Common Sense and MAGA World
Why we don’t think about common sense and why we should. (Democratic Vistas Newsletter, June 27, 2024)
This essay is a birthday present for my friend, Elaine. She is growing a little tired of common sense. Happy birthday Elaine!
Around 2010 or so, I was having my morning coffee and watching Morning Joe. At that time, Pat Buchanan was still a regular. Chris Hayes, who did not yet have his own show on MSNBC, was a guest. As he often does, Hayes was speaking eloquently about the effects of global warming, including the melting of the polar ice caps and the rise of sea levels. When it came time for Buchanan to speak, he said, “I don’t believe that. I go to the shore every summer. I haven’t seen the ocean rise.” I am going on memory here, so I may not have his exact wording, but this is pretty close. Buchanan seemed quite proud of himself, as if he had dealt a death blow to all the jibber-jabber about sea levels rising with a few trips to the Jersey shore. Hayes seemed stunned, as if he didn’t know how to respond. I suspect he was thinking something like this: “How do I counter a statement that is so blatantly stupid.”
This is a clash of epistemologies. Hayes’s epistemology (that is, his method of generating knowledge) was the scientific method. He was speaking about a clear consensus across hundreds of scientific studies. Pat Buchanan’s epistemology was common sense.
In the battle between science and common sense, if humans are rational (that’s a big “if”), science should always win. It doesn’t. Common sense wins far more often than it should. In MAGA world, it always wins.
It might be shocking to some that I referred to common sense as an epistemology. After all, the appeal of common sense is that it seems to work without a system or method, certainly without any help from philosophers. Common sense is the belief that our senses tell us what is real (“seeing is believing”) without mediation (“I know what I know,” immediately, without messing with logic, verification, or reflection) and it can be expressed in clear, transparent language (“I mean what I say”). Equally important, we (we, as in most of us) assume that the soundness of common sense operates as a form of reason without education or training, and it does not need to agree with any established body of knowledge. It just happens.
From a rhetorical perspective, the truth of common sense is so apparent that it is often a way of shutting down discussion. If I say, “It is common sense that the ocean level cannot possibly rise” (after all, the ocean is just too damn big), I don’t need to provide evidence or listen to anything you say. It’s just common sense. If you disagree with me, you must be stupid. Armed only with common sense, Buchanan rendered Hayes speechless.
Why does common sense win so often? It has an elegance and simplicity. Its truth arrives immediately. It seems to be a human faculty that just works all on its own (how fortuitous for us humans) or it requires no explanation (commons sense is just common sense).
Not so for science. Since Francis Bacon and the creation of formal experimentation (the publication of Novum Organum in 1620 can be used to mark the beginning of what we now call “the scientific method”), scientists have discussed and critiqued how they construct studies. Indeed, Bacon presented some of the most insightful comments about the limits of science in Novum Organum, which he called the Four Idols of science. Bacon wrote that the “idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human understanding” will divert us from truth unless we are “forewarned about their danger.” Way back then, in 1620, at the origin of modern science, Bacon warned us about the dangers of sloppy thinking.
No such tradition exists for common sense. Maybe, a big maybe here, David Hume’s empiricism might serve as the philosophical ground for common sense, but I think Hume would be insulted by this. And, I have never heard any proponent of common sense cite Hume as an influence.
So, as a little thought experiment, let’s try to explain the method of common sense in the way that Bacon and later scientists describe the scientific method. In other words, I want to discuss common sense as if it were a fully developed epistemology. Let’s begin by examining its tenets.
Is “seeing believing”? In other words, can we trust our senses without exception? Here’s a simple experiment you can try with your friends who like common sense: Put a straight stick into water and see what happens. Spoiler alert: The stick bends. Does it actually bend? No. We all know this. We all know, in varying degrees of sophistication, that this is an optical illusion—the light bends, not the stick. This is not common sense. It is science. Most of us learn to think like this around six-years-old. We all learn to think scientifically without even realizing it.
Seeing is believing (thinking that our senses never lead us astray) is an error that Bacon called an Idol of the Tribe. By tribe, he meant human nature, not just the senses but also the entire human body, our biology. We think within human bodies. He wrote, “All perceptions as well as of the sense of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe.” He adds, “The human understanding is like a false mirror” that “distorts and discolors the nature of things.” Kant will create what he called a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy when he published The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. In that work, he said that we cannot know the “thing-in-itself,” that is, reality as it exists apart from our perception. Bacon had already said the same basic thing, eh, about 160 years earlier.
With current political media, which often present an unflattering photo out of context, strategically edit videos, or use AI to produce Deep Fakes, the tenet of “seeing is believing” has never been so problematic.
Is what we see the truth of reality, without any mediation? We see at birth, but how we see is learned. What we see—this is true for all of our senses—is constructed by our brains as we learn how to interpret our connection to the world around us. Children who are younger than about five-years-old often run out in front of cars. Why? Their brains have not yet learned how to interpret the speed of an approaching car and predict whether or not they have time to retrieve their ball safely. This might seem like an absurd comment, but it is not: They have not yet learned how to connect what they see to the physics of velocity. Of course, I am not saying that six-year-olds who do not run out in front of cars could speak about the Newtonian physics of motion with clarity and authority, but they have learned enough about what we might call physics to interpret what they are seeing.
Bacon would call this error an Idol of the Cave. By the cave, he means our unique experience and knowledge. We all have our own “cave or den.” If Bacon were writing today, I think he would include human development in this category. He wrote that “the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable.” Common sense assumes that we all see and interpret what we see in the same way. We don’t.
Can the knowledge that we gain from common sense be expressed in clear, simple language? In the “Sense Certainty” chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel discussed common sense. He didn’t use that term. Actually, he was referring to David Hume and empiricists, specifically, their claim that all knowledge derives from the senses. (We could call common sense a sloppy variety of empiricism.) He wrote that we can look at a tree, experience the truth of that tree, and say, “That is what a tree is.” At some point, we look away. When we look back at the tree, it has changed. We can still say, “That is what a tree is,” but our previous experience does not exactly agree with our current experience. Hegel does not deny the material existence of the tree or the possibility of a knowable truth about that tree. He is saying that, once we convert that experience (seeing the tree) into language (calling it a tree), we have converted that sensory data into an abstraction. In short, the language that we use to express what we see is not exactly the same as the thing that we see. What common sense cannot capture is time, how reality is constantly changing. More generally, common sense is not good at thinking historically.
Bacon calls this the Idols of the Market Place. By the Market Place, he means discourse or language. He wrote that “the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding” and that definitions don’t “set the matter right.” In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, the Logical Positivists tried to find a language to convey the truth of objective science without distortion. Even they agree that they utterly failed in this project.
Is what we learn from our senses reasonable? Or, to set a slightly higher bar, is it rational? Can the short path between what we see and what we claim to know, which could best be described as an intuition, be trusted to always arrive at the same place—Truth with a capital T, or the one and only Truth? Since Plato, philosophers have defined “man” as a rational animal. This assumption is harder to analyze, and it will blur the boundary between common sense and science as well as between common sense and philosophy. Time for a lesson in humility.
Recent research into how we make decisions has raised serious questions about the rationality of our decision-making. In The Enigma of Reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber wrote: “Contrary to the commonsense picture, much experimental evidence suggests that people quite often arrive at their beliefs and decisions with little or no attention to reasons [what we might call logic or evidence]. Reasons are used primarily not to guide oneself but to justify oneself in the eyes of others, and to evaluate the justifications of others (often critically).” In other words, it is common sense to think that we are rational beings who make decisions using a method like logic. Science has not confirmed this.
Mercier and Sperber’s work is complicated, too complicated to summarize here, but I think they would agree with this statement: Human beings, whether they are speaking from the perspective of common sense or science, are not as rational as they believe, and they do not typically understand how they make decisions or how they adopt values.
Most of our stated reasons for a decision are actually constructed after the decision has been made. While this makes us all seem equally irrational and deluded, there is value in trying to convince others that we are rational. As Mercier and Sperber wrote: “Socially competent people are hardly ever indifferent to the way their behavior might be interpreted. By explaining and justifying themselves, people may defend and even improve their own reputation. By failing to do so, they may jeopardize it.” I think post hoc justifications do more than just defend our reputation; they potentially change our identity and how we will make decisions in the future. As we reveal our thinking, we are becoming more “socially competent.” We are behaving in a way that sustains democracy.
I am going to discuss this point from the perspective of rhetoric. How I explain my “reasons” for supporting a policy is an argument to others about who I am (my identity), what I believe (my values), and even how I imagine a good community (my politics). This is a rhetorical process. It could also be called democratic dialogue. I think Mercier and Sperber would also agree with this statement: As I explain my reasons to others, I am constructing myself as the kind of person who can participate in democratic dialogue.
While reason might seem flawed when an individual uses it to solve a problem in isolation, maybe this is not what is has evolved to do. Mercier and Sperber argue that the function of reason is social. It is about developing reasons that promote cooperation and communication. It is about a society coming together to solve a problem. We could say that reason is rhetorical, although they don’t use that term. Is common sense rhetorical in this way? Does it promote cooperation? Does it argue for a certain course of action? Is common sense social? Or, anti-social?
As we discuss politics, we need to be humble about our views. We need to think more about the “I-position” from which we speak. Who am I? What are my values? How do I imagine us all living better lives, together, as a community? None of this is part of common sense.
In this series, I will come back to imagination. I believe that it should be a central part of democratic thinking. We could say that it is opposed to common sense, the kind of thinking that happens in bureaucracies, and even the kind of thinking that feeds totalitarianism.
Interestingly, even in 1620, Bacon already knew that human beings were not always rational. He called the “dogmas” and “received systems” Idols of the Theatre. These idols include “many principles and axioms in science, which by tradition, credulity, and negligence have come to be received.” We could also call these assumptions. Science critiques its assumptions. Common sense assumes it has no assumptions.
Finally, is it possible for common sense to be true without embodying prior knowledge? To discuss this point, I am going to move from science to the Humanities and Social Sciences. From that perspective, let me restate this tenet: Can we find truth in the senses, immediately, without connecting what we see to what we have learned from history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and other fields of study, which have been emerging for thousands of years? Even more basically, can we learn immediately from our current experience without connecting that insight to our past experience? My common sense says, “No.” Well, also a lot of studies in cognitive science. But, I want to discuss the implications of the assumption that sound decisions can be made in a flash of insight within the mind of a single individual as if that individual had no connection to the rest of the world.
To discuss this, I am specifically going to switch to the perspective of ethics. (In this series, I will often come back to switching perspectives as a key feature of democratic thinking.) One way to view ethics is that making ethical decisions is a process of decentering. If I make a moral decision by consulting only me, I am more likely to act only in my own benefit. That seems fairly obvious. Common sense, you might say. (Of course, many philosophers and psychologists have come to this conclusion after much reflection, going back, I don’t know, maybe 2,500 years or so, and much research, going back, eh, at least a hundred years or so.) To act more ethically, I need to consider how my actions potentially affect others. If seeing is believing, I need to see the issue from their eyes. That should also be obvious. More common sense.
The more we decenter, the more ethically sound our decisions will likely be. Most of us decenter to some degree. (Not narcissists, of course.) We all need to learn how to decenter better. I might even say that it is common sense that I cannot make an ethical statement about our immigration policy until I imagine the experience of immigrants, until I empathize with their situation. That doesn’t mean I will end up supporting an open border. It might mean that I will have less anger about immigration and less fear of immigrants. After I decenter, I might be able to imagine a different kind of policy.
Here is one of the central points I want to stress in this essay: The statement “it’s common sense” hides thinking and the role of prior knowledge on thinking.
Prior knowledge is tricky in at least two senses. First, knowledge can be rather compartmentalized. Second, knowledge carries with it certain ways of thinking, which enable certain kinds of insights and limits others.
How does this apply to common sense? If I am a dentist, my common sense about dental hygiene will probably be at a much higher level than my common sense about winning a poker game. While some people argue that common sense is just as good as expertise, that is rarely the case. And the kind of thinking that we call common sense often obscures deep knowledge and experience—or complete ignorance. It might reflect ingrained ways of thinking, developed consciously over decades of study. Or, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it is just fractured gobs of dogma held together with emotional duct tape, like fear or resentment or anger. Common sense might be a justification for a prior belief, a refusal to rethink a problem, a hunch, an intuition, or a brilliant flash of expertise. If we call it common sense, it’s hard to know what it is or if it should be trusted.
To repeat my central concern: Common sense hides thinking. We could even say that common sense is undemocratic in this way: It tends to obscure thought and shut down discussion.
Mikhail Bakhtin, a thinker who spent most of his adult life resisting Stalinism, felt the most accurate way to convey our ethical thinking is in narratives. I would slightly revise “narrative” to “personal essay,” a genre where the author explores the self and the self’s connection to a way of life. It is a genre that reveals thinking and finds acceptance for a self-in-process, as opposed patching holes in a fragile and rigid self that spouts dogma to preempt change. When practiced in the tradition of Montaigne, the personal essay is the antidote to dogma.
Now, I am going to circle back to the MAGA world, more specifically to a key element of Trump’s rhetoric that has puzzled many people who are not Trump supporters. Trump often talks about how toilets don’t flush properly and how the water pressure of a shower is so weak that he cannot adequately rinse his “luxurious hair.” At Trump rallies, MAGAs accept this as truth with their nods and laughter. To outsiders, it is bizarre. When, in our country’s history, has a politician talked at length about toilets and showers?
Think about this from the perspective of common sense. Here is the line of thought behind it: Trump sees that his toilet doesn’t flush completely on the first try. Stuff is still there in the toilet bowl. Yuck. He is frustrated. He has to flush again and again. Something is wrong with America. It’s government regulations. I (Trump) can fix this. It’s simple. Get rid of the regulations.
This seems to resonate with the MAGA crowd, perhaps, because they have had the same experience. Even if they have been spared the trauma of a toilet that doesn’t flush on the first try, Trump’s experience seems reasonable. It all seems true because it is common sense.
Here is another problem with common sense: It tends to be used in random ways to justify what we already believe. For example, as Buchanan basically told Hayes, “I don’t believe in global warming, I go to the beach each summer, I don’t see the ocean rising, so it is common sense that scientists are wrong.”
We don’t hear MAGAs using common sense in this way: It is common sense that there is no such thing as Jewish Space Lasers. Or: It is common sense that Hilary Clinton is not running a child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza parlor so that democrats can drink the blood of the children and live longer.
Within common sense, there is no way to move the discussion foreword. It levels every truth claim so that one “truth” is as valid as any other “truth,” no matter how ridiculous. Trump is convinced that America is broken because toilets don’t flush worth a damn.
Here is my common sense truth response: My toilet flushes just fine. I have flushed toilets all across this great country. As far as I can see, the vast majority of them flush pretty well, on the first try. Gosh darn it, isn’t America a great country? I am not going to vote for Trump. Why? Because he doesn’t love America, and, dang it, we don’t need him to fix something that is not broken. And maybe Trump needs to stop staying in his own hotels. Try staying at some place where the toilets work.
If one bit of common sense seems as reasonable as another, how do we get past this divide? We need to make our thinking more transparent, whether we are using common sense or not.
As I practice political discourse, I need to do more than state conclusions. I need to share my process. What are my values? What are my experiences? What have I been reading? What line of thought lead me to this conclusion? What are my doubts? What are my fears?
When someone says “it’s common sense,” we need to draw out the thinking that this statement has obscured, perhaps even to the person who says it. Our goal should not be to prove the other person wrong or make that person feel stupid. Our goal is to promote democratic thinking.
As we ask others to explain the thought behind their common sense, we might even be surprised. There might actually be some interesting and original thinking hiding there.
This is the key point: Instead of letting “it’s common sense” shut down a discussion, let’s use it as an opportunity to expand the discussion and engage in democratic dialogue.