Uncommon Sense

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius. — George Bernard Shaw

It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense. — Robert Green Ingersoll

The approach of fall signals the arrival of election season in many places, from municipal and school board votes here on Vancouver Island where I live, to the hotly contested Oct. 5 provincial election in Quebec, to the much more consequential midterm Congressional elections in the Disunited States of Trumplandia on Nov. 3.

Notwithstanding their vigorous disagreements over what needs to be done, one thing you can count on from politicians of just about every stripe is the refrain that their policies boil down to “common sense.”

For example, distancing himself from what he characterized as elements of socialist extremes in his party, Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania referred to himself as a “common-sense Democrat” in his surprising video cameo at this week’s Republican midterm convention in Dallas.

Similarly, a familiar theme repeated by speaker after speaker at the so-called Trump-a-palooza was that the Republican policies under U.S. President Donald Trump are simply common sense while those of the “Dumocrats” are the deranged aspirations of Radical Left Communists and Islamists.

There is no federal election in the offing here in the Great White Nous Ne Serons Jamais le 51e État. But assuming he lasts until the next writ is dropped, Pierre Poilievre appears committed to sticking with “common sense” as the central political slogan and guiding philosophy of his leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada.

No one could argue against sensible solutions to a city’s or a country’s problems, of course, but the problem with this messaging style (which is hardly original — think former Ontario premier Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution”) — is that what seems like common sense to me might come across as sheer lunacy to you.

A quick trip down memory lane from Wikipedia should suffice:

Harris’s government reduced Ontario welfare rolls by 500,000 people; critics contend these cuts led to a rise in homelessness and poverty. Supporters argued that high welfare rates had created disincentives to find entry-level jobs, and that poverty levels remained relatively unchanged between 1995 and 2005. Employment rates increased significantly during the late 1990s. The government rewrote labour laws to require secret ballot votes before workplaces could unionize. The previous NDP government’s law outlawing the hiring of replacement workers during strikes was repealed.

Depending on where on the political spectrum you fall, these initiatives could have been deemed a matter of common sense or unfair and counterproductive. The Harris government’s privatization of provincial water testing to save money (anyone remember Walkerton and the Koebel brothers’ comedy act?) and its handling of the largest teachers’ strike in Ontario history were even more controversial. But whether you applauded or deplored the steps Harris took was ultimately a matter of opinion, not fact.

Currently, there are an awful lot of Republicans who doubt whether Trump’s promise at the convention to send $5,000 cheques to all American adults if his party wins the midterm elections — thus adding an estimated $1.2 trillion to what is already an unsustainable deficit — is a stellar example of common sense at work. To say nothing of starting a trade war with Canada. Or a real war with Iran. Or a million other common sensical initiatives by a practical businessman with a level head on his gonads.

Bottom line: We’d all like to live happier, healthier, more affordable lives, but finding universal agreement — or even forging a basic consensus — on how to get there is quite another matter.

The famous observation that “common sense is not so common” is most widely attributed to the French philosopher Voltaire. But it was English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the jurist and social reformer considered the founder of modern utilitarianism, who really put his finger on the problem.

In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, published in 1789, he took aim at the habit of treating “common sense” as though it were some kind of universal human faculty, like eyesight or the ability to locate the nearest Tim Hortons when driving through any Canadian town of any size.

Bentham’s objection was devastatingly simple: People routinely call their own opinions “common sense,” while dismissing the opinions of people who disagree with them as anything but. What makes me so sure that I’m right and you’re wrong? All too frequently, nothing but hubris and horse pucky.

Bentham was underscoring a deeply ingrained human tendency: our desire to impose our own moral preferences, tastes and opinions onto others while pretending we are doing no such thing. Instead of admitting that a preference is simply our own opinion, we invent elaborate philosophical systems, objective-sounding doctrines and sophisticated phrases to make our personal views look like universal, undeniable truths.

When Bentham uses the term “self-sufficiency” in the following quotation, he’s using it in an old-fashioned sense to denote the belief that one’s own opinion is inherently correct:

It is curious enough to observe the variety of inventions men have hit upon, and the variety of phrases they have brought forward, in order to conceal from the world, and, if possible, from themselves, this very general and therefore pardonable self-sufficiency.

One man says, he has a thing made on purpose to tell him what is right and what is wrong; and that is called a “moral sense’: and then he goes to work at his ease, and says, such a thing is right, and such a thing is wrong — why? “Because my moral sense tells me it is.”

Another man comes and alters the phrase: leaving out “moral”, and putting in “common” in the room of it. He then tells you that his common sense tells him what is right and wrong, as surely as the other’s moral sense did: meaning by common sense a sense of some kind or other, which, he says, is possessed by all mankind: the sense of those whose sense is not the same as the author’s being struck out as not worth taking. This contrivance does better than the other; for a moral sense being a new thing, a man may feel about him a good while without being able to find it out: but common sense is as old as the creation; and there is no man but would be ashamed to be thought not to have as much of it as his neighbours.

From there, Bentham merrily proceeds to eviscerate parallel claims to having an inherent “understanding” of whatever is under discussion, which similarly rely on the author’s internal faculty, as do suggestions that one’s beliefs and convictions arise from an allegiance to an eternal and immutable “Rule of Right,” the “Law of Nature” and so on. Call it what you will, but any attempt to dress up one’s subjective beliefs as objectively valid is a bogus, albeit remarkably efficient enterprise.

The math on this one is easy. Let’s suppose X is the opposite of Y. I say we should do X because it is common sense. You say we should do Y because it is common sense. I say that Y is obviously not common sense. You say that X is obviously not common sense. We have now established that common sense is on both sides of the argument, which means it has contributed absolutely nothing to the discussion except possibly higher blood pressure. It also demonstrates that at least one of us, possibly both, is full of crap. Q.E.D.

If politicians could bottle common sense, they would sell it in convenience stores beside the windshield washer fluid. But Poilievre in particular has made the phrase central to his political identity in a way that deserves some attention, because “common sense” sounds like a philosophy while requiring almost no philosophy whatsoever.

I have watched this play out many times in the letters to the editor section of my local paper, the Victoria Times Colonist.

Suppose the city council is considering a new housing development. One resident says it is common sense to build more housing because young people can’t afford to live here. Another says it is common sense to oppose the development because the roads are already crowded. A third says it is common sense to approve the development but require the developer to pay for road improvements. A fourth says it is common sense to oppose all new development until the municipality fixes the roads. A fifth says it is common sense to build nothing because the entire point of living on Vancouver Island is that there are not supposed to be too many people here. A sixth says it is common sense to build more housing … but not anywhere near his house.

All six are completely sincere. This is one of the great truths of political life: sincerity does not make an opinion common sense. It merely makes it sincere. Which is why the city council, relying on its own innate common sense, simply throws up its hands and builds another bloody bike lane.

We tend to forget this because “common sense” has such a reassuring sound. It suggests that somewhere out there exists a large, sensible Canadian named Common Sense who has looked carefully at the evidence and concluded that your position is correct.

Common Sense lives in a house with a tidy lawn. Common Sense pays his taxes. Common Sense remembers to put the recycling out on Tuesday. Common Sense doesn’t need an app to figure out how a four-way stop works. And Common Sense certainly doesn’t write letters to the editor or append idiotic comments to online news stories.

The trouble is that Common Sense is fictional. There is no central warehouse where all the world’s common sense is stored. There is no federal Department of Common Sense, although given the current state of politics I would not rule out a campaign promise to create one.

Above all, there is certainly no rule saying that whatever seems obvious to the majority of people must therefore be correct. For most of human history, enormous numbers of perfectly ordinary, sensible people were convinced that things were true that we now regard as absurd.

It was once common sense that the sun moved around the Earth. It was once common sense that disease could be caused by bad smells. It was once common sense that only white men with property should have the right to vote. It was once common sense that children could be usefully employed in coal mines. And it was once common sense, in various places and periods, that beating people with sticks was an entirely respectable method of resolving workplace disputes.

Common sense, in other words, has a bit of a tawdry history. And history has a nasty habit of revealing that what seemed obvious at the time was completely wrong.

This doesn’t mean that everything is complicated, of course. Sometimes the sensible answer really is obvious. If your car is on fire, for example, common sense suggests that you should get out of it. If your roof is leaking, common sense suggests putting a pail underneath it.

But at a political level, appeals to common sense are also akin to whispering vague nothings into the ears of the public. Instead of saying — “Here is my preferred policy. Here is the evidence supporting it. Here are the trade-offs. Here are the risks. Here is what it will cost. Here is who will benefit. Here is who will bear the cost. And here are the circumstances under which I would admit that I was wrong” — the politician can say: “It’s just common sense.”

Ba da bing ba da boom. Better soundbite for sure. No math or Venn diagrams required. Or thinking.

Bentham would have hated this.

His life work, among other things, was an attempt to drag moral and political argument away from mysterious concepts and toward consequences. If a policy is good, he wanted us to ask what good it actually produces. Who benefits? Who suffers? By how much? And compared with what alternative?

You don’t have to accept Bentham’s utilitarianism to appreciate the basic point. If somebody tells you that something is common sense, ask: common to whom?

This question becomes especially important in a country like Canada, where we have developed an almost religious attachment to the idea that we are a nation of reasonable people.

We are polite. We compromise. We listen. We apologize when somebody else bumps into us. We stand in line. We form committees. We establish a task force to study whether another task force is necessary. And then, after three years of consultation, we announce that the obvious answer has been common sense all along. More bike lanes!

This is one of our national superpowers. We can turn almost any disagreement into a dispute over who is being reasonable. It drives the puerile meme-makers and Grade 3 name-callers in the White House nuts, but Mark Carney is a master at this with his calm demeanour and hint of a smile.

As Margaret Atwood put it recently while reflecting on the state of a national identity under attack by the Mango Mussolini, “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances used to be a joke. Now it’s a hope.”

But it comes down to this.

The person demanding lower taxes is being reasonable. The person demanding better public services is being reasonable. The person demanding more housing is being reasonable. The person demanding that nobody build anything anywhere is being reasonable. The person demanding action on climate change is being reasonable. The person demanding that climate policy not make groceries, heating and transportation more expensive is being reasonable. The person demanding fiscal restraint is being reasonable. The person demanding that we fix the hospital system is being reasonable.

The person demanding that we do all of these things simultaneously, without raising taxes, cutting services, borrowing money or inconveniencing anybody is also, presumably, being reasonable. But at some point, “common sense” begins to lose all semblance of meaning.

This is why it makes such a good slogan. It doesn’t really tell you what the politician believes. It tells you what sort of person the politician wants you to believe he is.

Not an ideologue. Not a theoretician. Not some pointy-headed academic with a stack of papers and an inconvenient knowledge of statistics. Just a sensible person you could share a beer with. A person like you. A person who looks at the world and says, “Come on. We all know what’s going on here.”

But perhaps we don’t. Perhaps some things are genuinely complicated. Perhaps there are trade-offs. Perhaps policies that sound good produce unintended consequences. Perhaps policies that sound terrible produce benefits nobody anticipated.

Perhaps the people on the other side of the argument aren’t evil, stupid or hopelessly detached from reality. Perhaps they simply have a different idea about which costs are acceptable and which benefits matter most.

That is not a failure of common sense. That is politics.

Which brings us back to the famous observation that common sense is not so common. Voltaire probably did not actually say it in the form in which we now encounter it, but never mind. The quotation has acquired the sort of authority that makes fact-checking seem distinctly unsporting.

And perhaps there is a better formulation anyway. Common sense isn’t uncommon because people lack it. It is uncommon because everybody has a different supply.

The Conservative has some. The Liberal has some. The NDPer has some. The libertarian has some. The Green has some. The municipal councillor has some. The retired guy at the next table in Tims, God love him, seems to have an industrial quantity.

The trick is not to find someone who possesses all the common sense. The trick is to recognize that none of us does. Which is a rather less satisfying political message.

It doesn’t fit neatly on a lawn sign. It doesn’t fit neatly on a campaign bus. And it certainly doesn’t fit into a three-word slogan. But it has one enormous advantage over common sense.

It might actually be true.