Common Sense: Why It's No Longer Common

Yogi Bera swears by it. Rush Limbaugh and Ross Perot seem to think it's all we need to set this country straight. Even Clinton-Rodham-Gore appeal to it now and then. Common sense is the Great American Virtue, the sine qua non of justifiable action. And yet, if common sense is the wisdom that's "as plain as the nose on your face," why does it seem to be in such short supply?
From his vantage point in the common-sense borough of Brooklyn, writer Larry Joseph sets off to explore this all-purpose attribute. What is common sense, anyway? An instinct? A social convention? A form of intelligence, or a talent like playing the harmonica? If it truly does exist as some definable capacity, how does it work? Are we born with it, or can it be developed? And who has more of it, women or men? Democrats or Republicans? Readers of The National Enquirer, or The New York Review of Books?
Joseph traverses the country looking for the right person to ask. He visits a scientist in Austin, Texas, who reads supermarket tabloids to his computer to help it learn to distinguish sense from nonsense. He analyzes the work of developmental psychologists and cognitive philosophers. He talks to people who have a reputation for great common sense - some very successful entrepreneurs - and those with reputations for having very little - academics. He takes up the subject with the Lakota Sioux medicine man with whom he shares a sweat lodge, and with the San Diego biker with whom he shares a beer. He interviews the president of Iceland about commonsense culture. He takes us inside one very commonsense institution - Berea College in Kentucky, and inside another which seems to have almost none - the World Bank.
When all is said and done Joseph concludes that it's not so much the "sense" that has changed as the "common." While many still trust in a body of knowledge, assumptions, and practices "we" can all share, the human frame of reference and the scope of our problems has expanded beyond the range of consensual wisdom. Telecommunications, the global economy, and so many competing perceptions of reality have outpaced our capacity to make sense, and the concept of a "common" sense yields to the confusion we all feel.
Rather than leave us to the "trained incapacity" of experts, though, Joseph ends with some simple recommendations for updating the common-sense grasp we still have.