Robert Curry - Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World

Praise for

RECLAIMING COMMON SENSE

In the modern intellectual climate, the basic rationality of common sense has been unsettled, and sometimes altogether eclipsed, by dreamworld ideologies and personal truths asserted in defiance of elementary facts of experience. The revolt against common sense has moved beyond the universities to take hold of our political and cultural institutions, in coercive government policies and public shaming. Against the feverish assault, Robert Curry sounds a note of cool sanity, presenting common sense in simple (though not simplistic) terms and illustrating it in living color. For level-headed readers disoriented by the craziness, this little book will be a bracing tonic.

SCOTT PHILIP SEGREST

Associate Professor of Political Science at The Citadel and author of America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense

In his second companion volume about common sense, Robert Curry again reminds us that our leisured and affluent society periodically dismisses the fundamental Western way of knowledge that ensures our collective success. Or at least it says it does in its periodic relativist, romantic, and emotional flirtations with thoughts that are not grounded in reality. This book is a much-needed reminder in our postmodern age that what works and what we perceive to be real are alone real.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

In his entertaining, insightful, and highly literate new book, Robert Curry gives the superpower that is common sense its proper due. Heres hoping that members of the political class read Currys book, and in so doing find within themselves the humble qualities that might cause them to do less so that we the people can do more.

JOHN TAMNY

Vice President of FreedomWorks

What Robert Curry started simply and beautifully in Common Sense Nation he continues in Reclaiming Common Sense: the revival, defense, and application of the principles needed to save America and Western civilization.

Ryan P. Williams

President of the Claremont Institute and Publisher of the Claremont Review of Books

Having recovered in Common Sense Nation the important role of common sense in the nations founding, Robert Curry has written a thoughtful, passionate analysis of the social and political ills that have followed the abandonment of common sense in our countrys culture. From appeasement of jihadism to the follies of self-selected gender identities, Curry provides a powerful, must-read warning of the dangers to our principles of self-government and our political freedom by neglecting common sense realism in our policies both at home and abroad.

BRUCE S. THORNTON

Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University

RECLAIMING COMMON SENSE

RECLAIMING COMMON SENSE

Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World

Robert Curry

NEW YORK LONDON

2019 by Robert Curry

Foreword 2019 by Brian T. Kennedy

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601, New York, New York, 10003.

First American edition published in 2019 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation.

Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

Manufactured in the United States and printed on acid-free paper.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48 1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

LCCN 2019013891

To Lisa, my joy

The medium of his thought is common sense, and his commitment to intellect is fortified by an old-fashioned faith that the truth can be got at, that we can, if we actually want to, see the object as it really is.

LIONEL TRILLING, on George Orwell

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Say what you want about the liberal arts, but theyve found a cure for common sense.

ROBERT GODWIN

CONTENTS

, by Brian T. Kennedy

FOREWORD

A T THE HEART of this wonderful book by Robert Curry is the simple belief that you as a human being can govern yourself. That shouldnt be a controversial proposition, but when an army of federal bureaucrats, university professors, and social science experts begin telling you how you ought to be living your life or running your business or raising your children, you might start to wonder. You may begin doubting your own ability to make decisions and to distinguish true from false, with the fundamental faculty of common sense.

For over a century now, there has been a sustained attack on common sense on what Curry calls the foundation of the American founding. It was the common sense of the American people that led to the American Revolution, the creation and ratification of the Constitution, the vindication of both in a bloody civil war, and the defense of America and the West in the wars of the twentieth century. America was the most successful experiment in liberty and self-government that the world had ever seen. But some people have a different plan for us.

Progressive intellectuals have long been trying to turn the free and self-governing people of the United States into wards of a massive bureaucracy, or what the political philosopher John Marini has called the administrative state. Many refer to it as Big Government. In order to get Americans to reject self-rule under a limited constitutional government and to accept rule by bureaucrats and experts instead, progressives needed first and foremost to undermine peoples confidence in their own common sense, and to discredit moral common sense too.

As Curry so elegantly explains, common sense is the basis for countless daily choices and actions. We rely on common sense in decisions concerning safety and security, in matters of life or death. We also employ common sense in questions of right and wrong. Common sense is the indispensable starting point for knowing what is true and what is morally right. We simply cannot get along without it.

Then why is common sense now being so badly eroded? This book tells how progressive intellectuals have sought to elevate academic theories and fashions above common sense, and establish their preferred doctrines in its place. They have foisted social science, and later its handmaiden, political correctness, onto the American people in the hope of smothering the exercise of common sense. In large measure, higher education today is a war on common sense. To say this is not to disparage the importance of education. Rather, it is a criticism of the modern university, with its disdain for the belief in truth and its embrace of intellectual and moral relativism. It is a criticism of the intellectual forces that are weakening the influence of common sense in the lives of the American people.

Certainly, most of us still have and use the common sense that prevents us from giving knives to babies or drinking gasoline to quench our thirst. But when it comes to anything involving political issues or social policy, common sense is frowned upon as pass or lowbrow as out of touch with how educated, sophisticated people see things. This message is drummed in so insistently that many average Americans have learned to distrust what their own common sense tells them.