Constructing and Controlling Common Sense

Common sense is not something that I have ever really reflected on. There is a series of arguments in the anthropology of religion that I would refer to under the heading of ‘religion as common sense’. Clifford Geertz is the figure I have most regularly associated with this view in my undergraduate lectures. It is Geertz’s suggestion that religion is simply a mode of thought, the basic, unspoken and unquestioned way of thinking within a specific society, and hence ‘common sense’ for that society, that is the basic principle behind this view.

My partner also regularly tells me that something or other that I have failed to do correctly, whatever it might be, is ‘common sense’. The fact that he and I disagree on how to do the task in hand or, more frequently, that my dyslexia means that I simply cannot remember how to do it, shows that it probably is not as ‘common’ in terms of sense as he assumes.

However, I have never really thought about common sense as something that is constructed or controlled. It takes very little thought, however, to recognise that this is the case. It is very rare that we see ‘common sense’ change in real time. Looking back on my lifetime, however, I can see many obvious changes (even if we ignore the impact of technology on what is ‘common’ sense).

In the 1970s and 80s it was ‘common sense’ that gay men were sexually interested in boys and latent paedophiles. Everybody thought that they knew that to be true, very few people seriously questioned it, and Section 28 was based on that principle. It took considerable effort, and ten, twenty, perhaps even thirty years to change this ‘common sense’ position. Today it is ‘common sense’ that gay people will want to settle down, get married and have kids – something that I still find rather problematic.

In recent years, however, I have seen common sense change much more rapidly, either because of sustained argument or, more frequently, due to a draconian insistence that it is the case, even when every argument argues against it. Trump is a master of stating things so loudly and so insistently that a surprising number of others come to believe that he is ‘simply stating common sense’ – what we all agree and know to be ‘true’(??).

The most explicit space where I have seen this change in action is in the move from the ‘common sense’ position that we must respect whatever identity any person chooses to adopt for themselves, to the ‘common sense’ position that women are biological women and trans women are obviously not women. This is partly a case of critical feminists simply stating, over and over again, their position, primarily by insistently asking the question ‘what is a woman’, but it also depends on the structure of the statement ‘women are women’ which appears, logically and structurally, to be ‘common sense’ and has, most recently, been defined in law and so must be ‘common sense’.

Whoever controls common sense, therefore, to go back to Bourdieu, controls society. What matters, therefore, is to set the parameters for what is, and what is not, common sense. One change, in recent years, is that certain politicians and social commentators, have deliberately begun to put this principle into practice. In doing so they have recognised, as I have suggested, that the best way of doing this is to state the case, over and over again and as loudly as possible, rather than trying to argue their case – something that those of us who have been trying to change social values over many years end up doing primarily because we do not want to offend!

 Common sense is also related to my theory of situational belief. It is formed of a series of statements that we might call ‘belief statements’. Such statements can be used to make sense of specific situations, but they need not be coherent or consistent across different situations. Another strategy, therefore, is to take key statements that are already widely accepted by the speaker’s opponents and to build new statements on these foundations, making it difficult for the opponents to reject the new statements without also rejecting the shared common position as reflected in the widely accepted statements, the ‘common sense’, that is recognised as being shared.

The statement that women are suffering increasing levels of sexual abuse, for example, is a statement of common sense that is noted across the political spectrum, but that has been most explicitly stated in recent decades among those on the left. Those of the right, however, have recognised this and have appropriated this ‘common sense’ statement by adding to it the statements that the most significant perpetrators of sexual violence on women are trans women and/or immigrants.

The original statement, condemnation of sexual violence against women, should bring us all together (although the identification of men, as a category, as the perpetrator and so the ‘enemy’, and the impact of this on boys, is another discussion). The new elements then begin to divide and are open to challenge factually. By creating these views as ‘common sense’, however, it allows those on the right to endorse certain policies that many of find morally unacceptable.

Recognising that the right has become incredibly good at controlling, managing and even creating ‘common sense’, explains, in part, the power that this gives them across society. What Bourdieu does not tell us, at least at that part of his argument, however, is how we challenge this, or perhaps how we set about creating an alternative ‘common sense’. Or perhaps it is the case that to challenge the construction of ‘common sense’ leads to the collapse of the whole structure of ‘sense’ as those on the right would like us to believe?