Thomas Paine: Common Sense

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom."

Thomas Paine writes this line in the introduction of Common Sense, a pamphlet urging immediate independence from Britain.

I'm not sure if I'm reading it the way it was meant to be written, but if I'm not mistaken, it means that people get in the habit of believing in something... anything... and end up believing it just because it's what they've always believed. If one were to ask them why they believe the way they do, they would have no good reason, except that it's just the way it's always been done. It's just what they know. Their answer to the question "Why?" would be "Just because." And if this is what Paine was in fact trying to say, then A-fricken-MEN! heheh.

What I mean is: So many people really DO go on believing and acting as they've always done, just because it's the way they've seen it done and been taught to do. These people will even often fight to the death defending an ideal that they can't quite explain, just because it's what they think they're supposed to believe in. Would you call that tradition? Maybe.

Paine was said to have been a brilliant man, if I recall correctly, and an introductory statement like the one above is a great example of his ability at least to read human nature... his instincts, I suppose. He anticipated what the general reaction would be to Common Sense and he asked that readers open their minds instead.

Craig Nelson said, in an article in The New England Review ,that Paine "believed in cultivating an elegant and stylish simplicity as an outward manifestation of republican ideals" (Nelson said this in regard to both Paine and Benjamin Franklin, in fact). I take this, and many other things I've read on Paine, to mean that he was an incredibly clever man, and if I knew him today, he'd be one of those people by whom I'd be impressed, but would be afraid to say anything foolish in front of, for fear that he'd ridicule me with a sharp retort. Hmm... I wonder if this is an accurate presumption on my part. And Hmm... I wonder what kind of "common sense" he'd plead of today, if he were alive to do so. And would people listen?