Lonergan’s Insight
Richard Renshaw, Welland, ON
Volume 40 Issue 10, 11, & 12 | Posted: January 21, 2026
The Editor:
I am re-re-reading Lonergan’s Insight. I came across the following. It seems to me appropriate to the current global mess. Remember that Lonergan was in Italy during the Mussolini regime and the rise of Hitler.
“What is the subsequent course of the longer cycle generated by the general bias of common sense? … The totalitarian has uncovered a secret to power …. Common sense … will desert the new empire for the individual or group interests that it understands. … this assumption of emergent probability; nothing is inevitable … In the first place, the general bias of common sense cannot be corrected by common sense … but the disease is a succession of lower viewpoints that heads towards an ultimate nihilism; and so the remedy has to be the attainment of a higher viewpoint … The needed higher viewpoint is the discovery, the logical expansion and recognition of the principle that intelligence contains its own immanent norms and that these norms are equipped with sanctions which man does not have to invent or impose.” [Lonergan goes on, in the next section, to speak of the reversal of the Longer Cycle.]
Insight, chapter 7, section 8.3.
Richard Renshaw, Welland, ON