Does Common Sense Have Any Value?
Well, yes. It does.
A former client of mine who, though a perfectly lovely guy, styled himself as a bit of a rule-breaker and radical, once told me in passing that common sense was just ‘a set of bad inherited ideas’. This blew my mind, because though some common sense is redundant or unhelpful, much of it is useful. The trouble is that common sense, being ‘common’, remains largely unexamined, let alone defended or advanced.
This would not matter much if people wielding narrower, more specialist types of knowledge had not made a hash of quite so many things in recent years. Nassim Taleb gives over a page of his Skin in the Game to the historical failings of what he calls the ‘intellectual-yet-idiot’ class, which include Stalinism, GMOs, lobotomies, urban planning, low-carbohydrate diets, behaviourism, transfats, freudianism, housing projects, the selfish gene, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the financial crash. (Patrick Deneen calls this group ‘idiot savants’, which is only slightly more flattering.) In any case, a bit of common sense might be just what is needed sometimes. That requires us to make a case for it.
Nassim Taleb gives over a page of his Skin in the Game to the historical failings of what he calls the ‘intellectual-yet-idiot’ class.
We can probably start from the — well, common-sense principle that we learn from experience. If I fall out of a club at three in the morning, stumble into the road and narrowly avoid being flattened by a passing car, I learn to be a bit more careful (or not to wear such ridiculous heels again). Over the course of even a third of our lives, we make so many mistakes that we have learned quite a lot. And it would be remiss of us not to tell others about what we have learned so that they do not have to make a mess of things to know what we do.
So we pass on what we learn — particularly to our children, but also, depending on what it is, to friends, partners, colleagues and the guy who starts up a conversation with you in the pub. (I do realise that people in the habit of giving unsolicited advice can be extremely taxing.) If what others have told us passes the test of our own experience, it takes root. And perhaps we pass it on in turn. And soon, it spreads, though the likelihood is that most other people have discovered the same thing by themselves.
And it would be remiss of us not to tell others about what we have learned so that they do not have to make a mess of things to know what we do.
Now, much of what becomes common sense is negative. What elicits strong feelings tends to be memorable, and we feel negative feelings more strongly and more often than positive ones. Hence many of the lessons we learn well have to do with avoiding trouble and staying safe, emotionally as well as physically. Think about the kind of advice you got growing up. Brush your teeth twice a day, don’t watch too much TV or your eyes will go square, look both ways before crossing the road, avoid alleyways after dark, don’t stay up too late — you see what I am driving at.
So two things happen. First, ideas that pass the reality test become ‘sticky’. They become common sense. And since they are transmitted by parents to children they tend to be accepted uncritically. Second, that common sense, by dint of concerning what keeps us safe, takes on a somewhat cautious, finger-wagging character that just isn’t all that exciting and connects common-sense to responsible (ie, those perceived to be ‘boring’) older people. Common sense, therefore, is at once very useful, hard to justify and perceived as dull. And now that technological changes have shut out the older generations from the public conversation, our exposure to that well of common sense is about as limited as it ever has been.
