Common Sense and Nonsense
Or, knowing when to bite
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It’s a few days before the end of the teaching term. I’m at a dinner party, seated with companions, new and old.
We’re sipping red wine. Guests are talking about their Easter holiday plans. Someone is flying off to Greece. Another friend is heading to Berlin. Sighs of envy. Someone says, light-heartedly, “Oh – you’ll be just in time to have your first smoke of legal weed in Germany!”
More sighs.
Then someone else decides to play the killjoy. “It’s all fine to talk about legalising cannabis in Berlin. Or any other city full of middle-class lefties with PhDs. But try going to a small town in Germany. Or even a few miles outside London. Talk to people in those places about legalising cannabis. See how far you get.”
This remark is not directed specifically at the Berlin-bound guest. As far as I know, it’s not directed at anyone in particular. It’s a conversation stopper rather than an invitation to serious exchange. I wonder briefly whether it’s aimed at me, since I’ve been involved in drug reform activism for some time. But I resist the temptation to be hailed. I don’t know the party-pooper and they presumably don’t know this about me. Anyway, I’m not in the mood. Marihuana isn’t my drug of choice and the wine’s giving me a nice glow. I don’t want to ruin it with a pointless political debate. The remark was meant as bate. I’m the winner for not biting. Within a couple of minutes the conversation has drifted to something else.
But the intervention nibbles away at me. My irritation doesn’t stem for this encounter alone. It’s cumulative. I – no doubt we all – have heard variations of the big-city-slicker-know-it-all-meets-innocent-but-wise-small-town-dweller too many times to count. Occasionally it’s drugs. More often its migration. Or these days trans rights. The moral of the story is always the same: middle-class urbanites who question the status quo or challenge stigmas are naïve at best, arrogant and ignorant at worst. Our knowledge is inauthentic, we’re out of touch with the truth – which is to be found at the end of the rainbow, in some fantasy backwater that we metropolitans would never dare set foot in, for fear of coming into contact with real people.
The myth hides more truths than it claims to reveal, luxuriating in simplicity and nostalgia. Yet it circulates widely and surfaces regularly because it holds a moral appeal. Thanks to its flexibility, it can always be dragged out to masquerade as astute commentary on the latest culture war.
In the British context, the idea of timeless small-town authenticity is summed up in the term “middle England” – an inexact place that is imagined as timeless but in fact dates only to the end of the last century. According to the cultural historian Joe Moran, the term began to circulate in British political discourse in the 1980s and 90s:
The phrase ‘middle England’ suggested a vague geographical area in the South and Midlands and outside the major cities, but referred less to a region than a particular group of people who had joined the middle classes since the Thatcher years.
The very vagueness of the concept makes it malleable. Moreover, it only works in the form of a binary; it needs a foil – the left-liberal urban intelligentsia – in order to function. Neither middle England nor its fantasy opposite is a historical or political category. Both are examples of common-sense thinking. Drawing on the work of the Italian revolutionary thinker Antonio Gramsci, cultural theorists Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea define common sense as
a form of ‘everyday thinking’ which offers us frameworks of meaning with which to make sense of the world […] a form of popular, easily-available knowledge which contains no complicated ideas, requires no sophisticated argument and does not depend on deep thought or wide reading.
Common-sense arguments pose a problem for progressive activists. They are hard to ignore because they often evoke, even if they do not name directly, oppressive stereotypes (for example, the idea that the ostensible whiteness or heteronormativity of the small town makes it more authentically British) that need to be resisted. Moreover, by presenting the world as set in stone they invite challenge from anyone who believes in the possibility of change.
As Hall and O’Shea argue, common sense needs to be taken seriously as a terrain of political struggle. In particular, they suggest that we be attentive to what Gramsci saw as the “critical or utopian” elements of common sense: those “that express a sense of unfairness and injustice about ‘how the world works’”. Some examples of common-sense thinking reveal not only reactionary ideas but “good sense”, for example, an understanding of unjust power relations. Hall and O’Shea suggest that this “good sense provides a basis on which the left could develop a popular strategy for radical change”.
In order to challenge common-sense arguments, we need in the first instance to recognise them for what they are, and in the second to assess whether, and where, there is also some good sense to work with. It might be tempting to meet common sense head on with a counter claim. But that would be to misunderstand the nature of its appeal, what Hall and O’Shea stress are the “affective dimensions […] which underpin common sense” – that is, why such arguments appeal and help people to make sense of their worlds. It is this affective element that often makes common sense so resistant to logic or evidence.
As for my fellow dinner-party guest: my hunch is that his pat assessment about how the world works had less to do with his awareness of either cannabis or life outside London than a sense of his own identity, a desire perhaps to distance himself from the out-of-touch urban lefties he imagined himself to be in the company of. If “common sense is a site of political struggle”, as Hall and O’Shea put it, it’s also important to choose our verbal battles wisely, to recognise a self-indulgent rant when we hear one.
To know when it’s best to bite our tongues.
Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here. If you like what you read, you can:
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and I want to read Hall now. Also reproduced here in an edited volume: http://library.lol/main/4BC7B2C05B4C0D43BA6629B5AD9069B6
This is a terrific piece. On the one hand, the world is upside-down. We need real thinking and action to set it right. On the other hand, the world, as it should be, is hidden from us, buried under all these layers of manipulation, exploitation, and repression. We have to get to the real common sense of things to set them right, to make them just. And what people believe is just can be absurd and really unjust.
Which then is common sense ? A vision of how the world really should be -- meaning, the real world below repression, provided we can see though it. Or how people perceive the world as it "really" is --- meaning when it isn't influenced by one element, usually whatever element is under discussion (i.e. taking the bate)?
In Arendt, Kant, and the German idealist, there is a debate about what constitutes common sense, which translates as gesunder Menschenverstand - something like healthy human understanding. In latin, which Arendt brings forward, its the senus communis, which places emphasis on what we understand together. Arendt places it at the center of politics - politics as the act of forming a common understanding.
There must be a discussion of sense communis in Chomsky. He believes in an innate form understanding in the form of an inner grammar. I aways wanted to read this in him but haven't yet. On a political level, he always likes to say phrases like: 'this is what any 10 year old child understands'. He loves Descartes, and in a way, hegelian/marxist thinking have driven us from Descartes. But there is a lot to be said for his vision of the autonomous freedom of common sense. It is in one of the Meditations, maybe 3, where he writes about sitting in front of the fire, in the living room, closing off all of the false and wrong impressions, impressions that can't be trusted, to get to a realm of true and pure thoughts about the world. The simplicity is hard to adapt today, considering all of the layers of repression. He is speaking about how we know things are true, rather than evil demons influencing us, giving us false ideas. But we can easily understand the world of capitalism, misogyny, heteronormativity, racism as Descartes demons, even if we cannot simply access the realm of common sense, but see it rather as a process of forming communal understanding.