The situation in France and many other democratic countries is much more than a political crisis. It’s a crisis of meaning: common sense has disappeared.
When you look at events around the world, you get the impression that what’s most lacking is a common sense. And it is this lack that explains the disarray of our societies and their anti-democratic drift.
This notion of common sense has long been defined as a set of opinions, beliefs and perceptions widely shared in a society.
In philosophy, Aristotle defined it as “the sense that enables us to name things”; Descartes identified it with “common sense”; Kant defined it as “an ideal standard for establishing judgments”. Locke called it “a fact common to all human beings”. Diderot saw it as “the only truth, the universal logic”. Voltaire saw it as “the first perception of things, before philosophy took hold of it”.
Then came those who questioned its existence: Marx, and his successors right up to Bourdieu, asserted that common sense doesn’t exist, that it’s “immediate evidence, often illusory”, and that the meaning of the world depends on what each person knows, what each person defends, their social position.
They thus had the intuition of what the most advanced mathematics demonstrated a little later: in 1931, in Vienna, in his completeness theorem, Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel showed that any logical system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of integers admitted propositions that could neither be invalidated nor confirmed by the axioms of the theory. More generally, there are no absolutely true theorems, no common sense, only unverifiable axioms, unprovable theories.
And this is the crux of today’s problems: for philosophy, for sociology, for politics, for science itself, there is no longer any truth commonly accepted as a basis for discussion.
Very prosaically, no one agrees on the facts, be they global warming, biodiversity loss, soil pollution, inflation, unemployment, growth, deficit, debt or tax yields; no one is prepared to accept that there is a common reading of the world, no one is prepared to accept the other’s perception: the other’s hypotheses are regarded as weapons in a social battle, not as facts. Common sense then becomes nothing more than a power struggle, in which there is no truth. Only points of view. No theorems, just unverifiable axioms, unprovable theories. Arguments.
This refusal to accept the existence of common sense, of indisputable truth, whether accounting, scientific or social, leads some and others to refuse to debate issues rationally. And even, for many, to ignore them: if the data are uncertain, there’s no reason to worry.
This explains the global and national inability to debate the issues rationally. And to come up with common-sense solutions that can be applied over the long term.
Yet there can be no democracy without shared common sense. And its absence explains the rise of illiberal or totalitarian governments, which impose their point of view and make it common sense. This is what is happening in a very large part of the planet, in totalitarian countries such as the USA, where the president dismisses statisticians whose data he doesn’t like, and imposes a parallel reality in many areas. And yet, there is no shortage of indisputable facts: the planet’s temperature is rising. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising. Biodiversity is declining. Wealth is concentrating. The very rich are fewer in number and living better and better. The very poor, in relative terms, are more and more numerous and are living worse and worse. In the middle, a global middle class, more and more standardized, more and more atomized, is losing its bargaining power and gradually sinking to the side of the poorest. And even if the precise statistics are uncertain, the trends are there, indisputable. In France, there’s no shortage of facts either: the public debt, the precariousness of the most vulnerable, the enormous wealth of a few. And so many other realities.
And even if the figures establishing these facts are imprecise, even if they cannot be established to the nearest thousandth, they do exist. So it’s not true that there’s no consensus on the data. There is a global common sense of what the world is.
To bring about this common sense, and to share the diagnosis that follows from it, we need to stop looking for precision in detail. And we have to stop referring uncertain statistics to each other. We have to make do with the great masses. And large masses are self-evident. Indisputable. They are independent of social position. They are true, for everyone.
If we don’t make this diagnosis clearly, if we refuse to see the facts as they are, even to within 10 or 20%, a minority, rich or poor, secular or religious, will impose its vision of reality by force. This is already the case today, in many countries; and it will be the case elsewhere. In today’s France, any future government that fails to share a minimal diagnosis common to the entire political mosaic of the moment will be condemned to failing to find a majority in Parliament. We would then have to wait until, in another assembly, with another president, a party regained an outright majority, and imposed its particular meaning on a country that had lost all common sense. This can still be avoided.
Good sense (2018). Painting by Roger Djiguemdé