4 June 2020 CE

Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, a private conservative college founded in 1844 by abolitionists, expressed his thoughts on the novel coronavirus panic in the March/April propaganda release of his Michigan institution.

He blames the worldwide panic on "Chinese deceit," and the inadequate response of the United States on "the bureaucratic form of government." He especially faults Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases, for not understanding the threat of infection and for initially saying, "it is a very, very low risk to the United States."

Mr. Fauci is only one of many frail reeds blowing in the wind. Responsible persons who publicly exhibit backbone must be fired. That is unfortunate because the repressive measures to protect the people from the disease by collapsing the economy smack of Antisocial Socialism, and that may very well result in Depression, Revolt, Anarchy, and War if those measures persist for long. Of course frustrated dictators with all good intentions may claim they have saved many thousands of lives with closures of so-called inessential businesses, antisocial distancing, involuntary quarantines, and mandatory wearing of flimsy masks.

And now the political authorities step back a little from the wreck they have wrought, and remind everyone that the killer virus is at fault. Thus would they deflect the blame from the immediate cause, which is their declared war against an invisible enemy, to be fought by hiding fearfully at home while poorer workers risk their lives on the supply lines.

Whom can we believe now that everyone is frightened into believing everyone else is an enemy, especially the ones wearing masks? Should one blame the Maskateer in the black mask who called the President a "fool" for saying he did not understand why a mask should be worn outside in the fresh air and not inside? Why, does not everyone know the doctors who depend on the government for their licenses agree that masks must be worn providing they do not totally cut off the supply of oxygen and smother the patient to death? The poor people who are collectively King and who elected their Fool believe that this masked man would rob them not only of their access to oxygen but of their opportunity to get rich quick, something every American fool believes in after hearing the rags-to-riches stories from the actually minimal circulation among economic classes in this country.

Mister Arnn thought Mr. Fauci had made himself perfectly clear, to the effect that experts need to worry, not the public, although it is the public who bears the costs, so ordinary people can be treated as pathogen carriers to be imprisoned at home. But the experience and education of the health experts is very narrow indeed. They must not have total control over the body politic. Their medicine may remedy a particular ailment but kill the patient in the process. An overarching generalist adept in the art of management, not a technocrat, is needed to manage the specialists. Conservatives naturally have a classical bent, so Mr. Arnn refers to Aristotle's concept of the architect guided by a ruling principle.

"Architecture means the ruling art," professes Mr. Arnn, "and it is a form of the kind of understanding every person must have to manage his life. The classical word for it is Prudence. It is the common sense capacity we have to pursue the proper ends of life amid the welter of shifting circumstances. This is actually the intellectual basis that underlies free government."

All that seems to make sense, and who does not have common sense? An ancient Greek myth held that every person should have common sense, and adults who did not have it should be exiled or executed.

And who does not want to be free? The professor did not say free from government, which would be anarchy. I think he means intelligent people appreciate the need for freedom from chaos, but they also want some satisfactory degree of freedom from government; that is, a limited government. A happy balance of the "I" and the "WE" would render good order. Yet many are the arguments over the precise location of the Tao or Middle Way. The "persona," by the way, is the cultural mask over the individuality we have in common, the One of ones.

So what is Hillsdale Common Sense? Is it, like the Christian deity, an abstract or indefinite entity whose guidance is intuited by prayerful individuals, or is Hillsdale Common Sense the name of a politically biased theology preached to all students hence known to all so that common sense means common knowledge of dogma so inured in group consciousness that it seems to refer to the sound practical judgment of everyday matters common to everyone similarly educated?

After all, what is common sense to a Chinaman may be nonsense to an Englishman. No less than Oliver Goldsmith famously pointed that out:

"Is it possible to bear the presumption of those Islanders, when they pretend to instruct me in the ceremonies of China! They lay it down as a maxim, that every person who comes from thence must express himself in metaphor; swear by Allah, rail against wine, and behave, and talk and write like a Turk or Persian. They make no distinction between our elegant manners, and the voluptuous barbarities of our eastern neighbours. Wherever I come, I raise either diffidence or astonishment; some fancy me no Chinese, because I am formed more like a man than a monster; and others wonder to find one born five thousand miles from England, and endued with common sense. Strange, say they, that a man who has received his education at such a distance from London, should have common sense. To be born out of England, and yet to have common sense! Impossible! He must be some Englishmen in disguise. His very visage has nothing the true exotic barbarity."

Still, by common sense we mean common knowledge, a fundamental under-standing common to the human race; something we Americans think we have even more of than the British because we shan't forget populous Thomas Paine's Common Sense, a sermon in common language based upon the common Protestant belief that monarchy and aristocracy are unmitigated evils because those forms constitute usurpation of the highest power immediately available to all individuals who protest domination by fallible authorities who lay claim to divinity. John Adams could not help denouncing that revolutionary, rather uncommon sense of what Paine thought best for people at that time, as a democratic evil. Common sense is no God nor a special faculty. Intellectuals might say it is the nominal resort of mediocre windbags who believe their feelings are profound truths, as if their perception of something were the thing itself perceived instead of a judgment up on the thing.

We moderns would dismiss metaphysical jargon and the so-called Sixth Sense in order to speak plainly of what we perceive with our five senses, as if sensations were indisputable. Yet to understand what we feel, that is, to perceive, requires judgment, and judgment has its faults, especially when we resort to oxymoronic and ambiguous jargon such as "free government," which may mean not only limited, mixed government but unlimited, tyrannical government. Our common sense or common knowledge is ideally modified by scientific observation of facts, many of them imperceptible.

Scientific knowledge of the physical world, as Mr Arnn well knows, is uncommon. It is narrow, even esoteric, and exceedingly dangerous when its certitude is artfully applied to imponderable issues of social "science." Therefore the Trivium upon which human civilization stands must not be abandoned. The material progress of our civilization is the consequence of scientific and technological advances (in the means of self-destruction, in event of war) in the struggle for survival. The antisocial war against the novel coronavirus disease applied to the total body may kill the spirit and the patient. Common sense purportedly provides a link between body and mind, matter and spirit, sensation and ideation, empiricism and rationalism, and informs us that the basic difference is a false dichotomy. The elevation of one side to the ruination of the other would be a fatal mistake.

Believers and skeptics and members of all sects alike have good reason to heed intelligent dissent instead of basing their opinions on prejudicial feelings about a person and his affiliates, even if he is courted by the White House and Fox News.

"More dangerous in the long run than the failure of our health experts is the idea that they and others with scientific expertise should run our government," Mr. Arnn professes. "President Trump has been consistently criticized by the media and others on the Left for his frustration that our economy has been shut down and for his eagerness to restart the economy and get people back to work. Time and time again he has been challenged as to whether he would dare go against the advice of medical experts."

Time and time again, historical common sense, whatever that may be, gives us cause to question frustrated dictators who, perhaps with all good intentions, foster Antisocial Socialism. If we are in our right minds and senses, each one of us will question misleaders who order us to stay at home to fight a war against an invisible enemy as our way of life is destroyed in the process. Yes, due precautions should be taken and casualties necessary limited, yet the whole world should be fully employed in a fight against a mortal enemy even if half the army die in battle.

But then again, maybe our precious way of life is not worth dying for. Maybe we should embrace Antisocial Socialism as our New Normal. Pray tell.