The disappearance of common sense, understood as sense common to all, is now in a clear crisis. Hannah Arendt, a political thinker facing this crisis, believes that, like Nazism, it is “… the surest sign of the present-day crisis. In every crisis a piece of the world, something common to us all, is destroyed. The failure of common sense, like a divining rod, points to the place where such a cave-in has occurred.” Look at the Syro-Malabar church, its Synod considers that their former Major Archbishop has not done anything immoral in the land sale issue. But the High Court of Kerala and the Supreme Court of India thinks and concludes otherwise, that he was involved in a “criminal conspiracy.” Perhaps, the common sense of the courts is no more shared by the Synod. This represents a serious moral erosion, the “disappearance of common sense” – what it leaves is simply a cave-in, the ruins after a collapse. Truth is that which puts a stop to all conversations. But there is no more a common agreeable Truth. It is the sign of a terrible crisis of authority. True authority has vanished from the world. There is no truth to help us in thinking, willing and judging. All these are one activity through which sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass.
This is a serious crisis where each group begins to cut itself off from the mainstream commonality and resides in ideological cocoons created for them. Nazism and Marxism can become such ideologies that are self-contained straitjackets of ideals totally separated from reality. Kindly recall to mind what happened to J. S. Siddhartha, a degree student at the Veterinary University in Wayanad, inside the college hostel on February 18. He was brutally assaulted without any human consideration in full view of the students and in full knowledge of the staff and authorities of the university. It was sheer brutality unleashed under their party flag by the leaders of a Marxist student organization. Naked violence to dominate and suppress everyone to an ideology was let loose. There is neither truth nor morality above and over the Marxist ideology from which the party draws its inspiration. It alone creates good and evil. Criminals run amok under the full protection of the flag.
“The immediate impulse that gave rise to her preoccupation with mental activities,” Arendt explained, “came from [her] attending the Eichmann trial.” In Israel, her “interest” was “awakened” by what she thought was the most striking feature of the accused—his “thoughtlessness,” a blatant “absence of thinking” both “in his past behavior [and] in his behavior during the trial.” A man responsible for the murder of 60 lakhs of Jews in Concentration camps was someone who never gave a thought to what he was doing. The banality of evil was so pervasive in Germany then; they were intelligent men and women, but they never thought of the other in their midst. It was not lack of mathematical sense that was behind it; it was simply the lack of moral sense – of right and wrong. They simply followed corporeal urges and their minds refused to see and judge. Men and women refused to be human. Nazism was a case of Aryan domination that can repeat itself in history if we forget to read history and march forward with a sense of future for humans. Any system of thought or faith can become an ideology of domination. Enlarged thinking, in other words, evaporates in times of crisis. Arendt’s historiography of Nazism reveals further tensions of this kind, one involving her understanding of the mental activities of both judging and thinking.
While talking to journalists on his return flight from Mongolia on Sept 5, 2023, Pope Francis said: “Within the Church there are often ideologies, which separate the Church from the life that comes from the root and goes upwards. They separate the Church from the influence of the Holy Spirit. An ideology is incapable of incarnation; it is only an idea. But when ideology gathers strength and becomes politics, it usually becomes a dictatorship, right? It becomes incapacity to dialogue, to move forward with cultures. And imperialisms do this. Imperialism always consolidates starting from an ideology. In the Church too we must distinguish doctrine from ideology: true doctrine is never ideological, never. It is rooted in God’s holy faithful people. Instead, ideology is detached from reality, detached from the people…” This is the danger we have fallen into.