Sometimes It’s Best to Leave the Cosmos Alone
A Not-So-Commonsensical Approach to Saving Mankind
Here’s an Armageddon prose poem for you:
The Great Fire
Since our house was spared in The Great Fire I have been considered a holy man. It didn’t matter I almost drowned in a flood or was nearly devoured by a cloud of locusts. I’ve had my share of diseases, too, and once drove drunk off a cliff in Arizona. But I was spared in The Great Fire, and that made me holy. Yesterday, an old woman on a park bench asked me to cure her. “Of what?” “Of everything.” She wore a faded, blue-print dress and red socks, Christlike sandals. Perhaps she was Christ, since He frequently appears in various disguises. She was smoking a little cigar, insisting we had met last year, even though I was living in Arizona. But people have a thing about fire. I once read that “to produce fire in one’s own body is a sign that one has transcended the human condition,” but I had never swallowed a burning coal, handled a red-hot iron, or walked on fire. If anything, I had deliberately avoided The Great Fire, which I started to explain until I saw a puff of white smoke erupt from her nostrils, a hailstone the size of a baseball land at her feet.
I recently read on the NPR site that NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an egg-shaped meteor named Dimorphos to see if they could change its course. Why would they do such a thing? you might ask. The experiment was meant as a test to prepare us for when/if an asteroid decides to head toward earth and send us all back to the Ice Age. The test seems to have been a success, and scientists assure us that the asteroid they redirected was so far away from earth that it posed no threat, though the article did mention that scientists looked on with "both terror and joy" as the spacecraft neared its final destination.
I don’t know about you, but this experiment scares the hell out of me.
I have been flinching every time I hear any rumble or static emanating from the heavens, thinking it may be reverberations from a chain reaction of celestial bumps and bruises that have yet to morph into something more sinister.
Also, if these scientists believe that nudging this asteroid is so innocuous, why did they watch with both “terror and joy”? That terror part doesn’t sound like someone who was 100% sure of what the hell was going to happen. It sounds like something a bunch of people might feel after they decide to do something risky, and then when that risky event is about to occur, they look at each other and say, “What the fuck!”
In short, common sense tells me this kind of diddling with the universe needs a little more thinking out.
Which brings me, dear reader, to the topic of the moment: common sense.
I wonder how many of you would agree with my “common sense” evaluation of NASA’s experiment. Even if every astronomer in the world insists that pissing off that meteor was okay, it seems to me that if the majority of normal folks share my commonsense view of their questionable “test,” then maybe we are right and should have been consulted beforehand. How about taking a poll or at least a show of hands at a football field filled with rational people like myself?
Is it fair to argue, then, that my “common sense” judgement should be the rule of thumb in this case because it is strengthened by the “general common consensus” of well-meaning people who would of course share my evaluation? And how many people are needed to give credibility to a consensus? 100,000? A million?
The problem with approaching common sense like this is that we butt heads with an age-old problem that occurs when we discuss any topic.
What is often one person’s common sense is another person’s “crazy.” What some people find comic, others find silly. What some people consider to be erotic, others see as pornographic, or as D. H. Lawrence put it, “What is pornography to one man is laughter of genius to another.” And I could go on . . .
The above rationale for common sense also comes under scrutiny when we look at how many people believe in bizarre conspiracy theories.
To make it simple, let’s stick with a few wacky ones that Qanon followers mull over when they’re not storming the capital or searching for alien feces in the confessional booths of the nearby Catholic church. Keep in mind that, according to recent, findings 1 in 5 Americans are Qanon believers. Believers in what? you may ask.
1) That powerful and influential Democrats were sexually abusing children at a Washington, DC pizzeria.
2) That vaccinations are embedded with tracking chips that can be activated by 5G cellphones.
3) That Hollywood celebrities are harvesting andrenochrome (an offshoot of adrenaline) from children’s bodies.
4) That the shootings at Sandy Hook were staged.
Now I’m sure Qanon believers would argue that their “common sense” tells them that the above scenarios are “facts”—facts that they will happily back up with other made-up “facts.” But if even 1 in 10 Americans (not the suggested 1 in 5, which by my account would be 33 million people), believe these things, you could argue, according to one usually accepted criteria for common sense (a general common consensus, based on shared values) that millions of loony tunes believing that tracking chips in Covid vaccinations is a reasonable assumption based on “common sense.”
If my “reasoning” on all of this is giving you a headache the size of Africa, I don’t blame you. And you might “reasonably” ask, “What can you possibly know about common sense, Old Petey?”
Well, fortunately, we don’t have to rely on Old Petey’s reasoning, because, many philosophers have tackled the topic of common sense. But then, at this current inglorious point in history, you can probably find a school of philosophy, along with Ph.D. dissertations on everything from acne to Pee Wee Herman Memorabilia.
If you don’t believe me, look at some recent titles: “Impact of Wet Underwear on Thermoregulatory Responses and Thermal Comfort in the Cold”; “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects on Evangelicals”; “The Symbol of the South American Horned Frog in Aborigine Poetry Where It Doesn’t Actually Exist.”
Okay, I made up the last two. But if you want to discover even nuttier titles, I invite you to peruse the library database called ERIC with a glass of Jack Daniel’s and some aspirins nearby .
But now for something serious:
Thomas Reid (1710-1796) is called the “common sense philosopher.” Bear with me as I try to explain his theories because, although I have a Ph.D. in literature, I usually avoid philosophical texts because their circuitous reasoning makes me dizzy.
According to Reid, as described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, common sense “refers to a select set of intuitive judgments. Reid calls these variously ‘first principles, principles of common sense, common notions, [or] self-evident truths….’ Common sense first principles are identifiable because they typically possess a suite of additional traits….”
Reid goes on to argue that common sense judgment is ‘necessary to all men for their being and preservation, and therefore it is unconditionally given to all men by the Author of Nature.’ Common sense intuitive judgments are ‘no sooner understood than they are believed…and both are equally the work of nature, and the result of our original powers….’ Common sense principles possess ‘the consent of ages and nations, of the learned and unlearned, [which] ought to have great authority with regard to first principles, where every man is a competent judge.’”
All of the above italics are mine, and those italicized quotations share a common vision of common sense, which suggests it is innate and intuitive and not discovered through reason. With its ties to “nature” and the “Author of Nature” (God), Reid’s common sense also hearkens back to an Edenic time. And if everyone (both educated and uneducated) just leaned into that commonsense voice speaking to them on all matters, by God, we could straighten out this sorry-ass world.
I have to admit that I like viewing the world this way, because, down deep, I like to think we are all noble savages, who just get distracted from our innate commonsense decent selves by a variety of man-made outside forces—religion, capitalism, social media, and so on.
It would be nice to end on this positive note, but of course, there is always some guy who wants to spoil the party. This time it’s a philosophy professor named Marcus Arvan. In his review of Doing Philosophy: From Common Curiosity to Logical Reasoning by Timothy Williamson, Arvan writes:
1) First, there is an enormous difference between commonsense knowledge—that is, things that people genuinely know—from commonsense belief, which is what people merely think they know [which can be false beliefs that are fed to them].
2) Second, appeals to commonsense in philosophy are a demonstrably unreliable method for distinguishing genuine knowledge (and truth) from mere belief (and falsehood). How do I know this? As Jason Brennan [another philosopher] points out, philosophers disagree wildly over philosophical issues. Take any philosophical debate you like—consciousness, free will, morality, epistemology, justice, etc.—you will find a wide plurality of mutually incompatible arguments and theories. Because mutually incompatible claims cannot be true, it follows that virtually all philosophical arguments and theories are unsound, having false conclusions.
3) Third, better methods—specifically, scientific methods—have a long track record of refuting commonsense beliefs that people once (falsely) took to be knowledge. For example, it was once taken for granted, as commonsense knowledge, that the Earth is flat and stationary—yet we now know from scientific inquiry that the Earth is spherical and revolves around the Sun.
I, for one, do not like any philosophy that suggests truth is relative, but I have to say that Arvan’s arguments make as much sense as Reid’s do.
So what do we do when faced with two approaches to common sense, both of which make, well, “sense”?
The only possible way out of this conundrum is to what I always do. That is, rely on my common sense, and assume everyone else is as fair-minded and intuitive as me, and if they aren’t, then the hell with them.
And as regards NASA’s experiment, my common sense tells me that we should stop fucking around with meteors until we have to.
And when or if that apocalyptic time arrives, please don’t get Elon Musk or Jeff Besos involved.
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is Old Man Howling at the Moon
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories