The term “common sense” has long been used as a weapon. Common sense has a variety of definitions, which include “Sound judgment from experience rather than study” (Taylor, 2011), “A cultural group’s body of shared beliefs about the world” (Fletcher 204), and “Ordinary or normal understanding, as possessed by all; good sound practical sense in everyday matters”⁠ (OED, 1993). However, the judgment of whether or not someone has common sense focuses on if they meet social expectations and conform to social mores based on class, religion, race, generation, education, or any number of other factors. “People with common sense are seen as reasonable, down to earth, reliable, and practical” (Taylor, 2011), but the admonition “They don’t have any common sense” is shorthand for “You are not one of us; you don’t understand the world the way we do.” The idea of a basic rationality shared by a society is a fiction that causes polarization and division. It allows one group to criticize another as having no common sense, dismissing their lived experience and cultural differences. Politically, common sense has historically been used by both liberal and conservative politicians, though in recent years, common sense has been embraced more fully by conservative politicians worldwide and used to exclude “the other” from citizenship.

Common sense as a concept increased in popularity in mid-sixteenth-century England, a time when the Reformation was beginning to change society. Common sense was often used as a counterpoint to religion and religious control of society; instead of religious education, you were said to understand the world through common-sense, experiential learning. Common sense represented knowledge outside of the church, allowing the people to take power back from church officials. The phrase was used by the middle and upper classes to exclude others while defining their beliefs and status in society. They had good reason to promote the idea of a universal common sense: by presenting their values, ideals, and views as normal and universal, they were able to gain power by marginalizing anyone who did not fit their narrow views of social order, including libertines, atheists, women, and the poor.

Today, some of what many assume is a collective American common sense comes from what Robert Bellah refers to as civil religion. This “collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things” (Bellah 8) instilled certain attitudes and viewpoints in American children who attended public school. These ideas are often reinforced by religion and tradition. As Bellah explains, “The civil religion has been a point of articulation between the profoundest commitments of the Western religious and philosophical tradition and the common beliefs of ordinary Americans” (Bellah 15). The shared beliefs we learn as public school kids become so ingrained that they seem obvious and feel like they are innate knowledge, a shared common sense. But there is nothing innate about it; specific concepts were selected by the state to teach American values and ideals. American social constructs are learned, and “conventional wisdom may differ sharply from group to group” (Fletcher 206) as well as from country to country and culture to culture. Worldwide and historically, there are many different ways of relating in a society and many different bases of knowledge.

The concept of common sense is not only used in terms of an individual’s personal speech; it is also widely employed in political speech and has been used throughout American history as a political tool. It can bring community together, but it does so by “highlighting the common sense of particular peoples in opposition to the perceived nonsense of others” (Rosenfeld 238). When someone brings up common sense, it is always in the context of specifying who is “the other,” those people who do not fit into a specific social role, political group, class, race, gender, nationality, or level of education. They are diminished and dismissed for being different, for not having the common sense to mirror the speaker’s background and experiences.

The history of invoking common sense in political speech is extensive, and it has been used by both conservative and liberal pundits, from politicians to preachers. For example, before the American Civil War, pro-slavery officials said it was clearly common sense that slaves could not reason and, therefore, could never be equal and could not have civil rights like voting. On the other side, abolitionists argued that “the moral wrong of slavery belonged to the category of truths that should feel so self-evident or instinctively correct to all sensible people that it precluded the need for demonstration at all” (Rosenfeld 233–234). In other words, your common sense should tell you that slavery is wrong. Each group utilized an argument for common sense to present its case and, perhaps more importantly, define its group members. By solidifying their so-called common-sense ideas about slavery, both pro-slavery and abolitionist politicians and preachers gained traction in the community by defining their core group. They also reduced slavery — a divisive and complex political and moral question with many cultural and economic repercussions — to a simple matter of common sense.

Over time, civil religion has become internalized, creating a sense of belonging to a certain nation. As more nations developed this sense of nationalism — with each nation supposedly having a single, distinct culture — the rhetoric of common sense ramped up, emphasizing the divisions between cultures as well as between those who “belong” in a country and those who do not. While both liberal and conservative politicians have called on a shared common sense, at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century it became part of the go-to rhetoric of conservative policy. Ronald Reagan said governing was easy if you just use your common sense, while the 2010 Tea Party Republicans went so far as to call themselves “common sense conservatives,” which is utterly meaningless unless you are part of their in-group.

In the US and Europe today, common sense is utilized as a way to emphasize white belonging. Donald Trump invoked common sense in his infamous June 16, 2015, presidential campaign speech regarding Mexican immigrants, in which he said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists… And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people…” (Time Magazine, 2015).

This same rhetoric is occurring throughout the West, with politicians like Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, employing the rhetoric of common sense to exclude “the other” as ineligible to be true citizens — in Hungary’s case, Muslim immigrants. In Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Orbán talked about the common-sense need to exclude immigrants from the EU. He wrote, “If Europe does not return to the path of common sense, it will find itself laid low in a battle for its fate… Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims. This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity… Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? There is no alternative, and we have no option but to defend our borders” (The Guardian, 2015).

The rhetoric of common sense oversimplifies complex issues and dismisses education, science, and history. The insistence that some people have common sense and others do not threatens to suppress debate and restrict new ideas, “convincing us that simple, kitchen-table solutions formulated by everyday people are necessarily better than complex or scientific ones” (Rosenfeld 256). In addition, the belief in common sense says there is a mythical innate American knowledge in which all Americans think the same and have had the exact same experiences. However, each person’s upbringing varies widely based on race, religion, gender, place, and countless other factors. Rural common sense is quite different from urban; the common sense of a Black man is vastly different from that of a White man; a woman’s common sense diverges widely from a man’s. At its worst and most divisive, the rhetoric of common sense is used by white supremacist and autocratic politicians to denote who is a legitimate citizen and who is not. Some people would argue that we need a shared common sense as part of our civil religion of shared ideas and ideals in order to have a successful democracy. But since common sense is subjective, changeable, and exists solely as a way to define in-groups and exclude “the other,” it would be healthier and less polarizing for our democracy to abandon the idea of common sense altogether and instead embrace the idea of using sound judgment based on facts, as well as thinking critically and questioning our assumptions about the world.

Sources
Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 1–21. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027022.

Fletcher, Garth J. O. “Psychology of Common Sense.” American Psychologist 39, no. 3 (March 1984): 203–13.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 2020 Edition. New York: International Publishers Co., 1971.

Time Magazine. “Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech,” June 16, 2015. https://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/.

Rosenfeld, Sophia. Common Sense: A Political History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Taylor, Jim. “Common Sense Is Neither Common Nor Sense.” Psychology Today, July 12, 2011. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/201107/common-sense-is-neither-common-nor-sense.

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 1, A-M. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Traynor, Ian. “Migration Crisis: Hungary PM Says Europe in Grip of Madness.” The Guardian, September 3, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/03/migration-crisis-hungary-pm-victor-orban-europe-response-madness.