The best spokesperson for common sense in recent times was Ronald Reagan.
In his farewell address, the 40th president defined his revolution as “a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.”
Actually, from the very start of his political career, Reagan attributed his success to his belief in the idea that government “could be operated efficiently by using the same common sense practiced in our everyday life, in our homes, in business and private affairs.”
Today presidential candidate Donald Trump, taking up Reagan’s mantle, has laid claim to the phrase “common-sense conservatism.” What exactly does this mean?
Common sense and prudence
In economics, common-sense behavior can be seen as “risk aversion,” defined as a predilection to take precautionary moves, especially when an uncertain future is seen as perilous, full of risks that can neither be fully calculated nor avoided.
In accounting, “risk aversion,” a fundamental concept, is defined as prudence, a standard used to determine, for instance, the time when revenue can and should be recognized – a calculation that typically is neither unimportant nor inconsequential.
Lawyers still abide by the so-called, “prudent (man) judgment rule” to argue cases at law involving judgments of “right” and “wrong.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in Part Three, Section One, Chapter One, Article 7, identifies the “human virtues,” with an addition written in 1806 devoted to articulating the “cardinal virtues” by quoting St. Thomas Aquinas in reference to prudence.
That text reads: “Prudence is the virtue that disposes practical reason to discern our true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it.” It went on to conclude with some sound advice, namely: “The prudent man looks where he is going.”
If prudent behavior is right reason in action, then why has the importance of prudence to common sense been mostly abandoned, forfeited in more recent times and nearly totally forgotten by our post-modern culture and governments?
Resurrecting common sense
Let’s trace the history of common sense’s demise, for in so doing we will then be able to suggest ways for its possible resurrection.
For Aristotle any conception of the “good life” employed practical wisdom.
Knowledge of the good life is what elevated prudence into a virtue in the first place and identified it as wisdom. This “practical wisdom” for Aristotle was rooted in our experience. Experience teaches us how to apply universal principles to the particular circumstances of life. Aristotle’s inquiry of “practical wisdom” and the “good life” was meant to inform human action.
In the “Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle wrote: “Prudence is that virtue of the understanding which enables men to come to wise decisions about the relation to happiness of the goods and evils. … ”
By the time of English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, however, at the start of the modern era, we witness a complete rejection of such thinking.
Hobbes finds prudence no longer to be a proper concept in philosophy. He cast it aside as “mere conjecture.” This turned classical ethics on its head as prudence was no longer a virtue at all.
During the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith (who was first and foremost a moral philosopher, and later the founder of modern economics), tried to reconnect prudence to morality.
An entire section of his opus, “The Moral Theory of Sentiments,” is devoted to the virtue of prudence as a form of common sense. Thinking as he did about the rising wealth of nations, Smith transformed the concept of prudence into both an economic and a moral virtue.
Caution is not popular these days, and prudence in that sense is hardly the supreme virtue it once was, if it is a virtue at all.
No longer able to hold back gratification, modern individuals and governments cannot delay desire in the present – even if, in so doing, we could take steps to satisfy ourselves better later in time. Gratification must be instantaneous.
This is why our budgets are out of control and our debt is what it is.
Donald Trump, much like Ronald Reagan, is criticized by politicians on the left and the right for proposing solutions that are “too simple,” not adequately thought out to meet the standard Washington think tanks demand of public policy wonks considered qualified to govern.
But for Trump, like Reagan, common sense was the core of public policy, demanding we ask of all government actions whether today’s modern political excesses – such as a $20 trillion national debt – are prudent.
Put simply, if running a $20 trillion national debt is a bad idea, then to political thinkers of Reagan’s or Trump’s ilk, it only makes sense to take prudent measures to bring the national debt into a more manageable level, perhaps now, before paying interest on the national debt begins taking one-third or more of the federal budget.
Common-sense conservatism rooted in the virtue of prudence is making a comeback because Trump, like Reagan, is calling into question our political purpose and system of cronyism, victimization and entitlement.
It is high time for some more common sense and less immediate gratification, a principle Reagan and Trump would both see as antithetical to the prudent management of government.
