Common Sense, Common Purposes, Common Dreams

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/28/6668/

Common Sense, Common Purposes, Common Dreams
by Caroline Arnold

I’m tired of the bashing, the negativism, I want to know what they will do. I’m pleased at the variety of winners - shows people are thinking.

I like Obama,, he’s honest and reasonable …

I think Clinton - she really knows hands-on what to do about trying to change the world.

I look for equal rights - equal for everyone - I’m not into politics, I just want them to represent people.

–NE Ohio voters talking to WKSU News Director M.L. Schultze, 1/21/08


For me, what shone through all these statements was their common sense - reasonable, thoughtful assessments of the issues, candidates and campaigns.

Are humans cold calculators of utility or steaming vessels of passion? Are we fiendish agents of evil or cool unflappable saints? mute fungible cogs or talkative problem-solvers? Or are we familial creatures with a talent for reason, logic and science, the gift of speech and storytelling, and social habits of sharing and trading?

All of the above, but it is the last that generates the common sense - both the simple logic of everyday experience and the consensus rising from our shared experiences - that make society and civilization possible.

We reason and talk together to find our commonalities and differences, make stories about the world, and share those stories to generate the values, beliefs and truths we hold in common. Common sense changes as events and perceptions change, and is always open to challenge and modification, new stories about what’s important.

We need those stories both to shore up our personal common sense and to create national narratives of what our nation is about - who we are, what we want to do and how we want to do it, and stories about what we fear and what we cherish: our common purposes and common dreams. In a liberal democracy, these national narratives construct our moral order and our public will. Such stories also tell the rest of the world about the common purposes and dreams of a nation.

snip//

Common sense - both our everyday experience and our shared experience as Americans - suggests that as a first step we need to impeach and prosecute those responsible for the death, terror and dehumanization that stalks the world today. Then we can work out, together, our common purposes and common dreams.