My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4, #26, January 18, 1999

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

When I wrote a column for Fox News about how clueless politicians are about normal people's lives, I mentioned that George Bush seemed a tad unfamiliar with grocery stores. A huffy reader complained that I was obviously too ignorant to realize that the story about Bush and the grocery store scanner had been misreported, that his campaign had immediately called them on it and told them that Bush was perfectly familiar with scanner technology.

I felt like telling him I knew about the Bush campaign's spin on the story, just as I knew that every campaign has people whose sole purpose is to prove to the public that we did not see what we saw. That does not mean that any of us are required to believe them.

The reason we believed the grocery store story is that it made sense to us. After all, can any of you picture George Bush making an emergency run to the grocery store because Barbara ran out of eggs in the middle of baking cookies? Of course he looks ill at ease and out of place in a grocery store or snacking on pork rinds, just as Clinton looks entirely at home in a McDonald's. Trying to make a born aristocrat look like one of us is like trying to turn a silk purse into a sow's ear--it just makes for a remarkably silly-looking pig.

There is a certain basic shrewdness to Americans, and our judgments about public people are often swift and accurate. We have found Newt mean, Starr obsessed, George Bush clueless, Ross Perot looney-tunes. Most of us understood in 1992 that Clinton had a problem with zippers and truth, but we voted for him anyway. (Since four years and forty million dollars later, all the Republicans have proved is that he has a problem with zippers and truth, many of us don't see that as a good enough reason to overrule our election.)

What we're talking about here is common sense: believing the evidence of our eyes and experience, deducing patterns, and making inferences. If somebody tells us something that doesn't fit with our sense of how the world works, we reject it. The more complete our world view, the less we believe things because we see them, and the more we see things because we already believe them.

Building that common sense world view requires some sufficiency of evidence, usually starting with our own experiences. People who have lost a family business to overzealous enforcement of some dinky little federal regulation they overlooked will henceforth see ALL government actions as the work of pointy-headed bureaucrats who know nothing about the real world and have way too much power. They will remember and collect any similar instances they see on the news as yet more proof of what they already know.

But reasoning and logic are also part of common sense. At the World Question Center, one of the questions raised was "Why do people believe in things for which there is no evidence, and would it be a mistake to persuade them not to?" I would argue that that's an interesting question with an utterly false premise. Even the least educated, most simple-minded people DO have evidence for unseen things like religious belief, for instance, which includes reasoning from analogy: if you saw a complex machine, with many intricate internal systems all working together for one purpose, would you not assume from it a designer?

Our world is far more complex than any machine, and yet there don't seem to be any missing or pointless parts: for every predator, there is prey, for every vegetarian species, plants ideally suited to its needs, for every kind of tree or plant, birds and insects to spread its seeds far away from the rooted parent. To assume a designer IS reasoning from evidence, though it may be argued that the evidence is insufficient.

Another requirement for common sense may be a belief that evidence was gathered and presented fairly--Americans don't much care for stacked decks.

Republicans can't understand why Americans aren't rising up as one to cast Clinton forth from the White House. After all, the evidence is not only clearly sufficient, it is so blatant even Clinton can't deny it entirely. I believe our resistance is grounded in a sense that the evidence is tainted, that he is the victim of a sting operation by a gossip-mongering publisher, a vicious supposed friend of Monica's, and a stop-at-nothing prosecutor. The evidence is clear and sufficient, but the way it got there made us queasy and violated our belief in the right to privacy and fair play. Hardly any of us think Clinton should be above the law, but many of us wonder why he should have been BELOW the law, afforded none of its customary protections.

For all the blessings of common sense, though, it comes with blinders on that screen out too much of the evidence that doesn't fit. Those who see government as a bunch of bureaucratic fools will NOT see that they are driving on government-funded roads, drinking government-certified safe water that comes through government-funded dams, and sending their kids to government-funded colleges with government-backed student loans.

Common sense also does not deal well with complexity. We leap too easily from what IS to facile explanations of WHY it is. "Common sense" lends itself to either-or thinking, when there may be far more than two available options. It is too easy for our minds to go from the factual statement, "a disproportionate number of America's prison population is black" to just one simple supposed cause, like assuming that black men are inherently criminal or that our criminal justice system is racist to the core, an either-or proposition that overlooks things like the disappearance of jobs from inner cities, the unavailability of inexpensive housing in the suburbs, the inadequacy of inner city schools, the way the welfare system undercuts traditional family structure and reduces the presence of black men in the lives of their children, or the fact that the drug business offers economic opportunities to people who have few others.

This is why common sense is not enough--it allows us to act from false assumptions, and justify our hatreds. "Common sense" too often has justified lynchings and apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Rigorous logic and high standards for evidence do not come naturally, but have to be drilled into us. We have to practice over and over the skills of questioning our assumptions, analyzing all the data, considering multiple theories, testing them rigorously.

But even training our minds is not enough without humaneness. Rationalists and politicians and doctors have been able to justify experiments at Auschwitz and murdering entire inconvenient populations. The terrorists who are willing to bomb embassies and release poison gas on subway trains are "educated" men with carefully cultivated but inhuman minds. Reason is a coldhearted, bloodless tool unless it is controlled by the best of human virtues: Ethics. Kindness. Mercy. Love.

Common sense was once an evolutionary advantage for the human race, that allowed us to thrive and dominate our world. But right now, it's too simpleminded an instrument for a complex and dangerous world. It could use a little help in the way of logic, knowledge, and ethics. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.