The case against common sense

In the autumn of 2023, during a segment on his midweek primetime slot on GB News, Nigel Farage let slip what might just be the daftest sentence ever committed to air.

In a spirited conversation with Emma Webb, from the then recently founded hard-right organisation the Common Sense Society, the man who would be king said, “It’s a rare commodity, common sense, you know”.

Leaving aside the oxymoronic reasoning, evidence that Farage has since changed his mind is easy to find. A quick glimpse at the website of his limited company, for example, suggests that widespread wisdom will be the foundation upon which the Reform Party intend to govern. “Join us to fix broken Britain with commonsense policies on immigration, the economy, the NHS and more,” goes the mission statement.

In a peculiar defence of vile social media posts, elsewhere, Kemi Badenoch believes that “it is time to bring common sense to policing and our justice system”. Keir Starmer – at the time of writing, still prime minister – has described himself as “a common-sense merchant”. Across the ocean, meanwhile, Donald J. Trump promised “a revolution in common sense”. Goodness me, the balls on that guy.

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The problem is this: appeals to common sense allow voters to opt out of the responsibilities of democracy. Infantilised by a political class that thinks we’re thick, instead of being invited to make the acquaintance of even basic facts, voters have been permitted – no, scratch that, encouraged – to engage their emotions. No matter the complexity of the problems bedevilling the country, and the world, we’ve been told that it’s okay to go with our gut.

The corollary of this guesstimate economy is the implicit dismissal of specialist knowledge. Jabbering away with our common-sense takes, it’s as if politics is being conducted by quarterbacks and wide receivers from an American high school at which the success of the football team is prized higher than academic records. Why bother listening to eggheads and swots – who, let’s face it, are probably woke anyway – when the issues of the day can be thrashed out, after the game, over a bucketful of tallboys down at the Thirsty Cowboy?

It’s worth noting, I think, that inquiring minds have been warning about this for a long time. “For every complicated question, there’s an easy answer that’s almost always neat, plausible, and wrong,” noted US journalist EL Mencken, in the first half of the 20^th century. (Never mind that Mencken was a racist and an antisemite – that was common sense at the time.) Elsewhere, rushes to judgment by Joseph Public were neatly skewered by none other than Sid Vicious. “I’ve met the man on the street,” he said, “and he’s a cunt”.

Mindful of sounding like a snob, I should say that Sid’s words apply to me. Time and again, whenever I’ve indulged my intuitive judgement, I’ve proved myself to be as thick as a house brick.

Last weekend, for example, after realising I’d forgotten to take two iron tablets, for my anaemia, I simply doubled the dose the following day. The logic was obvious: two + two = four, right? You don’t get much more commonsensical than that.

I was, of course, wrong. As well as discovering that medicine doesn’t work this way, an hour later, while lying on the settee with pronounced stomach cramps, I also discovered that my wife and I have differing ideas about the core ingredients of heuristic thinking. Looking down at my pained face, she told me, “You’re an idiot”.

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On the right of the dial, meanwhile, shrill voices invoke the apparently sound judgement of the British people as a means of validating their own prejudice. Affecting to speak on behalf of simple folk whose desire to call a spade a spade is impeded by pesky elites, columnists such as Richard Littlejohn and Brendan O’Neill – both trenchant snobs, of course – summon common sense as a means of impugning everything from multiculturalism to members of the transgender community.

Inevitably, GB News has honed this sleight of hand to the point of perfection. With metronomic precision, the trick is to present an awful event – most likely a sexual assault by an asylum seeker – as if it were happening up and across the country at every minute of every day. With the country in this state, who but an enemy of common sense would grant further license to an undocumented army of feral marauders to terrorise the women of our green and pleasant land?

With this, common sense metastasises into a weak and nasty cry of persecution. Encapsulating this trend in a single paragraph, Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson wrote of the May 7 elections, “If I had to come up with two words to explain what happened last Thursday, they would be these: immigration and unfairness. The British have an acute sense of fair play. It has been violated over and over by a Labour government… that puts the foreign and the idle before hard-working people who must go to the back of the queue in their own country.”

Of course, entreaties to think with the blood about hot-button topics have the added bonus of elbowing other important matters to the margins. Disparaged and dismissed, in this berserk kaleidoscope, environmentalists become “zealots”, protestors are “a mob”, and the structural unsustainability of wealth inequality is mentioned not at all.

In the face of this kind of manipulation, unsurprisingly, common sense proves itself to be worthless. If the term had any currency at all, its purview would surely include issues that aren’t served up on a plate.