Common Sense
A friend from college, Patrick, who I took memorable 8am Arabic classes with, emails me about his latest readings. He is puzzling over the Theaetetus, among other dialogues.
Lately my husband has been re-listening to a 1996 audio lecture series titled 'Plato, Socrates, and the Dialogues' from Michael Sugrue. We had first listened to it together back in the summer of 2020, during the height of the pandemic. The lectures are vibrant, full of dense paraphrases. Professor Sugrue is as entertaining as he is didactic, doing his utmost to draw out the tensions between characters and ideas in many of the dialogues without watering down the perplexing nature of the text. There were as many unanswered questions as any author dared to posit, Sugrue seemed to suggest.
On yet another sweltering hot day, baby and I retreat home from the park well before noon. He waddles over from the living room to the balcony and I follow, carrying in my arms the gigantic handwritten 200-page volume of reading notes that I kept up for a few years. It contains notes on over 200 titles, ranging from novels, to non-fiction, to several movies, spanning over three years of intensive reading. I flip to the index to find the section covering my notes on the Sugrue lectures, skimming through summaries of Theaetetus and some of the other dialogues. The handwriting is tight and neat in color-coded fountain pen ink, from another era, one without the constant interruption of babies.
After that summer, Plato and the 'Living Voice' – the spirit of the dialectic, always colored my long discussions with my husband. We fought about it as often as we rejoiced over it.
A couple months after finishing the lecture series, in April of 2021, I was called to jury duty. The timing was awful. Five weeks prior to the first summons, I had booked a two-night 'girls' trip' to Santa Cruz with my college roommate, Jen. It was a rare trip out of the house since the beginning of lockdown, and the first time I would spend a night apart from Nicolas. As usual, the scheduling of the trial was nebulous, but with the summons spanning at minimum one full week if not much longer, it was looking very likely to overlap with my nonrefundable trip. I felt gloomy about the circumstances: annoyed at myself for fretting about the wasted expense, worried for the lost time at work which I would have to make up on my own time, guilty for wanting to prioritize my own affairs above my civic duty.
After filling out forms at the initial info session, I returned back to the courthouse for the first meeting with the judge. It was a murder trial, of a black man in Oakland. Anyone with ties to BLM were immediately filtered out. I stood amongst the group of 40 or so adults, arms wrapped around my bike helmet which I carried with me, self conscious behind my humid mask. I had been in plenty of courtrooms before, but I had been a teenager, and we were merely playing dress up back then. Here, everyone looked so much older and more self-assured than me.
One lawyer each from the Prosecution and Defense were present. The judge opened up with a quick introduction of his own career, the nature of the trial at hand, and what he expected from each of us potential jurors. Great emphasis was placed on the importance of maintaining the integrity of the courtroom by not using devices during the trial, or leaking information to the media, no matter how tantalizing the details. Especially for a murder trial like this one.
The judge pointed out that in the evidence to be presented, there would be important photographs of an explicit nature, depicting bodily harm and gore, which needed to be studied in detail in order to reach a fair verdict, and was there anyone who would be unable to make a sound judgment based on this premise?
I looked around me. No one raised their hand. I felt my heart pounding, and wanted to speak. I would, I wanted to say. In movies I always squeezed my eyes shut during violent scenes; they made me quake with nausea. It felt shallow, but it felt true.
The moment passed.
The judge spoke at length about the qualifications of the specific jurors, about basic understanding of English.
I raised my hand.
"Yes?" the judge called on me.
I coughed, and struggled to find my voice underneath the cover of the mask.
"Will we be given legal definitions and explanations of precedents where relevant?" I was thinking back to my moot court days, where courtroom arguments largely surrounded the discussions of past cases and constitutionality. Even the very drama-oriented mock trial competitions, on murder cases for example, had an extensive pre-trial component.
"Definitions, yes, though not of an overly technical nature. Precedents, no. Jurors do not need to concern themselves with those."
I nodded. Of course. My mind was distracted, getting lost in high school nostalgia.
The judge moved on to the jury deliberations that would take place at the end of the trial.
"Each juror is expected to give their full and honest opinion, formed from the trial's accumulated evidence, based on a grounded common sense, nothing more. The jurors must deliberate until they reach a unanimous conclusion – "
My hand shot up.
"Yes, Ms, uh, Soleliu?"
"Can you explain what you mean by common sense?" Socrates instantly came to mind. I felt my skin prickle in a sort of feverish excitement.
He paused for a moment. "Certainly. What I mean by common sense, is an uncomplicated, undogmatic, and unemotional way of reasoning out the fair verdict. Any ordinary person of sound mind has access to this common sense."
"And by undogmatic, do you mean free from any religious or spiritual dogmas?"
"Yes, free from theological beliefs."
"So is it like a morality based on normative values? An aggregate of what most people might believe?" I tried to remember what I could of the famous debate from Professor Shelley Kagan, who held that a world of atheists did not necessarily have to suffer from immorality, because effectively, a group's morality is more about consensus of the masses than it is about absolute truths.
"No. A single juror's common sense should not have to depend on the normative values of a group. It should be easily accessible to the individual, and separate from considerations of morality, or cultural or social conditioning."
"Separate from considerations of morality?"
"Yes."
"So if you are looking for those who are able to consider the evidence without emotion, without dogma, without their own private history, without morality even, wouldn't it be most efficient to assemble the best and most rational thinkers, a group of philosopher kings perhaps, rather than pluck random strangers off the street?"
"No, not at all. It is precisely in the individual that common sense is most accessible. Jurors do not need to have extensive education or training to perform this important civic duty."
I was a sweaty mess, anxiety creeping deep into my veins. I felt I had overspoken by a long shot. Maybe I was slowly going crazy from the social isolation of lockdown, but his stern belief in a Rousseau-like untainted, unbiased and 'natural' humanity was hard to swallow, in the middle of Oakland of all places. I nodded politely at the judge, silently thanking him for his patience with my rambling, and wondered if anyone else had been following along to our exchange. In my head, I was beyond confused. Common sense without morality? Even Socrates struggled to fully define common sense. Given his expectations, how could this man possibly expect little old me to decide on the verdict of a potential murder?
The speaking went on for some time. No one else raised their hand throughout the entire session. At the end, the lawyers went aside to deliberate. They came back to their tables. The judge thanked us for our time, and said he looked forward to seeing us for the next part of the juror selection process.
One of the lawyers stood up and handed a piece of paper to the judge.
"Oh, and one more thing. Ms. Soleliu, you are early excused. Everyone else, I will see you at the next session."