Requiem for Common Sense
Fr. Yves le Roux
From the March 2008 newsletter of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Common sense is no more, destroyed by the monstrous god of modern technology.
The famous saying of Descartes, asserting that "common sense is the most shared thing in this world," makes us smile today! What is, indeed, the use of this saying when man learns how to use a computer even before learning the rudiments of grammar and arithmetic? The computer screen is, for the child, not only a physical reality: it cuts him off, often permanently, from the indispensable tools of knowledge which will allow him to judge and understand the reality that surrounds him as an adult.
Caught up in technology, man becomes secretly its slave by subjecting himself to the poor binary language of computers, by unconsciously adopting it as the language of his own thought. Any idea of fine distinctions becomes foreign to him. This is a caricature of real truth, which, in its simplicity, takes into account all the complexity of the real world.
The technological bent of our world has created an artificial man, cut off from reality. Master of the world in front of his screen (without even thinking that the screen performs its own role of "screen" or filter, separating him from the real world!), man lives no more in the concrete world, where he must necessarily submit himself to a higher order. He drifts in an imaginary world, where his desire for domination can infinitely expand itself without risk–thus becoming god and master. At least he believes it to be so! But he is only a sad individual used to having the world revolve around his grandiose person–we see here the perfect and unbearable type of a tyrannical individual making grotesque demands.
This imaginary world has its own laws, its own morals, its own criteria of truth. Each man moves within a universe that is rigorously personal. This solitary isolation is only the last misadventure of a civilization dying by asphyxiation. When men are no longer subject to an order superior to themselves and when they maintain between each other only spasmodic and extremely minimal relationships, society itself is not far from its breakdown. We already live in this strange world, a world that the philosopher Marcel De Corte accurately called "dissociety," where man, reduced to the solitude of his poor individuality, becomes foreign to the world and to himself.
Man, indeed, locked up in his world because of the omnipresent tyranny of images which do not leave him time to reflect, each day loses the vital contact with reality, source of balance and...of common sense!
The essential link between man and the concrete reality that surrounds and dominates him grows blurred, in favor of an imaginary world that is violently imposed upon him by the proliferation of modern means of communication and information. Man finds difficulty in establishing a living relationship–let us dare to use the term, a carnal relationship, a relationship of flesh and blood–with the real world which has become foreign to him. This loss of contact with reality is tragic. Reality, by raising a barrier against man's morbid inclination to egotism, is the only protection man has against himself.
This barrier was nothing other than common sense. A man who knew that he was naturally dependent did not have the insane yearning to rise above himself. He fit with ease in the order of the universe and drew from it his force and his balance.
But times have changed: now is the reign of disproportion, in which man, intoxicated by his technical successes, lives in a disincarnated world that tries to delay its unavoidable defeat by attempting a dazzling and dazing escape into the future.
The barrier that was common sense is now broken. Man has become nothing more than a frail raft, tossed around at the media's whims. The Mass has been said: it was a requiem Mass.
We take note of it; painfully, because the disappearance of common sense is only the twilight that heralds the disappearance of man.
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