Samuel Earle | Against Common Sense LRB July 19, 2021

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On May 11, 2020, with Britain reeling from the first wave of the pandemic, Boris Johnson urged the public to use “good British common sense” to manage the risks posed by Covid-19. A year and 120,000 dead later, the Prime Minister’s advice to the nation was the same. “It’s a matter of common sense,” he said on May 11, 2021. Now, as Britain lifts all Covid restrictions while registering almost as many cases as the rest of the world European Union Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who tested positive over the weekend, told Commons that it was time to “open a new chapter based on the foundations of personal responsibility and common sense” .

Last September, Johnson said “common sense” is the “greatest weapon” against the coronavirus. In October, as cases skyrocketed in Wave 2, he told people to “live fearlessly but with common sense,” dismissing the case for a two-week “breaker” lockout; he announced a four-week nationwide lockdown a few weeks later. At the end of November, he assured us that a regional “tier system” guided by “common sense” would put an end to the need for national blockages; in February, during a three-month nationwide lockdown, Johnson said the tier system no longer existed. And so on.

Most of the public health measures, from the compulsory wearing of a mask in public places to social distancing, cease today: a policy of “moral vacuum and epidemiological stupidity”, according to a senior official of the World Health Organization. health. But the dangers of reopening when the case rate is so high – vaccine-resistant mutations, young people who have not yet been vaccinated have long contracted Covid, those whose underlying health conditions are still at risk – can apparently be approached with “common sense”. What could possibly go wrong?

Given the poor performance of the UK government’s ‘one gun’ so far, common sense might suggest that we try something else. But for the Conservatives, there is no cheaper defense at hand. The more Britain’s situation worsens, the more “common sense” must be invoked – to cover the gaping holes in the government’s pandemic strategy and turn its withdrawal from its responsibilities into a twisted compliment: the British people are wise enough to take care of itself.

The devastating insufficiency of this logic in times of a pandemic – when people often do not know if they are carrying the virus, however caring they may be, and cases are increasing exponentially – does not need to be highlighted. Its convenience to government is equally evident: if the pandemic is about “personal responsibility and common sense” as Javid (a telling amalgamation) put it, then the public can still be blamed when things go wrong.

As Antti Lepistö writes in The rise of common sense conservatism, conservatives have long invoked “common sense” to “depoliticize the public sphere, supplant legitimate intellectual conflicts with a moral consensus invented at a time of perceived moral chaos”. It was not always so: that of Sophia Rosenfeld Common sense: a political historiany (2011) underlines the radical connotations of expression in the 18th century. But it’s now a key term in the conservative playbook. William Hague called it a “common sense revolution” in 2001. Ten years later, as the Conservatives pursued austerity, David Cameron said: “Let this be our message – common sense for the common good.

The term has a particular appeal to a British elite that has nothing “in common”, a ghost thread that connects Johnson and Cameron (both distant relatives of the royal family) to “the common man”. The British ruling class has long displayed a combination of false humility and anti-intellectualism that elevates instinct to the detriment of expertise (despite the considerable sums it spends on its education). When asked to Arthur Balfour – like Cameron and Johnson, one of Britain’s twenty former prime ministers – what his guiding political principles were, he replied modestly: “I guess the principles of common sense.

When Michael Gove said during the Brexit referendum campaign that the British public was tired of the experts – “I ask them to trust each other” – he was not betraying the Conservative tradition but continuing it. “No lesson seems to be so deeply instilled by the experience of life as never to trust the experts,” Lord Salisbury said in 1877. “If you believe the doctors, nothing is healthy. theologians, nothing is innocent. If you believe the soldiers, nothing is certain. They all need to dilute their strong wine with a big mixture of common sense.

In other words, the Conservatives’ empty invocations of “common sense” and their indifference to scientific advice predate the current Prime Minister. Yet maintaining the same posture during a pandemic requires a recklessness and callousness that Johnson can call his own. The idea that there could be something like “common sense” in the face of a pandemic – caused by a new and unpredictable virus – is clearly a fantasy. But it is the one that the Conservatives, determined to give up, will continue to peddle.

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