The common abuse of ‘common sense’

If you spend any amount of time having deep conversations on sensitive subject matters, you will undoubtedly encounter patterns of thought and speech peppered into the discourse as if certain people were helpless but to utter them.

Perhaps you are trying to get to the heart of a complicated matter and the disagreement with your conversational partner starts to get a little heated. Often somebody will dust off the old diplomatic gem of “let’s agree to disagree” to extinguish further argument.

Or perhaps you are trying to console a grief-stricken person who has gone through a traumatic event. People in such a state will often rail against the state of the universe with powerful philosophical sentiments, demanding to know how such injustice could be permitted. You would not be the first person to misguidedly try to soothe them with something like “everything happens for a reason.” Or, less secularly, “God works in mysterious ways.”

These are known as thought-terminating clichés. Pithy little sayings that sound like folksy wisdom but serve mostly to sever a train of thinking, often because it is either uncomfortable or more complicated than the person is willing to engage. Admittedly, they often come from a good-natured place of keeping the peace, though it could easily be argued that they mostly serve to preserve to comfort or indulge the intellectual laziness of those who speak them.

Even among those who recognize the shortcomings of such turns of phrase, one of the most insidious is employed regularly as if it truly were folk wisdom. Indeed, it is used almost as a talisman which dubs anything it touches to be folk wisdom. I am speaking, of course, about “common sense.”

We love to declare things common sense, even as generation after generation discovers the common sense of yesterday to be the toxic anathema of today. Spanking your kids used to be common sense. Doctors bleeding patients to get the ghosts out of your body used to be common sense. Owning and selling people used to be common sense.

Doctors bleeding patients to get the ghosts out of your body used to be common sense.

When we declare something “common sense,” all we are saying is that a particular political viewpoint is widely accepted and thus valid entirely on the premise of it being widely accepted. This circular logic allows us to go on believing a certain perspective is inarguably valid, just because it is simple and part of the status quo.

It is fundamentally designed to stymie the sort of revolutionary thinking which challenges entrenched power structures and leads us to progressive new ways of doing things. It lets us dismiss the scary prospect of radical change, even as our institutions fail and the status quo diminishes around us.

Sometimes we employ the concept of common sense thoughtlessly, almost innocently, as creatures enmeshed in a culture in which it is admittedly often difficult to imagine as radically different. But it is also weaponized quite cognizantly by the powers that be to defend their hierarchies.

Take the field of economics. We are told this is a school that is paradoxically so byzantine that the layman can’t be expected to understand it, while also rife with such simple truisms that you would have to be a fool to deny them.

For example, every time the topic of raising the minimum wage gains traction, conservative pundits will come out of the woodwork to tell you that it is a foolish, even childish, idea. If you force an employer to pay their workers more, they will have to hire fewer workers because they simply can’t afford to pay more than they already do. Raising the minimum wage doesn’t help workers, it kills their jobs.

Simple. Concise. Common sense incarnate — and utterly wrong.

The data does not bear this out when minimum wages go up, even with significant increases. It also ignores more nuanced analysis, such as when workers earn more money, it comes with increased spending power that often bolsters the sales of those same industries now forced to pay them the higher wages.

Higher wages as economic stimulus for some reason is never treated as common sense. Then there is also the fact that most people earning minimum wage are not employed by small businesses struggling with thin margins, but by giant corporations who can absolutely afford to cover an increase.

We do ourselves no favours by letting the complex issues of our time be dismissed with neat little turns of phrase that offer answers which are obvious, simple and wrong. As the status quo continues to produce diminishing returns that destroy our environment while increasingly failing to provide comfortable and stable lives for the citizenry, we ought to be more skeptical of our pillars of conventional wisdom than ever.

It is time to interrogate all matters long written off as common sense, lest we stagnate alongside our ideas as they grow stale and brittle.

Alex Passey is a Winnipeg writer.