The Many and The Modern
“Say things as simply as possible” — in order to be understood as widely as possible. “Live in accordance with the norms of your society” — in order to be accepted. “Do not do what will be seen as inappropriate, foolish, or out of step by the people around you” — lest one be rejected or even condemned by others. “Keep up with the latest art, music, attitudes” — so as not to appear obsolete or incommensurable. “Meet others halfway when you are unable bring them over to your side” — if you want to be successful on the terms of the present. The rule implied in all these common sentiments — and also demonstrated by these sentiments themselves — may be reduced to one overriding injunction: Never stray from what is common.
To be sure, in following these general guidelines, you will be living as most of the human race has ever lived, or at least as it has always hoped to appear to itself. Equally sure is that not one single person throughout history whom you regard as essential, indispensable, important, or even relevant, beyond the narrowest range of your personal emotional experience, ever lived according to any of those sentiments. These individuals, on the contrary, lived memorably and in a sense redeemed the bulk of humanity around them, by accepting the hardest truth that separates the bulk from the essence, namely that although the common is an inevitable and necessary stage of development, its purpose is to give way to the uncommon, to let go of what is uncommon — which, according to its nature, it usually does only by force, and after exerting the subtlest and most relentless efforts to subdue and contain the uncommon impulse, which it understandably perceives as a threat to be crushed within its embrace. “Common,” as applied to those who collectively embody the notion, means unwilling to be alone, afraid of being misunderstood or unprovided for, lacking the nerve to stand apart and to be noticed as standing apart — or unnoticed, as the case may be.
Modern politics, modern science, modern art, modern religion, and modern education — the suffocating embrace of the common elevated to a ruling principle. The root cause of all this: modern philosophy, with its “state of nature” reductionism, its shamefully proud ceding of the realm of truth to material sciences unmoored from any foundation in, or duty to, human life as we actually experience it, i.e., the soul, and its resulting decay into the pseudoscientific “social sciences” with their abiding spirit of utilitarian pragmatism — the reversed perspective of commonness itself entrenched as a telos.
