The People’s King

On common sense that must be tested

When I attended junior high school in the United States in the 1960s, we were not taught Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. We were given the book.

Then we went outside, sat in groups on the school lawn, and discussed what we had read.

Our teacher could, of course, tell us who Thomas Paine was and what significance the pamphlet had for the American Revolution. But he could not teach us what freedom was. He could not tell us what common sense was, what justice required, or when power lost its legitimacy. We had to try to work that out for ourselves.

We had to formulate our own views, listen to what the others thought, defend our arguments, and be willing to change our minds if someone else had a better argument.

I did not know then that this had a name. Today I would call it practical philosophy.

Common sense must be tested

Thomas Paine called his famous pamphlet of 1776 Common Sense. The title itself contains a democratic idea: the great questions of power, freedom, and society do not concern kings, lawyers, and scholars alone. Ordinary people must be able to think about them for themselves.

But common sense is not the same as whatever immediately seems self-evident.

Paine himself understood this, in a way. What has existed for a long time can begin, precisely for that reason, to appear natural. Hereditary power was one such example for him. Something may have existed for centuries without thereby being reasonable.

Common sense must therefore be open to correction. That was what happened on the lawn. I held one view. Another student held another. I had to justify mine, and he had to justify his. Perhaps I discovered that his argument was better than my own.

Then I had to move.

This is where the connection with Aristotle’s phronesis, practical wisdom, becomes clear. It is not simply a matter of knowing general rules, but of being able to judge what is good and right in concrete situations. Such judgment develops through experience.

Many years later, I found in Hans-Georg Gadamer an idea that deepened this further. Experience is not only what confirms what we already know. Genuine experience is also what can correct us. A conversation is therefore only a genuine conversation if I enter it with the possibility that the other person may be right.

Perhaps that was the most important thing our teacher taught us by not teaching us the answer.

When a society is put to the test

I think of this when I listen to some of King Harald’s most significant speeches.

The day after the terrorist attacks of 22 July 2011, Norway found itself in a situation in which very little could be said with certainty. The King did not attempt to explain the inexplicable. He held on instead to certain fundamental values and expressed his belief that freedom was stronger than fear, and in the open Norwegian democracy and society.

The words were simple, but they were not simple in a philosophical sense. Norwegian society was at that moment facing a question: What is this act going to do to us?

Terror could produce fear, suspicion, and demands for a more closed society. Or it could lead to a renewed commitment to the values that had been attacked.

King Harald did not offer an argument that ended that discussion. He articulated a position within it.

Ten years later, he again reminded us that democracy presupposes equality, freedom of expression, the ability to tolerate disagreement, and the willingness to seek compromise.

That matters. For common sense in a democracy does not mean that we all agree. It means that we have ways of disagreeing that still allow us to live together.

“Norway is you”

Five years after the attacks, King Harald gave his famous speech at the garden party in the Palace Park.

He asked a simple question: What is Norway?

He began with the landscape, the mountains, the fjords, the islands, and the weather. Then came the turn: Norway is, above all, people.

He went on to describe those people. People born in Norway and people who had come from other countries. Young and old. Rich and poor. People with confidence and people who struggle. Girls who love girls. Boys who love boys. Girls and boys who love each other. People who believe in God, Allah, the Universe, or Nothing.

Then he summed it up in the words many still remember:

“Norway is you. Norway is us.”

It is tempting to say that the King is simply stating a fact. But that would be too easy.

For this speech, too, makes a claim about what a society is. It says that belonging is not determined by religion, sexual orientation, social position, or where our grandparents were born.

That is not a neutral description. Other people may think differently.

And precisely for that reason we must ask: Where does the authority of the King’s statement come from?

Tested reason

The answer cannot be: because the King says so. If that were the case, we would have left both Paine and democracy behind.

The words derive their force, rather, from the fact that they articulate something that has already been tested in the experience of society. For generations, Norway has debated religious freedom, women’s rights, immigration, the place of gay and lesbian people in society, discrimination, and human dignity. Laws have changed. Attitudes have been challenged. People have protested, argued, and told their stories. Others have listened and, sometimes, changed their minds.

That does not mean that the conversation is over.

But the King’s “Norway is us” does not descend from the Palace balcony as a royal truth. The words come after a long social conversation.

This is where Gadamer becomes important. None of us enters a conversation without preconceptions, assumptions, and judgments that we already carry with us. But encounters with other people can make these assumptions visible and force us to examine them. Understanding does not merely mean having what we already believe confirmed. It presupposes the possibility that our own horizon may be enlarged.

Perhaps this is precisely what King Harald did in his 2016 speech.

He did not invent diversity. He gave it language.

But what about the monarchy?

There is, of course, a paradox here.

Thomas Paine was a radical critic of hereditary monarchy. How, then, can Common Sense be used to understand a hereditary king?

The objection must be taken seriously.

King Harald is not elected by the people. He holds his office by inheritance. From the perspective of Paine’s political philosophy, the institution itself is therefore problematic.

And yet it may be precisely this particular constitutional position that helps explain some of the King’s influence in modern Norway. A prime minister must represent a political majority. A party leader must argue against other parties. A government must choose among competing political solutions.

The King is not supposed to do this.

His political powerlessness can, paradoxically, give him a different kind of public voice. He cannot decide what policies we should pursue, but he can try to articulate something about who we are while we disagree about politics.

There is no guarantee of wisdom in this. A king can be wrong like anyone else. But the role opens a space that democracy also needs: a language for what comes before party politics and makes political disagreement possible.

Perhaps this is where part of the meaning of the expression “the people’s king” lies. It does not simply mean that the King is popular. It may mean that, at certain moments, he has found words for experiences that a society recognizes as its own.

Society and government

Here Thomas Paine returns.

At the beginning of Common Sense, he distinguishes between society and government. Society arises because human beings need one another. Government arises because we also need rules, institutions, and authority.

The distinction matters.

Government is not society. Political parties are not society. Parliament is not society.

Society consists of the people who must still meet one another in the street, at work, at school, in hospital, and around the dinner table after the political debate is over.

King Harald’s best speeches seem to find their language precisely there: not above politics and not outside democracy, but in the space between the people whom democracy is supposed to make it possible to live together.

The lawn

I think again of the lawn at my junior high school in the United States.

A group of young people are sitting there with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. What is freedom? What makes power legitimate? What does it mean to belong to a society?

The teacher does not answer for us.

We have to try for ourselves. We speak, contradict one another, and listen. And perhaps the most important thing of all happens: I discover that what I thought was common sense was merely my own opinion.

The other person forces me to think again.

More than sixty years later, I hear an echo of that experience in King Harald’s best speeches.

Not because the King has the answer.

Not because his words stand beyond criticism, but because, at his best, he has been able to articulate something a society has already struggled with, debated, experienced, and slowly learned.

That is the difference between a royal proclamation and practical wisdom. One says: This is true because I say so. The other asks: Look at one another. Is this not what we have gradually learned?

Norway is you.

Norway is us.

Perhaps common sense is precisely this: not what we all believe before the conversation begins, but something we may slowly come closer to because the conversation never ends.