Thomas Paine and a demanding but universal model of common sense. All he wanted for his beloved Russia was the very same things we are in danger of losing in America at the moment: free speech, a free press, uncorrupted free and fair elections. Another dimension of common sense Navalny exemplified was nonviolence. While he apparently wasn’t a doctrinal pacifist in the Gandhi mold, like Gandhi his absolute confidence in truth was his only sword. Harassed by a Kafka-esque system of petty prison regulations deliberately designed to drive him nuts, he remained cheerfully defiant unto death.
In our own common sense defiance of lies and baloney, we must add the inconvenient truth of the global climate emergency which the President and his administration so painfully and backwardly deny, much to the deep distress of broad swaths of the world.
The primary context of planetary common sense today is radical interdependence. Everything “nests” in that larger truth. If we should slip into nuclear war, and as the global environmental crisis becomes more acute, people everywhere will suffer. We find ourselves all in the same leaky boat. Neither militarism nor unrestrained capitalist growth can get us where we need to go. Indeed, world military forces, with the U.S. leading the pack, are the single greatest source of fossil fuel emissions.
But these realities also give us a new sense of shared fate and therefore common, shared self-interest—a new anti-militarist pro-environment common sense. The meaning of strength and security has fundamentally changed. Many countries are a mixture of help and harm; that is simply the norm.
For instance, we abhor the Chinese record on human rights, but the reality that they are the largest manufacturer of solar panels and electric car batteries will benefit our health by cutting greenhouse gases.
Our strength and security now come not from numbers of weapons or gross national product but instead from what each nation can contribute to strengthen the total health of the biosphere. This insight might be drowning in a vast sludge of uncommon nonsense, but truth has a way of willing out—whether painfully or triumphantly.
Winslow Myers, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the co-author with Libby Traubman of One: One Humanity, One Earth, One Future, and serves on the Advisory Board of the War Prevention Initiative.
