Tension Between the Forces in Humanity

The power, influence, and wealth of the USA made the recent inauguration a global event. People around the world watched and asked themselves: What does it mean? What does it demand of me?

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The incoming president announced a “revolution of common sense,” a theme that resonates all around the world. This particular revolution, however, invoked a prioritization of national interests, the energetic extraction of natural resources, growth in industrialization and consumerism, as well as competition with other countries.

In an age of remarkable scientific and technological power, concerns about common sense may strike many as strange, including long-established politicians who have been displaced in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Yet, for over a century, thinkers have tried to come up with ways to bring instrumental, economic, and technological rationality into a deeper connection with values and qualities that arise in human scale orientations and life. This is at the heart of Max Weber’s sociology, and it is central to the concerns of the “new left,” Hannah Arendt’s vita activa as opposed to vita contemplativa and the neo-conservatives that have recently had to relinquish positions of power. In different ways, all focus on the type of intelligence that is now shaping human life on earth (defined as progress) but at the same time contradicting and undermining human ethical concerns, capacities, and values. This “new intelligence” unfolds through a fascination with logic and mathematics, and the practice of hypothesis testing and experimentation. It is associated with a vision of the world as a great machine that can be controlled and manipulated through calculation, whereby abstract functions are assigned to all phenomena. It is a form of knowing intrinsically oriented toward control and the (conscious or unconscious) subjugation of the individual under a rational system. The highly disciplined and specialized forms of modern instrumental reason are represented in a culture of “experts.” This leads to a charged gap between “state-of-the-art” science practices and “common sense.”

Sensing the Tension

The charged gap appears in different ways. When we do not know what our basic commodities are made from or how to properly dispose of them, it creates a tension between common sense and expert knowledge. How is it possible to have a broad sense of the significance of “forever” chemicals or plastics and the ecological crisis when most people are in the dark about the most basic materiality of the products they use daily? This is true for disposable cups all the way up to our phones, which are mysteries to most of us.

In social organizations, as demonstrated in 2009, those who work hard, invest, and save money can lose everything due to actions of the financial sector, while the latter receives bailout money funded by taxpayers. For many, this is an example of a highly specialized approach to economic “science” that largely excludes common sense and requires that economic decisions be debated and decided by experts. We can see something similar in public health. In the USA, a country where most individuals have religious or spiritual orientations, public health regulations required individuals to abandon loved ones who were dying. Many individuals were ordered not to go to work with the rational justification that this would save lives, even though they had to work to live and their children’s lives depended on them. Again, it is possible to understand that many felt this to represent a clash between “common sense” and the dictates of experts. Now, military officers who were dismissed for refusing vaccinations are being pardoned, and Robert Kennedy Jr., who opposes the expert culture in healthcare on many fronts, has been confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

When we look at the US military, we find something similar. Today, almost one-sixth of the federal budget is allocated to the military, with eight hundred military bases around the world and “anti-terrorism” operations in almost 85 countries in recent decades.¹ Most people in the USA do not know this, which demonstrates that one of the most important activities of the country is largely invisible to the people and beyond “common sense.” Promises of peace and the end of “forever wars” are serious matters, and some see hope in the new president’s attitude toward conflict and conventional culture.

Then there are the intelligence agencies, which play a key role in these matters. For decades, many have pointed to their efforts to steer “common sense” and the future of the country. Many believe in the possibility of their involvement in domestic terrorism, including the assassinations of JFK² and MLK Jr.³ One of Trump’s first actions was an order to unseal all remaining classified documents related to these murders.⁴

This sense of tension between the “common,” or the people (demos), and the experts, is written into almost every facet of modern life. Politicians who do not appreciate this widespread anxiety make a hollow impression. This is not an economic problem, a problem of government administration, or a problem with a technological solution. Optimistic speeches that underestimate the significance of these grievances or that lack a nose for them sound untruthful. Subtle omissions and silences grow louder than the colorful lights and cheering crowds of political events. A political campaign that is too put together, too polished, and capable in the conventional sense makes an uncanny impression, like an alien or a robot.

Social Imaginaries

Learning about logic and rationality takes effort and is characterized by discipline and organization. When we think about what is common (democracy demands such), we cannot say it is strictly logical, systematic, or calculated. Social theories differ from social imaginaries,⁵ which consist of images, stories, and imaginations irradiated with values and meaning. These are woven together in the places we live and work, the people we know, and the activities we participate in. They are permeated by qualities of feeling, moods, and ethical dimensions and horizons. This is where we might intuitively look to find “common sense.”

This brings us to a very important point. The field where we expect to develop the orientations we call “common sense” has been changing radically in recent decades. With radio and television, this imaginative horizon of experience underwent a significant transformation. Today, screens and images are everywhere, and the capacity to differentiate between waking and dreaming, images and reality, has been altered. Advertising and the ability to control cycles of consumption and spending represents a high art of visual culture and its political counterpart—it’s an attempt to shape “common sense” through subconscious propaganda.⁶

As we see old rivalries ushered to the margins by new populist political movements, we sense, on an instinctive level, the anxiety of our predicament: a vulnerability of the truth of life on a human scale in the face of an intelligence that cannot accommodate humanity, while our “common sense” is manipulated and undermined through the revolution of communications technologies and current uses of visual culture.

People have a sense of danger and urgency, although many do not sense that they are disoriented or have been drugged. But just as the dreaming person strikes out at a phantom figure that might be an actual intruder in the night, they are also liable to hurt themselves or to discover they have been mistaken and injured a friend. Our common sense is in a vague sense of unclarity, although we feel something is not right.

What would a “revolution of common sense” actually entail? In his color theory and contributions to biology, Goethe developed a form of understanding that complements instrumental rationality. The fundamental insight of his method was that each experiment could only be illumined by the greatest practical variety of (rightly ordered) contrasting experiments. The individual phenomena was not explained as a result of calculations from general principles, rather, the general emerges at the conclusion of the greatest variety of particulars, and, wonder of wonders, in the form of a particular: a “primal phenomena”.⁷ It has recently been demonstrated that Goethe’s approach to science played a major role during the emergence of the ecological movement and the articulation of its core message: the earth, including humans and their economies, is an interconnected, living whole.⁸ This is a view that chastens national consciousness and supports a kind of global citizenship. One aspect of this movement involved new approaches to finance and banking, which arose when Goethe’s theoretical contribution to “common sense” received a practical and ethical counterpart through individuals like Rudolf Steiner, Daniel Dunlop, and Walter Stein in associative economics. They were able to understand the ethical and economic ramifications associated with this culture of disciplined “common sense,” or judgment, revealing an “imperative” of interdependence, economic cooperation, and goodwill inherent in social and economic specialization and the division of labor.⁹

This contrasts starkly with the “revolution of common sense” recently embraced by the new administration in the USA. Stoking the fires of nationalism, economic competition and extraction of resources (regardless of planetary limits and global orientations), is in truth a kind of tragic inverse image of common sense, and represents an illusion with an odious core.

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Image Ella Lapointe, Election 2024

1. Phil Klay (2022) Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War. (Penguin Publishing Group).
2. James W. Douglass. (2010) JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. (Simon and Schuster).
3. William F. Pepper (2018) An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King. (Verso Books).
4. Declassification of Records Concerning the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy. The White House.
5. Charles Taylor (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries. (Duke University Press).
6. Hilary Osborne (2018) What is Cambridge Analytica? The firm at the centre of Facebook’s data breach. The Guardian, 18 March.
7. See Ed. David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc (1998) Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press).
8. Dan McKanan (2017) Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism. (Univ of California Press).
9. In 2024, an event was hosted at the Goetheanum that focused on the global significance of these approaches to economics. See also Otto Scharmer’s reflections here: kosmosjournal.org.