Collegiate Times

At the dawn of the 17th century the Western world was in the midst of one of its greatest ideological conflicts in history.

For the nearly 500 years prior, this intellectual thought was held hostage by the science of Aristotle and the theology of the Christian church.  

Though Aristotle’s outlook fared well for the primitive knowledge of that early science but with the recent breakthroughs of modern science now becoming less assailable, Europe was in need of a new outlook on the universe.  

It was at this time that Rene Descartes published his philosophy which sought to end the Greek view of the world as being full of quality and value and replace it with a purely mechanical and mathematical outlook.  

Thus modern science and modern philosophy came together to force people to rid themselves of the common sense outlook of the world and replace it with a less intuitive and more difficult outlook to grasp.  

If there is one phrase that has become the battle cry of the current right-wing radicals it is ‘common sense solutions.’  

Extolled by such banal minds as Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and John Boehner this notion strives for a less intellectual set of solutions for this nation’s problems and instead calls for something that simply ‘makes more sense.’  This is of course nothing new.  

For most of our recent political history there have always been societal elements that have strived to end the intellectual elitism of Washington and replace it with something that was more common and down-to-earth.  

This notion has been used to justify nearly every failure of modern conservatism from President Regan’s absurd ‘trickle-down economics’ to President Bush’s war in Iraq.  

But never before have Americans witnessed a spectacle such as the one that’s been gaining during the Obama Administration from the recent surge in radical-rightists.

The current conservative movement, which is now held prisoner by the radical Tea Party believers, stands as the leaders of finding common sense solutions to not-so common sense problems.  

Consistently their response to every political, social and economic problem and crisis has been to abandon intellectualism in favor of common sense, to abandon realist complexity in favor of irrational simplicity.  

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A version of this article appeared in the Aug 4 issue of the Collegiate Times.