Traditions, Pt. 2: Objects, Objectivity, Common Sense
Musing on our fears of and for the truth, (and accidentally being a defense of the doctrine of original sin from accusations of "meanness")
I have noticed, anecdotally, that in moral conversation it is a particular weakness of our time that we are unable to think of those who disagree with us as Others with their own thoughts, principles, and desires which logically lead to different standpoints. I’ve talked a bit about this before, here, in part one of this loosely-bounded series, but I want to take a closer look at the problem of common sense(s), contested traditions, and some of the discursive problems that experience creates.
To revisit the problem of “common sense”, briefly: As it is used, in general, it means that (insert moral claim) is so intuitively obvious that it does not require argument to prove, everybody already knows it to be true. In this sense, what an appeal to “common sense” does for the speaker is twofold. First, it prevents them from having to appeal to a tradition beyond local cultural practice. If I am arguing for a moral proposition that I know develops from a tradition to which my interlocutor does not belong, and therefore I cannot appeal to that tradition in arguing for the position, I can dodge argument entirely, and also pretend that my own beliefs are without and prior to a genealogy. The implication of “common sense” in popular usage is that every person is born with the same moral intuitions I hold, and that neither I nor they have ever had to learn them.
This leads to the second function, which is that it allows one to believe that one’s interlocutor is not merely incorrect, but knowingly engaged in self-deceit and is also lying to you. Thus, disagreement with one who appeals to “common sense” is not simply a matter of error, it is a sin, a knowing violation of the truth, and any disagreement is understood as an act of violence.
This presents us with a couple of issues. The first is that it is dependent on the infallibility of the speaker. There are plenty of things held as “common sense” in some communities that we (I hope) would all rightly find repellent: conventions against racial intermarriage, for example, or the idea that only a specific race or ethnic group are endowed with common dignity, and not all humans. So, we immediately run into the problem of multiple common senses in multiple communities, which suggests that our presumption of universality is flawed.
Of course, as I mentioned in the first part of this series, this is also an affected atemporality which does not survive historical scrutiny. It was common sense in various communities across the history of Europe alone that all members of a household, whether they be slaves, children, wives, or a combination of the three, were property of the paterfamilias against whom it was essentially impossible for him to commit a crime. This is a tradition which, while kept quietly alive in some places, has largely been rejected, (and all for the better, says I). The fact that something once was the common sense approach to family governance, for example, does not necessarily mean that it must always be so. To pretend otherwise, that ones’ moral claims are not claims at all, is to pretend that history does not exist and that one has not been formed by the process and development of a tradition. Further, for Christians in particular this would be quite a problematic claim, as ours is one of several traditions which base our moral claims not merely on nature, but on divine revelation, and when on nature primarily in that it is a type of revelation of divine intent. After all, the closest one gets to a description of “common sense” in scripture is in 1st Corinthians 3:18-20.
However, even assuming that our speaker, we’ll call him “Drew”, is somehow blessed with suprapapal infallibility, and his personal moral intuitions are correct on every matter of faith, morals, and reason, with no need to refer to his teachers, scripture, or tradition to make a moral claim, we are still presented with a second issue. Namely, our definition of “common sense” would require that not only is “Drew” blessed with such infallibility, but everyone else must be too, at least up to a certain extent. Therefore, to disagree with “Drew” would require that somebody born with an intuitive unobstructed knowledge of The Good be obstinately rebellious.
There are a couple of ways of dealing with this. One could subscribe to a type of Pelagianism, where every person is born with unobstructed moral knowledge, and obstinately chooses to do what they know is wrong. Alternately, one could subscribe to a type of double-predestination wherein God in His eternal wisdom has from all time made it impossible for those unelect predestined to damnation to access this “common sense” moral intuition by withholding it from them, and grants it (all the way through to an endorsement of Austrian economics), at least sufficiently to avoid true heresy, to the regenerate elect.
Alternately, one could hold to the Catholic-Augustinian model of Original Sin, meaning that one holds that we are all misguided from the beginning. My choice of the word “unobstructed” in prior paragraphs was quite deliberate, as the consequence of Original Sin (or, if you prefer, “Human Nature”) is that our moral intuitions, our thinking, and our desires are obstructed from the good, and it is only through an act of Grace that we can begin to choose the good for its own sake.
In this way, the doctrine of original sin not only offers spiritual grace, but epistemelogical grace as well. Rather than operating out of the presumption that everybody who disagrees with me on a given subject is obstinately refusing to acknowledge my supreme moral intuition, I can simply assume in my pride that they are wrong, misguided by a darkened intellect and malformed desires (as, of course, am I). To put it less charitably but pithier, as the variously attributed phrase goes: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”.
Of course, while I do not want to engage in the same thing I am criticizing, I think it is fair to acknowledge that most people engaging in an appeal to “common sense” are not consciously setting themselves up as the final moral authority, nor are they deliberately denying the existence of traditions in which they are morally formed. What they are actually engaged in defending, very often, is something else entirely.
The first thing they are defending is the idea, which is psychologically necessary for many of us, that the things that they find especially morally repugnant are objectively so. We would like to believe that there is an obvious hierarchy of moral failures, with the failures we are likely to commit being more minor than those to which we feel no attraction. The idea that this ranking system could be less than objective casts doubt, for many of us, on the idea of objective morality itself. I think here of a couple of people I have known who have said that if their church body were to change a certain teaching, they would cease to believe in God at all. So, for many, a defense of their “common sense” hierarchy of sins is a defense of the idea of an objective good itself.
To address this as sympathetically as possible, I would like to draw an analogy, once again with a pair of brothers and a father, for simplicity. As discussed somewhat in the last post of this series, a student’s relationship to the tradition in which they are formed is dependent on their experiences, and whether that tradition corresponded to, described, and explained their experiences of the world. What matters for us here is that it is their relationship to that tradition, and those who formed them in it, is what changes. If one is raised in a false tradition, or by a false teacher, the falsity is not created at the moment of its discovery, it was always already false, or at least flawed.
Put another way, two brothers may have a very different relationship to a father. One may have treated well, cared for, and loved, while the other was neglected. Or both may have been treated well, but one uncovered and did not share a secret, for good or ill, that the other did not know. The first brother’s greater knowledge of the father’s character does not change the father’s character any more than the second brother’s ignorance.
All of this to say, budgeting for flawed apprehension of an objective reality does not make it unreal. That one (at least!) brother is wrong about the type of man his father is does not mean, in most cases, that he is in willful denial. It would, however, make a discussion on the subject with his brother quite difficult, and could cause the less informed to question whether he knew their father at all. Even if one brother were entirely correct in their understanding of their father, it would take a certain measure of trust - one might even say faith - for the other to convert to his way of thinking. I could say similar about my experience of the academy as opposed to the feelings of those who do not have my experience, but have strong feelings, positive or negative, about the academic world: they will mostly not be converted to my view except insofar as they find me, personally, credible.
None of this, as in the first post of this series, should be taken as a type of “relativism”. Rather, as a principle of discourse for Christians (and in general) I think that we ought to take seriously the fact that original sin (or human nature, if you prefer) leaves us all with obstructed, flawed, and various apprehensions of that which (and Who) objectively is. Traditions are the communities within which we engage in the process of refining those apprehensions, drawn from revelatory experiences (the Incarnation first of all), and to discredit the insights and developments brought about by one’s tradition as “common sense” is arguably a case of dishonoring one’s fathers and mothers in faith.
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