I know I haven't posted here in quite a while. It often happens that I have an idea for something I might want to write here, and then I realize I've already said what I wanted to say about the topic. There's stuff here I've forgotten I wrote, though of course I remember it once I look at it again.
A few days ago, a friend asked me about something he thought he'd seen here on my blog, but couldn't find it, and I realized it's something I had not, in fact, written about, not exactly. One of those frequently forwarded emails, supposedly an "obituary for common sense", the kind of thing I probably would have torn apart here, but in fact never did. So here I am, having thought about it a few days, and at last posting again on this long neglected blog.
I'll not refer here much to the "obituary" or provide a link to it, as it's not especially remarkable in itself. What I want to talk about is not the specific details of that particular document, but rather the attitude it represents, a misplaced elevation of "common sense" above actual expertise.
Don't get me wrong; I have nothing against common sense. Last week I was having a conversation with someone about the reason why we have jury trials, with juries made up of random citizens rather than recognized experts, and "common sense" is a big part of that. The legitimacy of the law's claim to our obedience depends on us, as common ordinary citizens, recognizing the judgments of the court as coherent and intelligible, and the best way to do that is to have a random selection of citizens actually make the judgment.
But it's important to point out that experts still play a role in the process. The judge applying and enforcing the rules of court, and the lawyers for each side in the dispute, do need to have some actual expertise in how law is done, and expert witnesses may be needed to help the court to understand the implications of complex or subtle bits of evidence. In all cases, though, the matter must be made intelligible to the ordinary "reasonable person", who is presumed to possess the faculty of common sense.
So common sense is great. I'm all for common sense. But common sense is a faculty, not a set of facts. My complaint here is not about people using common sense, but about people mistaking their preconceptions and first impressions of a subject for common sense. "Gosh, I look out at the horizon and the world kinda seems flat, so common sense said the world is flat."
No it doesn't. Common sense says that you can be mistaken about stuff. Common sense says that experts who have studied a subject their entire lives probably know more about it than people who haven't. Experts can be wrong, of course. But common sense says you shouldn't just assume they're wrong because your conclusions are different, especially if you haven't spent as much time studying the matter as they have.
"Common sense" is just used so often as a political rallying cry to reject the advice of experts as "elitist", and the tragedy of it is that it really does not need to be so, as the example of the jury trial demonstrates. At a jury trial, when there is some issue that may be difficult for the average lay-person to understand, you have legal experts examining and cross-examining an expert witness in order to make the relevant aspects of the issue clear enough to the jury to reach an informed verdict. You never have to just trust the expert testimony; the process gives you ample opportunity to decide for yourself if this guy sounds like he knows what he's talking about, especially when he's being cross-examined by the lawyer for the other side doing their best to discredit damaging testimony.
And we can, to a large extent, do that ourselves. I have never known an academic or expert who was not more than willing to talk at length about their research, and explain how they had come to the conclusions they'd reached, and include all sorts of qualifiers and caveats about the uncertainties, and it doesn't take a huge amount of education to be able to ask intelligent questions and make a good faith effort to understand the answers. But it does take honesty and humility, to acknowledge when you don't understand an explanation and ask for clarification.
Which is probably the point. Humble honesty is very hard for some people, and doesn't sell well to certain voting demographics. It's easier to get behind someone who confidently proclaims he has all the answers than it is to back someone who openly admits to uncertainty. And "common sense" as a phrase tends to suggest a comfortable certainty, so it's no surprise that populist politicians so frequently claim their policies are based on common sense when they reject the consensus of actually knowledgeable experts.
Ultimately, and ironically, this appeal to "common sense" is fundamentally authoritarian, in that declaring something to be common sense is a way of shutting down any kind of argument about it. It doesn't matter than someone might be able to produce terabytes of data and analysis that, once understood, conclusively proves beyond any doubt that their conclusions, however counterintuitive, are correct, if you can just dismiss it as contrary to common sense.
And that strikes me as very dangerous.
