Common sense.
I keep hearing people ask what ever happened to common sense, or stating matter of factly that it is dead.
A guy whose blog I used to read a lot (www.ejectejecteject.com) once defined common sense as: the minimal amount of sense you must have to survive in your world.
I like that definition. It makes sense. It also points out why there really is no such thing as a common common sense. We all live in different worlds. The sense an aborigine in the Australian outback has to have is very different from that of a Russian in Siberia or a Wall Street broker in New York. It varies depending on location. It also varies over time. The sense a guy needed to survive in America in 1776 is very different than he needs today (Interestingly your average Chinese peasant probably needs about the same amount of common sense as he did four hundred years ago. It all depends on how much your world is changing).
Common sense is the cumulative wisdom developed over time by a group of people. Mostly it comes through trial and error, since we tend to learn from the school of hard knocks far more often than we do from sitting down and thinking things through ahead of time.
It was discovered back in prehistoric times when a tribe of hunter-gatherers found a new purple berry they had never seen before. A teenager named ugh scarfed them down so he wouldn’t have to share. After making a few disconcerting gurgling noises, he dropped over dead.
Common sense wise, it was a two-fer-one: “Don’t eat the purple berries” one part of the group thought. “Share with the rest of the tribe or the gods will strike you dead” thought the other part. Ugh could have actually choked to death, no one knows for sure. They were too excited about having discovered common sense to look into it. Thus we see that common sense doesn’t have to be based on the actual facts, just the perceived ones (a good thing to keep in mind when you look at what passes for common sense in some circles).
Which brings us back to the original question. Is common sense dead? Of course not. It’s just a little behind. Our world has changed more in the past three hundred years than the other seven thousand combined. It is changing so rapidly today that poor old common sense just doesn’t have a chance of keeping up.
Fortunately the Internet helps some. Now when the modern Ugh does something stupid anywhere in the world, the rest of us can immediately watch the video on YouTube and add it to our collective list of things not to do. The Internet’s also very good at letting us see things people are doing that work.
So common sense and the modern world are in an evolutionary battle very similar to the one being fought by bacteria and antibiotics (or virus writers and anti-virus programs). Like the old saying goes: about the time we make things idiot proof, nature comes up with a better idiot. With things changing so rapidly, we are all pretty much the better idiots when it comes to all the newfound powers and gadgets we have that we still haven’t figured out how to use.
Can common sense keep up just enough to prevent us from self-destructing?
I wonder some times. About the time most of us have learned not to put our tongue on frozen flagpoles, the king of Nigeria starts emailing to tell us he wants to deposit money into our bank account. No sooner do we catch on to that one then www.petfood.com talks us into buying their stock for $500 per share. With our savings wiped out from the tech bubble crash, we all decide it makes perfect sense that the price of houses can keep going up forever. Bankrupt from defaulting on our mortgage and still wondering when the king is going to deposit that money, we accept as self evident that the hope and change guys in Washington can spend trillions of dollars of money we don’t have and there will be no negative consequences.
Playing on a famous quote from Winston Churchill: The good thing about humans is you can always count on them doing the right thing, after they have exhausted every other possibility.
It’s in that process of exhausting every other possibility that most common sense is developed, and we seem to be actively developing a whole bunch of it these days.
