"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and, in order to qualify himsel for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive anything more destructive to morality than this?"

Thomas Paine
The Age of Reason
(from the opening passage)

Paine's road was not easy, and seeing how he suffered in the end does not make it less difficult to follow in his footsteps (not to presume I could fill his shoes). Although speaking out against your ideological enemies takes some courage, particularly when they have power or numbers, I find it far harder to confront my friends and colleagues. I'm not talking about corrective advice, that's simply a matter of tact. I mean when I think they are engaged in the kind of ass-hattery that Paine is talking about above. It's not a "Hey, I think there's a better way to do what you are trying to do," but a "Hey, you are entering the full-of-shit realm in an obvious attempt to suck up to people who can make your life easier, and everyone can see it."
I'm a union rep at the school that I teach at, and a few days ago I had to publicly confront our admin team on a practice that is both counterproductive and a violation of the contract--a public declaration made necessary because they refused to abide by a settled grievance. Nearly a dozen teachers (from a faculty of 136) saw it as an opportunity to line up for a nose browning session. They felt the need to publicly declare how pleasant their experience was, in contradistinction to the experience of others, and that they deeply appreciated the wonderful work the administration was doing. Since their personal experience doesn't negate that of others, the only possible reason to make a public declaration is to distance themselves from those who had fallen out of favor with the crown.
I've always felt that public praise should be reserved for those from whom you have nothing to gain, otherwise it cannot escape the pall of insincerity, but this was such buffoonery that the insincerity was more than just a pall.

But, for all my ranting, I could not bring myself to do what my conscience prodded me to; I couldn't call them out on it.

If I willingly call out the poor practices of my self-declared antagonistic administrator, but I bite my tongue rather than offend my friends, aren't I denying them the help I am providing my (for lack of a better term) "enemy"?

And then to add one piece of cowardice to another, I vent on a blog they'll likely never read...

On "Common Sense"

An old friend of mine, and I mean that in both ways, just retired from the classroom two days ago and it's an odd kind of feeling. It is the end of an era. As he said himself "It's been a long time coming." I first met him in the fall of 2001, and he was talking about retiring then. I'll spare you the metaphors and similes about what kind of guy he was, although I'll give you a cliche: he was often his own worst enemy. He would start almost every argument with something along the lines of "If you weren't such an idiot, you'd see..." That he was usually right mattered little to the people who stopped listening at the gratuitous insult. I'll admit he knew when diplomacy was critical, and surprised me with his skill; he just had little use for it outside of those rare circumstances. Those of us who managed to get past that (or through it) were privileged to know a man of rare intellect whose warmth and humor were genuine and surprising.

Last week he passed along to me a weathered copy of Howard Fast's Citizen Tom Paine, convinced that I would enjoy it; he was thoroughly right. I'm always amazed at how much more I learn from good historical fiction than I do from even the best non-fiction. The ability to get into the thoughts and feel the emotions of a person living the times is a territory that the unfortunate historian must retreat from. My sentiments on this are perhaps why, despite my deep fascination with history, I teach English.

The most surprising thing that came out of reading this text was the realization about 70 pages in, that I had never read Thomas Paine's Common Sense. I graduated with a double major in Literature and Government, from a school consistently ranked top 20 in the nation (13th the year I graduated), and whose reputation in Politics and Economics exceeded even that ranking. Yet, I never read one of the most profound and important era defining documents of all time. Perhaps Paine chaffed the conservatism of Claremont McKenna; they certainly plied me with much of the ridiculous dogma of the right. One course assigned Charles Murray's willful stupidity The Bell Curve--a fools magnum opus if ever there was one. And, before someone tries to salvage my professor's intellect or honesty, he did not intend it as an excercise in critical reading.

Paine's power to crystallize an era was simply an unwillingness to be anyone's fool. He called into question everything that did not square with the logic of human equality, and in that vein refused to see the common man as inherently flawed or incapable of mastering his destiny.

The dream Paine fought so valiantly for, in word and deed, has faded and decayed. Like da Vinci dreaming into the future and imagining machines that allowed men to fly, but too far ahead of his time to have the tools available to see it correctly, Paine imagined commerce to be the tool that would liberate humanity from the yoke of serfdom and subservience, but he could not recognize how want and enslavement would remain, and indeed become critical components of modern commerce.

Paine could not but rebel against the triumph of commerce which, despite the downfall of aristocracies nearly across the globe, has renewed that very hereditary privilege Paine so bitterly railed against. We didn't read Paine in my college, in all probability because if you see past the words to their meaning, the intellectual legacy of Paine is Marx.

Read Howard Fast's Citizen Tom Paine. It will be impossible not to come away from the text without a deep appreciation for the man and a sense of how desperately we need a new Common Sense.