The Uncommonness of Common Sense

By Stefan Kanfer

There are three kinds of senses: physical, common and non.

The first is used (and abused) by everyone. The last has become the property of infants, absurdists and politicians. And the one in the middle? Strung between the poles of the superrational and the occult, it suffers from disuse and neglect. The nation suffers along with it.

There was a time when native intelligence was the salient American virtue. When Citizen Tom Paine wished to incite his countrymen, he titled his pamphlet Common Sense. His colleague Benjamin Franklin made a career of common sense; Poor Richard was a seed catalogue of utilitarian philosophy ("The used key is always bright"). By the early 19th century, De Tocqueville noted that Poor Richard had gone public. "Without ever having taken the trouble to define the rules of a philosophical method," he wrote, Americans "are in possession of one, common to the whole people."

The method: shrewd conclusion based on empirical observation. What the eyes could see, the wits could solve. At the zenith of the Darwinian revolution, Oliver Wendell Holmes assured his countrymen: "Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper-chamber, if he has common-sense on the ground floor."

But in the 20th century, that floor became cluttered with the jargon and rhetoric of specialists and experts. Occasionally, a native wit would appear and be lionized for his logic--Will Rogers, for example, or for that matter, Dr. Spock, who shrewdly titled his 1946 volume The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. But by midcentury, sense was no longer common. Today the American public can be intimidated by those who ask Chico Marx's question: "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"

ITEM: The Energy Crisis. As every driver knows, automobiles, not nations, now stand accused of the abuse of power (65% of American workers inefficiently drive to their jobs--most of them sans passengers). Common sense, then, would dictate new attention--and funding--for railroads, buses and subways. Instead, the House of Representatives has just refused to allow new funds for mass transit. Meanwhile, as fuel supplies dwindle, new appliances are creating absurd demands. Among other concerned legislators, Senator Henry Jackson concludes: "We need to ask whether we must despoil the hills in Appalachia to air-condition sealed-glass towers in New York. We need to ask whether we must put ourselves in hock to Middle East sheikdoms to keep roads clogged with gas-hungry cars." As yet, Americans have not answered, nor even asked, those sensible questions.

ITEM: Increasing and Reducing. After half a year, Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution remains a nonfiction bestseller. Manifestly, overweight Americans still seek an easy way to play the scales. Today he and she are assured that eggs are good; yesterday they learned that calories don't count; before that it was rice or grapefruit or fish diets. Only the commonsensical, apparently, have concluded that the less they eat, the lighter they weigh. Or that the more they exercise, the more fit they feel. Thus snowmobiles and golf carts do a brisk business; mayonnaise and Dr. Atkins are enjoying their best years; and salons employ new electric reducing machines--which, in turn, contribute to the energy crisis.

ITEM: Sex. This arena has never been famous for logic or wisdom. Today absurdities bloom anew. Sex education is fought by parents and school systems. Meanwhile, VD reaches epidemic proportions. The crucial moral clash over abortion has drowned out a much saner debate: how to develop a safe, certain contraceptive that the world will use.

ITEM: Relevance. The activist '60s are vanishing from history with remarkable velocity. The good, it seems, is interred with their banes. The evil lives on in the name of "relevance." Under that umbrella huddle the artifices of miseducation -- the dropping of the classics, history curriculums that rewrite or annihilate the past, "soul studies." All contribute to an atmosphere hostile to knowledge. True learning is concerned with the unfamiliar -- the "irrelevant" made comprehensible. The student who looks for relevance sel dom learns that it sits neglected in the chronicles and studies of individuals and societies that passed this way long ago.

ITEM: The Drug Culture. Disturbed by the encroaching headlines, Americans have condemned, with justifiable ran cor, youth's indiscriminate use of uppers and downers. At the same time, adults assure them selves that trouble ends at a bottle of Quaalude, that sleep is contained in Seconal, that energy can be stimulated with a few wisely chosen compounds. Common sense, it would seem, often stops at the family medicine cabinet.

ITEM: Uselessness. "If youth knew, if age could" runs the ancient folk observation. Today age knows, but is shunted aside, forced to retire before it is ready, made to feel superfluous and wasteful. Youth can, but also sits outside the system, uncertain of its identity or purpose. Native wit would dictate that these groups profit from consultation, that new and use ful energies could benefit a third party -- the rest of the country. Instead, age and youth remain segregated and rest less. And their problems lie unsolved and burgeoning.

ITEM: Pollution. The use of "improved" chemicals exacts a usurious price. Clothes are more immaculate, but rivers are dirtier. Insecticides help fruit to ripen undisturbed, but as insects die, so do birds and fish and mammals. Preservatives give packaged food a longer shelf life, but they may also cause disease. As the latter-day Poor Richard, Barry Commoner, has observed: "There is no such thing as a free lunch." Nonetheless, that illogical meal remains the most actively sought of all contemporary national goals. (On the other hand, the parvenu naturalists attack the machine as a malignant monster -- though, if pollution is ever to be overcome, it will not be by nature but by technology.) The list of equally absurd goals remains endless. After years of generously funded studies, pundits announce what the canny observer has concluded without aid: that airports have grown less efficient, for example, or that the poor are more victimized by crime than the middle class. Specialization, abstraction and rhetorical overkill -- all have made native wit afraid to show its face. Political candidates no longer employ the folk idiom in their speeches. Humorists rarely use the short, acute idiom of Lincoln, Twain -- or a Hoosier caricaturist named Kin Hubbard. A pity. In the voice of Abe Martin, a wise old rustic, Hubbard once cracked: "Ther's some folks standin' behind the President that ought t' git around where he kin watch'em." No matter how informed its consultants, how great its G.N.P., a country without that kind of wit is an underprivileged nation. That's only common sense.

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