Common sense is a ‘common’ phrase that is in reality far from common. To add insult to injury, common sense also seems to weigh in a trite bit light on ‘sense’ as well. It might be proper to say that common sense is neither common nor does it make much sense anymore. Today, common sense commonly lacks sense and we are the poorer for it.
It seems rather apparent that some things in life should simply ‘be’ without any thought about whether they should ‘be.’ We would define those as the common...
Common sense is a ‘common’ phrase that is in reality far from common. To add insult to injury, common sense also seems to weigh in a trite bit light on ‘sense’ as well. It might be proper to say that common sense is neither common nor does it make much sense anymore. Today, common sense commonly lacks sense and we are the poorer for it.
It seems rather apparent that some things in life should simply ‘be’ without any thought about whether they should ‘be.’ We would define those as the common things. If we tinker with the idea of “common” for a moment, it would imply something that just ‘is’ because it has a place in life that’s uncontested, blatantly obvious, globally useful, intrinsically beneficial and it’s as cleanly natural as sunshine and rose petals. ‘Common’ defines those things whose existence we simply presume without questioning what they are or what role they play. They just ‘are’ because they’re supposed to be and we accept them as such.
Common Sense
It seems that common sense should be common as well, or at least we would like it to be common. After all, when we apply common sense things usually come out pretty good. Even if we can’t rightly define it, the phrase “common sense” has a nice ring to it. There’s something soothing about the idea of “common sense” as it seems to have some reliable guiding quality to it that’s much more likely to insure a good outcome. Common sense seems to bring a sure and steady compass to situations that are short on compasses. It seems to be the thing that will not fail us when all the craftiness, shrewdness, cunning and presumed brilliance of men who presume themselves as brilliant fails. Common sense is the spotless and orderly notion that we smile at with a kind of soothing and pleasantly simplistic agreement.
Common sense implies a cup of wisdom, a dash of discernment and a dollop of intellectual acumen that’s blended clean and translucent. It’s clarity in chaos and focus when all else is frantic. It suggests the direct application of life experience, gently hemmed in by intuition and held fast by reason. Common sense is the best of our senses refusing to react to the worst of our fears. It appears to be a culmination and consolidation of the best of our experiences that in combination are sufficiently adequate to overcome the worst of who we are.
The Absence of Common Sense
The absence of common sense seems in large part to be related to the fact that we tack so much stuff on to it, or cut so much stuff out of it, or painfully contort it to the point that we’re not certain what we’re left with other than it’s probably nothing even remotely close to common sense. We’re prone to nip, tuck, tinker and toy with it until it’s a whole lot less to common sense and a whole lot more something else. Common sense then gets unrecognizably blurred or worse yet it gets entirely lost in our tinkering.
What’s problematic is that once we’ve done all of that stuff to common sense, we think that what’s left over is still common sense. If fact, we often think that we’ve refined it to the point that it’s tight, clean and logically invincible. In reality, common sense is lost to the point that we don’t even recognize that whatever we’ve got left over after messing with common sense, it’s probably anything but common sense. We’ve got our own derivative of something that maybe started out as common sense but is only common in the fact that it no longer makes any sense.
But we go ahead and treat it like common sense anyway. The obvious and natural progression is that we act on it thinking all the while that its common sense that we’re acting on. The repercussions are that we end up acting on something that’s likely distorted by our agendas or shaped by whatever the cultural bias is. The result is that we do incredibly stupid things while applauding ourselves for how smart we think we are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said it well when he wrote, “Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.” George Bernard Shaw put it another way when he said, “Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.” Common sense is the stuff of simple man’s uncluttered instinct simply applied to whatever we’re facing. Instinct is all of our life experiences pooled together that gives us a sense that something’s right or wrong, good or bad, constructive or destructive, wise or not. Common sense then is simply using that instinct; refusing to convolute it by engaging in tangled complexities, and doing nothing more than directly applying it to our situation as our instinct tells us to apply it.
If that’s the case, then why is common sense so incredibly uncommon? Common sense would suggest that common sense itself is contaminated and distorted by things that dramatically diminish or altogether destroy common sense. We bias it and distort it through a number of means that undercut it and render it largely anemic. In doing that we rob it of its simplicity, we sully its purity and then we strip it of its effectiveness. We make decisions based on whatever we’re left with and the end product is typically something reeking with the rancid stench of stupidity.
Authentic Common Sense is Free of Prejudice and Bias
Common sense is a frankness that’s not convoluted by prejudice, bias, special interests, personal demands, self-centered motivations, self-seeking agendas or any of a thousand things that twist it to something rank and spoiled. Those things cloud common sense to the point that it’s so mucked up that we can’t see in it, or through it, or even around it. In reality, common sense is a blend of truth and fact untainted by any agenda that would dilute or skew it. It’s clean and transparent, entirely uncluttered by all of the muck and mire that we rigorously pump into it.
What makes common sense so uncommon is that we contaminate it with all that stuff. We have a difficult time setting our agendas cleanly apart and maintaining some disciplined degree of objectivity. We don’t get that common sense has a voice of its own and that voice is not our voice. What we adamantly listen for is our voice, our opinions, our sense of what should be. What do we think about this, that or the next thing? What are the pro’s and con’s that we can weigh out to weigh in our favor? We tend to like to hear ourselves talk anyway, so when we hear our own voices we typically like what we hear. Because we like what we hear, we assume it to be common sense and we act on it as such.
Common sense is not our voice. It’s the voice of life experience. It’s the voice of uncompromised truth and hard fact. It’s the voice of a guiding conscious that whispers or sometimes screams in the back of all of our heads. It’s the voice of something that’s far greater than who and what we are that speaks simple truths that are so clean that we can’t even apprehend them in the sludge of our own minds. Whatever commons sense is, it’s not our voice. So, if we’re listening to hear what we’re saying, we’re not listening for common sense.
Authentic Common Sense Uses Knowledge as Wisdom
Despite the fact that it’s pretty clean and simple, we somehow have the need to analyze, decipher, scrutinize, probe, inspect, dissect and then review it all in retrospect. If we don’t go through this gargantuan process, we feel that we’re not being entirely responsible and thorough. In this cumbersome process the intellectual acumen takes it all in a thousand different directions which are then further skewed by our own biases. In the end common sense is altogether killed and swapped out with something that’s certainly intellectually shiny and pretty impressive, but probably entirely irrelevant and likely utterly off-base. Once we get to this place it’s all so messed up that we typically can’t even backtrack sufficiently well enough to find the place where we left common sense buried and dead.
Robert Green Ingersoll said that “it is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.” Common sense is not something that’s learned in academia. Rather, it’s something gained by raw, hands-on, day-in and day-out experience where we get slapped and slugged. Common sense is gained in the rough and tumble of life, where we get beat, bruised, belittled, betrayed and battered. It’s standing up after we’ve been pummeled, shaking ourselves back to some level of consciousness and asking “what did I learn from whatever it was that just happened?” Whatever we learned, we add it to our base of preexisting knowledge. It’s the pooling of all those experiences and bringing them to bear on our situation that’s the raw fiber of common sense.
The Value of Common Sense
Common sense is a whole lot more valuable than we might think. There is something inherently grounded in common sense, something that resonates with the facts and the realities of whatever we’re facing. It keeps things on track, focused and balanced. It directs correctly and in a manner that brings relevant solutions that are effective even in seemingly implausible and impossible situations. Common sense takes the confusion that we tend to create and develops a clarity that sometimes seems too simplistic to be worth anything of real value. Yet, common sense can have tremendous value. Re-evaluate your thought processes. Reconsider the impact of both your own mind and all the sordid messages impressed upon you by the culture. Get back to the basics and you’ll find that life often has a stunning clarity that was stunningly missed.
