Listening to sundry BBC interviews with sundry intolerant Anti-Fascists trying to disrupt the Question Time programme tonight, I started to think about something my Catholic friend mentioned yesterday, namely the Death of Common Sense.

Here is one well-travelled account of his (sic) tragic end.

And there’s the book:

But the issue we talked about yesterday perhaps is rather different.

Namely that common sense requires things to be believed which are (a) common (in the sense of being widely shared), but also (b) not really questioned too much.

And that society as an idea rests on some shared ‘common sensey’ assumptions, for in their absence there can be little except restless uncertainty and therefore moral and political instability.

Now we look to have a tsunami of politically correct ideological collectivist bossiness, coupled with secularisation and an Internet-driven free-for-all in which truth and lies and rubbish and value all slosh around looking for buyers.

Anything and everything is questioned, non-stop.

That has to be a mighty force for driving out anything common at all between people.

Thus, the Questions.

Do modern societies which believe in a fully free market of ideas carry the seeds of their own decay, as there is less and less ‘common’ to help keep people together?

Does giving a high-profile platform to people whose claim to fame is not their logic and honesty but rather their sheer emotional intensity (BNP-style racists, extreme Greens, Muslim radicals) empower them and reduce common sense still further?

Do those communities where sheer intensity of Belief prevails over Reason have an edge these days?

And, finally, do the people who vote for the BNP do so in part because they feel that somewhere, somehow they are being stripped of their common sense without quite grasping how or why it is happening?