Although I enjoyed Jordan Peterson’s runaway bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018), I thought it was needlessly long and complex. In Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World, Robert Curry offers a far simpler approach. It turns out there is just one rule for life and one antidote for chaos: common sense.
Despite the role that common sense played in Peterson’s various defenses against chaos, the subject did not appear in his index. This omission is the best argument for the necessity of Curry’s project. Everyone who has benefited from Peterson would benefit from reading this compact book.
Curry is a thoughtful patriot with an uncommon common touch. He is not an academic and, fortunately for us, he does not write like one. Reclaiming Common Sense is his second book. His first, Common Sense Nation (2015), showed that the American Founders saw mankind as naturally capable of discerning self-evident truths using common sense. In this new work, Curry traces the origins of that worldview to some largely forgotten Scottish philosophers, most notably the 18th-century luminary Thomas Reid, who was the first to analyze and understand it fully.
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