Tsarina McVey. (WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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So Esther McVey has been made Britain’s Common Sense Tsar. One can imagine the scene around the Cabinet table, as Rishi Sunak calls on various of his ministers to sketch their plans for the future.
First to speak up is the Chancellor, who in a voice trembling with excitement outlines his vision of an economy which has abandoned money altogether and reverted to a form of barter. The Minister for Health follows with an update of her imaginative new scheme to ease staffing problems in the NHS: a limited number of patients will be allowed to carry out minor surgical operations on themselves, starting by extracting their own tonsils and progressing to self-appendectomies. Finally, the Climate Minister announces further details of his campaign to control the emission of methane gases by cattle: all cows will be issued with a neat pair of buttock-hugging Lederhosen, some of them manufactured from the hides of their relatives, which should ensure a dramatic upswing in the planetās chances of survival.
At a nod from the PM, Esther McVey, dressed in cap and bells like an Elizabethan clown, swoops on these wretched visionaries and belabours them about the head with a pigās bladder rattling with dried peas, while the rest of the Cabinet thump the table in approval. Common sense has been restored.
The problem, however, is that common sense isnāt just opposed to silly ideas. A lot of it is hostile to ideas as such, which is one reason why there is so much of it around in the philistine British middle class. Unlike the high-rationalist French, idealist Germans and mystical Russians, British culture is suspicious of grand abstractions. In the United States, the word ādreamā is central to public discourse and used for the most part positively; over here, dreamers are people who forget to turn the taps off and bring the ceiling down.
If one wanted a figure typical of plain British sense, one could do worse than nominate the great 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson, whose bluff, downright, demystified observations raise common sense almost to an art-form. Asked whether the Giantās Causeway was worth seeing, Johnson replied: āWorth seeing, sir; not worth going to see.ā The dry, downbeat, practical tone of this is the tone of common sense. There are other examples in the literature of the nation. Asked what book he would choose if marooned on a desert island, George Bernard Shaw proposed Practical Hints on Boat Building.
If grand abstractions are to be avoided, it is partly because they are associated with the revolutionary Left. One wonders therefore why God, nation, law and order, all abstract notions beloved of many conservatives, arenāt to be spurned as well. Instead, we’re told that people who trade in ideas lack feeling, as well as being eccentric, unsociable and in sore need of a haircut. They are rootless, robotic creatures who cut you off from nation, family, lineage and locality, whereas what matters for the conservative is sentiment, piety, faith and intuition. The Left has concepts, while conservatives have customs.
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SubscribeA sad demonstration of a lack of common sense on my part. Common sense, coupled with past experience, should have prevented me from wasting my time in reading another essay by Mr Eagleton. Regrettably it didnāt and so I was treated to another serving of nonsense. But I will be wiser next time.
I think heās just trying to identify the useful idiots to better target his schemes.
I’m not convinced this is fair and I like moaning about lefies as much as the next man.
Someone described common sense to me once as “whatever seems obvious to me at the moment” and I think there is some value in that. Yes, I know, we’re living through a time when mad ideas are calmly accepted by our betters (men can be women, the world will end in a decade, all white people are racist). These ideas delivered in an almost scientific manner (even though they’re daft) so it takes a bit of effort to counter them.
Gut instincts, common sense have their place alongside rationality but we have problems when one or the other becomes dominant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Eagleton
Standard Eagleton fare. ‘Common sense’ derives from tradition (prejudices collected over centuries), and hence is ‘conservative’ and hence ‘bad’. Taking refuge in the notion of tacitness (with its hint of pre-scientific ‘the world works in mysterious ways’), is pretty weak, even for an unreconstructed 20th century lefty-dinosaur like Eagleton. He still has to bridge the gap between what he would like humans to be, and what humans actually are.
In his defence, I don’t think Eagleton is dismissing tradition out of hand. On the contrary, he come across as quite sympathetic towards it, and recognizes its importance in human affairs. Where he draws the line, it would seem, is that tradition is _necessarily_ good, and that received wisdom and prejudice do need to be examined, from time to time as circumstances change. Even Edmund Burke conceded as much, if I recall correctly.
Yes he may be a cantankerous old commie, but he does write in a funny, thought-provoking way and I’m almost prepared to forgive him for that. Only almost though.
Your drawing of him as ‘old socialist’ is probably accurate; back then there was a strong sense of community and a common sense attitude to life. But now there are the new luxury ‘socialists’; and they don’t have Eagleton’s little funny bits. I wonder where Eagleton would place himself between those two poles.
Very true – note Eagleton avoids talk of any theory of knoweldge that might give “common” sense a value. Ontological or empirical knowledge may have merits similar to traditional academic logic and reason and no one method can remain supreme as our paradigms are refuted and replaced over time. Consider his words about Russians, Germans and French then substitute these groups for “Gingers”, “Jews” and “Blacks” and you can see the paucity of his thought. He seems to lack sense – common or otherwise….
Britain’s (or maybe England’s) dogged attachment to the kind of “come off it!” common sense that Kate Fox wrote about in “Watching the English” and the tendency to scoff at big ideas (which Eagleton refers to here as “philistine”) is the reason why it’s never fallen to totalitarianism.
German idealism might have its merits. And in my experience, the Germans are far more given to thinking deeply and thoroughly, while the British like to “just get on with it” and DO stuff. However, the 20th century showed them (and us) how dangerous big ideas can be.
In the vast area beneath the kind of societal cataclysm that Nazism brought – both ways of being have things to commend them and both have drawbacks.
When, like 21st century Britain, you need huge state reform – people with big ideas should be welcomed. But they need to be the kind of rare creature who is clever, but also charismatic and clubbable enough to be able to get people on their side. The kind that can think in great abstract arcs, but bring their ideas “down to earth” by communicating them in earthly, common sense terms.
Good luck with finding that person.
Indeed; why would such a person step into the current political arena given the attitude of the Media and the Civil Service. Little wonder we have the present load of dross.
Perhaps that’s because the grand abstractions have not turned out all that well. Genocide, expansionist invasion of sovereign countries, economic experiments that enslaved and decimated populations. And now allowing the Third World to come and live in a welfare state.
Yes, Terry old chap, we really are a nation of dullards and we must try harder to obey your rules.
As an American I have to ask, is Eagleton taking the piss here or did someone really do something as mind bogglingly stupid as creating a “common sense” cabinet position? Things have become so stupid now that the line between parody and reality is getting hard to tell at times.
Not too long ago several cabinets had “blue sky” advisors, encouraged to present ideas to the government which may or may not have had any inherent practicality. I imagine they eventually realized that position was redundant, and brought in the common sense tsar to give true balance.
Politicians love to have grand ideas that they may be remembered for – and they frequently brook no common-sense intervention. Vital to have a non-toady around.
This bit gets more chilling with re-reading:
Far better, I guess, to allow the Jews living there to be murdered or displaced (they all belong in Manhattan anyway, right?) and to have a swathe of vying Islamic states stretching across Asia and Africa.
Looking at the first few paragraphs of this article with its sixth-form levels of humour, it’s easy to dismiss or mock poor old Terry as a daffy old academic Marxist who has lost the plot. But dig deeper, and there’s some really nasty stuff.
I’ve refrained from commenting on this article until now, but you’ve written what i would’ve anyway, so thanks.
The use of empowered āred hatā team members is a vital tool in all types of successful commercial and political environments. Itās a smart move to start to establish this kind of activity at the cabinet level to reduce the amount of dreadful legislation/policy being created on the hoof.
For example, I suspect the awful 2050 Net Zero initiative (from the awful Theresa May) would have been strangled at birth.
Any late maturation in this way of thinking has come way too late to save the Conservatives.
Snide shoehorning of Israel into a subject that has nothing to do with it.
One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. People rooted in ideas can think like that. People rooted in community tend not to.
Given the paucity of ideas in politics right now, I’ll settle for common sense.
“One wonders therefore why God, nation, law and order, all abstract notions beloved of many conservatives….”
I leave others to speak up for God and nation, but “law and order” – an abstract notion beloved of many conservatives? Maybe Mr Eagleton should spend some time in, say, Somalia to de-abstractify his understanding of what law and order – and the lack of it – actually entails, not just to ‘conservatives’, but to everyone.
Having a Tsar for Common Sense assumes that our politicians are fantasists in the grip of grandiose visions which need to be deflated.
That’s not an assumption, it’s just common sense.
I think what we need is a Tsar Tsar or should that be Zar Zar
Well, for at least the past thirty years we’ve been governed from Oxford University and it hasn’t been a resounding success, has it Mr Eagleton? So perhaps your snottiness about the notion that maybe someone else could have a go is a little inappropriate?
Common sense can’t win any battles because it is an age thing. Try telling any 18-year-old that something is coomon sense. Awful, stupid article.
In this age where chaos is ascendent, having a beacon of commonsense has merit. But appointing a female to the role is contradictory.
I tend to agree with you. I’ve noticed, even among highly intelligent and capable women, a tendency to go-along to get-along. Many such women are in charge of public institutions or enjoy positions of power in corporations and governments. As such they create policy that is supposedly inclusive (read popular) in order to appear kind and benevolent, no matter how silly or retrograde it is. There are of course women who buck this trend, but they are quickly ousted or publicly pilloried. I ultimately believe that the ascendancy of women within the spheres of work and politics has derailed the West, and completely demoralized and alienated young men.
https://www.wolfsheadonline.com/young-western-men-are-being-destroyed/
I completely agree with you.
The Longhouse.
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/02/what-is-the-longhouse
…very brave of you to speak your mind Julian. Consensus building is a valuable feminine trait, as is risk avoidance. But human consensus descends into catastrophic groupthink, when it is settles on maximum risk avoidance, and a focus on the particular at the expense of the at large. And as your comment implies this has become the default modus operandi across the public and private sectors, at least in the West. China of course, experienced the awful consequences of Yin ascendency let loose by the communist revolution in the 1960’s.
I think women can be more attuned to common sense than men.
Their clock ticks faster and longer.
Course then you have my grand mother telling me ājust vote for the ones that will give you the mostā. As a young man I was quite perplexed with her comment. Around 35 I figured it out though. Good governance provides security and opportunity and hard work doesnāt care about your skin colour. So thatās what gives everybody the most.
It was a great piece of common sense.
I’m very impressed by your Grandma. That’s what I do. I now realize. Until I read those words I hadn’t analysed it. I’ve NEVER voted Tory in my life but thats not really because I care about social justice. I don’t. In my partial circumstance my voting choice best protects MY interests.
A high tide floats all boats.
I was unhappy with all parties, so I got involved. At least now they have to listen to me whine and snivel.
“The problem, however, is that common sense isnāt just opposed to silly ideas. A lot of it is hostile to ideas as such, which is one reason why there is so much of it around in the philistine British middle class. Unlike the high-rationalist French, idealist Germans and mystical Russians, British culture is suspicious of grand abstractions. In the United States, the word ādreamā is central to public discourse and used for the most part positively; over here, dreamers are people who forget to turn the taps off and bring the ceiling down.”
When, Terry, you people come up with an idea or dream which doesn’t end up inflicting terror, torture, famine and mass murder on the huddled masses, do let us know!
It may not be good for people now. But in a hundred years their childrenās children will be better off. (We are still waiting)
…when I read the sentence “…what’s thoroughly questionable…(is)…that the West needs a foothold in the Middle East known as “Israel”…” – bearing in mind that the purpose of that State, by international agreement, was to provide the one place in the World where Jews had an absolute right to be, and to live in peace…
…and that although it shares many values ascribed to “The West”, many of it’s people are not now nor have ever been in any sense “of the West”…having been driven out of Muslim states by the modern equivalent of “fire and sword” in the years after it was founded…but having then taken on values that the UN mostly assert to be “universal”…
…I’m afraid my “Common Sense” leads me to assume, at best, that the writer is so unthinking in his belief that “Anti-Imperialism” is the seat of all meaning and virtue, that he is no longer applying either common sense, or even rational reasoning in his pronouncements…
…and if I make the leap beyond my commonsensical approach, I’m afraid the term I would use to describe his position would be rather different…
…but I will leave the reader to make their own leap as to what that word might be…
I thought the author was going to mock the fact that Britain actually has a commonsense tsar, something worthy of a satirical essay. Afterall, if common sense is in such short supply that does deserve some serious barbs. Gotta say I was a little disappointed.
Engineers learn from experience. It was the freedom which Britain enjoyed which enabled craftsmen and farmers to create the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. J Brownowski of the Ascent of Man said the IR was Britain’s Enlightenment was the Industrial Revolution.For exmple Watt’s steam engine was an improvement of Newcomen’s and G Stephenson used the already existing rails for his steam locomotive.
Common sense is nothing more than learning from experience. As Orwell pointed out, left wing middle class intellectuals are divorced from physical reality and do not know fire burns.
The headline suggests we’re about to find out what’s wrong with common sense. Instead, we’re treated to a rant on the evils of philistinism, dogmatism, hostility to abstraction, empirically-rooted caution, over-veneration of customs and tradition, insufficient awareness that common sense might not be universal, over-valuing some modes of cognition while neglecting others, and other unrelated failures of the intellect and imagination. Oh, well. When you can’t find any real fault with what you’re supposedly criticizing, change the subject and attack some contextual straw men instead, while pretending you’re still on topic. Common sense has traditionally awarded poor grades to student essays guilty of such transparent logical equivocation. For the sake of the country, may this particular tradition continue to survive awhile longer.
[Edited to add:] If the article’s author wishes to improve his grade by submitting a new paper, including in it a research-backed demo that the commonsensical are more prone to philistinism, dogmatism and confirmation bias than are (for some strange reason that would certainly require explanation) dreamers, German idealists, or those who favour grand abstractions would give him an excellent start on the road to improvement. But no one is going to accept his initial implied assumption that terms and phrases like ‘dogmatic’ and ‘hostile to ideas’ can be substituted for ‘common sense’ in a proposition without changing the proposition’s meaning. To the extent that he persists, ‘dogmatically,’ in committing the fallacy of logical equivocation, the author will not rise to the basic reasoning level attained by his more scrupulously commonsensical classmates, never mind vault past them to the icy heights of grand synthesis and metaphysical speculation.
True common sense acknowledges the need for inspired hunches and flights of imagination, just as competent grand synthesizers acknowledge the need to have all nuts and bolts in the right place to avoid talking nonsense.
Each of Terry Eagleton’s articles should be pretexted by the following statement in order to save the prospective reader the waste and pain of setting out on their intended course: “Terry Eagletonās contribution to Marxist cultural theory is broad in its range. While his earlier writing examined in some depth certain Marxist categories of literary-cultural analysis, his later, more popularizing, work has argued persuasively the need for theory. Eagleton has revaluated the English literary-critical tradition, redefined the criticās function, and reappraised specific authors from his historical materialistic perspective. These are substantive aspects of the general task of a Marxist critic”
The USA has foundations in Common Sense (Thomas Paine 1776). Sometimes it needs revisiting…
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Unfortunately someone as out of touch as Eagleton cannot do satire, and shouldn’t attempt it. Very cringe-worthy.
Thanks again, Eagleton.
I think that as this article got written and published, we do need a bit more grounded common sense.
I think we can safely surmise it’s Don Lightweight who’s running around dealing out down votes to anyone who doesn’t see things his way. š
I for one appreciated this essay very much! The notion of “common sense” normally gets away with conceptual murder, and i must thank Mr Eagleton for sending in the probe here!
The fact that the Unherd will now gather around and make so many disdaiinful ‘superior-sounding’ moos, would be hilarious if it wasn’t so disappointing..
(?) This comment is incoherent. No one concerned about “conceptual murder” would “appreciate” the scourge of logical equivocation.
Missing from Eagleton’s quite interesting piece is the choice of ‘Tsar’. McVey is a grotesque sociopath who spent her time at the DWP bulling the disabled and chronically sick. For this, among her other charming traits, she was unceremoniously dumped by the ordinary, common sense people of her original Liverpool constituency and given a seat so safe that a stuffed monkey with a Tory lapel could win it.
Eagleton is an undermine everything academic.
Just one sentence in this struck me as supreme irony. Talk about running up the beach to avoid having the advancing SEA (of FAITH) soak your feet. I’ve heard Mr Eagleton on radio discussions about Faith,on the BBC,on Unbelievable,etc. He is,or was,one of those secular humanists who,being clever,could easily demolish the person of faith he was pitted against and his main point was always – we don’t need anything outside ourself,we can find supreme transcendency in music,art,even religious art,in nature,in landscapes,in beauty. Just because you know there isn’t anything further beyond the material world,ie what you can see and feel and touch doesn’t mean you can’t feel your spirit soar at wonderful things. He was always definitely in favour of common sense until the Tories (who I’ve never voted for).espoused it. Now Mr Eagleton has wised up to the danger of thinking “there is no more than this”,the danger being that,if there is no more than this then whoever has political control of “this” owns you body and soul. In just one sentence in this piece Mr Eagleton says you have to believe in something out there beyond comprehension,Good Lord,he’s discovered God even if he hasn’t Got Jesus. The Turncoat. He’s seen the shipwreck approaching and he’s doing what rats do. But then,he’s clever. He could become a celebrity.vicar who never mentions Jesus like the smiley vicar of Dibley blonde one,the Doctor Who lookalike one,or the ex 80s pop star one.