Greening a Machiavellian State? Insights for International Environmental Governance

This article is an appeal to common sense, once seen as the American virtue, as it may be applied to contemporary considerations of the contest over same-sex marriage. Specifically, I argue that all societies, including our own, are bound together by an underlying or fundamental common sense of a select few things. Each society builds upon these few universal fundamentals with its own particular mythic and social constructions. 

When any one society begins to lose sight of these original human fundamentals and relies instead upon new shared conceptions of its world based solely upon abstract instrumental reason, it not only risks creating social and political mistakes-these, we may be able to live with, if not correct. More importantly, when such mistakes completely detach us from our fundamental common sense of human society, we risk the loss of this very society itself. This we cannot live with, at least not together. In other words, no policy or legislation, no constitution, and no charter of rights can bind together a people determined to become unbound by their loss of a fundamental common sense of the things by which they are first constituted together as human beings. I write with hope that we Americans-humanity’s “last best hope”-are not yet so determined.