Looking for the common sense of ideology

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This article was published 23/10/2024 (581 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In these troubled times (are there any other?), we are bombarded with persistent appeals to common sense as the solution to our shared problems.

Pierre Poilievre promises Canadians that he has “common sense plans” to rectify multiple national problems, and the phrase has become endemic to the current backlash politics of “Common sense Conservatives fighting for Canadians.” Common sense, they assure us, will prevail in a common-sense revolution.

According to journalist David Moscrop, this is “as appealing to the disaffected as it is vapid and meaningless.” Aaron Wherry, senior writer at the CBC, adds that it is also a “vaguely egalitarian and inherently populist notion that flatters its purveyors and supporters while implicitly disqualifying its opponents and critics.”

Indeed, when appeals to common sense become politicized, they derogate those who disagree, and become their own form of “virtue signalling,” a derisive term used by those who want to signal that they have more virtue than those whom they accuse of virtue signalling.

Common sense is purportedly common because it is supposedly shared by all, and sensical because it is supposedly self-evident, needing no explanation. It implies that, though someone may not have extensive knowledge about a topic or even extensive skill in reasoning, everyone has enough of both to master truth. Reality, they say, is not complex.

But obviously, that some sense is common is insufficient to make it true, especially when it relies on a false sense of consensus, that cognitive bias of overestimating the level of agreement people have on issues. Furthermore, common sense varies vastly in time, place and culture, and because it is entirely subjective, there can be no common-sense definition of what constitutes common sense.

So the core question is: sense that is common to whom?

More specifically and significantly, sense that is common to which ideology? Which system of concepts that makes sense of the world while obscuring the social interests expressed therein? Which coherent set of interrelated ideas (about what is) and ideals (about what ought to be) that explains and justifies the prevailing or proposed distribution of power, wealth and privilege?

Common sense in Canada today is derived mostly from the dominant ideology of neoliberalism. A product of the Age of Enlightenment, classic liberalism was a political and moral philosophy based on individual rights, freedoms and equality, as well as private property and free-market capitalism. Contemporary neoliberalism is the reappearance of liberalism after the 20th-century social experiments with welfare and communist states, characterized by renewed privatization, deregulation and globalization.

Ironically and confusingly, it is political conservatives who today are the true neoliberals, those who want to conserve and renew classic individualistic Enlightenment liberalism. That, to them, is common sense.

There is also a related sense of “common.” The “tragedy of the commons” is a dilemma arising from situations in which an entire generational cohort of individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own short-term self-interest, will ultimately deplete a limited shared resource, even when it clearly is not in anyone’s long-term interest for that to happen. This tragedy has played out repeatedly on multiple fronts throughout history, most recently and obviously regarding our physical environment.

Yet doing so is common sense in neoliberalism.

And when an ideology becomes hegemonic, it manifests the capacity of cultural values to establish, as common sense, systems of meaning that can justify everything from short-term self-interest to its resultant social inequalities. Hegemony is the ability of dominant groups in society to exercise control over weaker groups, not by means of force, but by gaining their consent without their awareness, so that the unequal distribution of power, wealth and privilege appears to be both legitimate and natural. It’s just common sense.

Just as the neoliberal state is the dominant ideology in Canada, and therefore hegemonic common sense, so too is the welfare state in Sweden, and the authoritarian state in Russia. That is why we need more than simplistic appeals to common sense. We need to gain clarity and consensus on our deepest shared values, and then enact policies that best promote them.

Hopefully those values and policies will promote long-term collective-interest, not the short-term self-interest that leads to the tragedy of the commons. Because that truly would be the tragedy of conservative neoliberal common sense.

Dennis Hiebert teaches in the department of sociology and criminology at the University of Manitoba.