What’s curious about this story is that the language of the people involved almost precisely mirrors the experiences of Geertz, who noted in his study of witchcraft in Java that “when the whole family of a Javanese boy tells me that the reason he has fallen out of a tree and broken his leg is that the spirit of his deceased grandfather pushed him out because some ritual duty toward the grandfather has been inadvertently overlooked, that, so far as they are concerned, is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the matter: it is precisely what they think has occurred, it is all they think has occurred, and they are puzzled only at my puzzlement at their lack of puzzlement.” Disagreements over matters of common sense, in other words, are hard to resolve because it’s unclear to either side on what grounds one can even conduct a reasonable argument. Whether the issue is a Western anthropologist discussing witchcraft with preindustrial tribes in Indonesia, New Yorkers disagreeing about door locks, or the NRA disagreeing with the Brady Campaign over the sorts of guns that Americans ought to be able to buy, whatever it is that people believe to be a matter of common sense, they believe it with absolute certainty. They are puzzled only at the fact that others disagree.13
SOME RESERVATIONS
That what is self-evident to one person can be seen as silly by another should give us pause about the reliability of common sense as a basis for understanding the world. How can we be confident that what we believe is right when someone else feels equally strongly that it’s wrong—especially when we can’t articulate why we think we’re right in the first place? Of course, we can always write them off as crazy or ignorant or something and therefore not worth paying attention to. But once you go down that road, it gets increasingly hard to account for why we ourselves believe what we do. Consider, for example, that since 1996 support among the general public for allowing same-sex couples to marry has almost doubled, from 25 percent to 45 percent.14 Presumably those of us who changed our minds over this period do not think that we were crazy fourteen years ago, but we obviously think that we were wrong. So if something that seemed so obvious turned out to be wrong, what else that we believe to be self-evident now will seem wrong to us in the future?
Once we start to examine our own beliefs, in fact, it becomes increasingly unclear even how the various beliefs we espouse at any given time fit together. Most people, for example, consider their own views about politics to be derived from a single coherent worldview: “I’m a moderate liberal” or “I’m a diehard conservative,” and so on. If that were true, however, then one would expect that people who identify as liberals would tend to espouse the “liberal” perspective on most matters, and that conservatives would espouse a consistently different view. Yet research finds that regardless of whether people identify themselves as liberals or conservatives, what they think about any one issue, like, say, abortion, has relatively little relation to what they believe about other issues, such as the death penalty or illegal immigration. In other words, we have the impression that our particular beliefs are all derived from some overarching philosophy, but the reality is that we arrive at them quite independently, and often haphazardly.15
The same difficulty of reconciling what, individually, appear to be self-evident beliefs shows up even more clearly in the aphorisms that we invoke to make sense of the world. As sociologists are fond of pointing out, many of these aphorisms appear to be direct contradictions of each other. Birds of a feather flock together, but opposites attract. Absence indeed makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight is out of mind. Look before you leap, but he who hesitates is lost. Of course, it is not necessarily the case that these beliefs are contradictory—because we invoke different aphorisms in different circumstances. But because we never specify the conditions under which one aphorism applies versus another, we have no way of describing what it is that we really think or why we think it. Common sense, in other words, is not so much a worldview as a grab bag of logically inconsistent, often contradictory beliefs, each of which seems right at the time but carries no guarantee of being right any other time.
THE MISUSE OF COMMON SENSE
The fragmented, inconsistent, and even self-contradictory nature of common sense does not generally present a problem in our everyday lives. The reason is that everyday life is effectively broken up into small problems, grounded in very specific contexts that we can solve more or less independently of one another. Under these circumstances, being able to connect our thought processes in a logical manner isn’t really the point. It doesn’t really matter that absence makes the heart grow fonder in one situation, and that out of sight is out of mind in the next. In any given situation we know the point we’re trying to make, or the decision we want to support, and we choose the appropriate piece of commonsense wisdom to apply to it. If we had to explain how all our explanations, attitudes, and commonsense beliefs fit together, we would encounter all kinds of inconsistencies and contradictions. But because our experience of life rarely forces us to perform this task, it doesn’t really matter how difficult it would be.
Where it does start to matter, however, is when we use common sense to solve problems that are not grounded in the immediate here and now of everyday life—problems that involve anticipating or managing the behavior of large numbers of people, in situations that are distant from us either in time or space. This may sound like an unlikely thing to do, but in fact we do it all the time. Whenever we read a newspaper and try to understand events playing out in some foreign country—the Israel-Palestine conflict, the unfolding insurgency in Iraq, or the seemingly endless conflict in Afghanistan—we are implicitly using our commonsense reasoning to infer the causes and explanations of the events we’re reading about. Whenever we form an opinion about financial reform or healthcare policy, we are implicitly using our commonsense reasoning to speculate about how different rules and incentives will affect the various parties’ behavior. And whenever we argue about politics or economics or the law, we are implicitly using our commonsense reasoning to reach conclusions about how society will be affected by whatever policy or proposal is being debated.
In none of these cases are we using our common sense to reason about how we should behave in the here and now. Rather, we are using it to reason about how other people behaved—or will behave—in circumstances about which we have at best an incomplete understanding. At some level we understand that the world is complicated, and that everything is somehow connected to everything else. But when we read some story about reforming the healthcare system, or about banker bonuses, or about the Israel-Palestine conflict, we don’t try to understand how all these different problems fit together. We just focus on the one little piece of the huge underlying tapestry of the world that’s being presented to us at that moment, and form our opinion accordingly. In this way, we can flip through the newspaper while drinking our morning cup of coffee and develop twenty different opinions about twenty different topics without breaking a sweat. It’s all just common sense.
It may not matter much, of course, what conclusions ordinary citizens reach about the state of the world in the privacy of their own homes, based on what they’re reading in the newspaper or arguing about with their friends. So it may not matter much that the way we reason about the problems of the world is poorly suited to the nature of the problems themselves. But ordinary citizens are not the only ones who apply commonsense reasoning to social problems. When policy makers sit down, say, to design some scheme to alleviate poverty, they invariably rely on their own commonsense ideas about why it is that poor people are poor, and therefore how best to help them. As with all commonsense explanations, it is likely that everyone will have his or her own views, and that these views will be logically inconsistent or even contradictory. Some may believe that people are poor because they lack certain necessary values of hard work and thrift, while others may think they are genetically inferior, and others still may attribute their lack of wealth to lack of opportunities, inferior systems of social support, or other environmental fact
ors. All these beliefs will lead to different proposed solutions, not all of which can be right. Yet policy makers empowered to enact sweeping plans that will affect thousands or millions of people are no less tempted to trust their intuition about the causes of poverty than ordinary citizens reading the newspaper.
A quick look at history suggests that when common sense is used for purposes beyond the everyday, it can fail spectacularly. As the political scientist James Scott writes in Seeing Like a State, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were characterized by pervasive optimism among engineers, architects, scientists, and government technocrats that the problems of society could be solved in the same way that the problems of science and engineering had been solved during the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. According to these “high modernists,” the design of cities, the management of natural resources, even the business of running an entire economy were all within the scope of “scientific” planning. As one of the undisputed high priests of modernism, the architect Le Corbusier, wrote in 1923, “the plan is generator; without it poverty, disorder, willfulness reign supreme.”16
Naturally, the high modernists didn’t describe what they were doing as an exercise in using their common sense, preferring instead to clothe their ambitions in the language of science. But as Scott points out, this scientific aura was a mirage. In reality there was no science of planning—just the opinions of individual planners who relied on their intuition to speculate about how their plans would play out in the real world. No one doubts that men like Le Corbusier were brilliant and original thinkers. Nevertheless, the outcomes of their plans, like Soviet collectivization or Le Corbusier’s Brasilia, were often disastrous; and some of them, like the social engineering of Nazism or apartheid in South Africa, are now regarded among the great evils of the twentieth century. Moreover, even when these plans did succeed, they often did so in spite of themselves, as individuals on the ground figured out ways to create a reasonable outcome by ignoring, circumventing, or even undermining the plan itself.17
Looking back, it may seem as if the failures of high modernism—whether centrally planned economies or centrally designed cities—are a thing of the past, a product of a naïve and simplistic belief in science that we have since outgrown. Yet politicians, bureaucrats, architects, and regulators continue to make essentially the same mistake all the time. As the economist William Easterly has argued, the foreign aid community has been dominated for the past fifty years by large, bureaucratic organizations that are in turn run by powerful individuals whose ideas about what should and should not work inevitably play a large role in determining how resources will be devoted. Just as with the high modernists before them, these “planners,” as Easterly calls them, are well-meaning and intelligent people who are often passionately devoted to the task of helping the people of the developing world. Yet in spite of the trillions of dollars of aid that planners have devoted to economic development, there is shockingly little evidence that the recipients are better off for it.18
Closer to home, and over roughly the same period of time, urban planners in the United States have repeatedly set out to “solve” the problem of urban poverty and have repeatedly failed. As the journalist and urban activist Jane Jacobs put it fifty years ago, “There is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to spend—the figure is usually put at a hundred billion dollars—we could wipe out all our slums in ten years.… But look what we have built with the first several billions: Low-income projects that have become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.”19 It is ironic that around the same time that Jacobs reached this conclusion, work began on the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, the largest public housing project ever built. And sure enough, as the sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh describes in American Project, what started out as a high-minded and carefully thought-out plan to help inner-city, largely African American families rise up into the middle class became a debacle of dilapidated buildings, overcrowded apartments and playgrounds, concentrated poverty, and eventually gang violence.20
The large scale and disruptive nature of economic and urban development plans make them especially prone to failure, but many of the same criticisms have been leveled at government plans to improve public education, reform healthcare services, manage public resources, design local regulations, or decide foreign policy.21 Nor are governments alone in suffering from extreme planning failures. Corporations are rarely as large as governments, so their failures tend not to attract the same kind of scrutiny—although the near collapse of the financial system in 2008–2009 comes close. There are also so many more corporations than governments that it’s always possible to find success stories, thereby perpetuating the view that the private sector is better at planning than the government sector. But as a number of management scholars have shown in recent years, corporate plans—whether strategic bets, mergers and acquisitions, or marketing campaigns—also fail frequently, and for much the same reasons that government plans do.22 In all these cases, that is, a small number of people sitting in conference rooms are using their own commonsense intuition to predict, manage, or manipulate the behavior of thousands or millions of distant and diverse people whose motivations and circumstances are very different from their own.23
The irony of all this is that even as we observe the mistakes of politicians, planners, and others, our reaction is not to criticize common sense, but instead to demand more of it. At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in early 2009, for example, in the darkest depths of global financial crisis, one indignant audience member announced to the audience, “What we need now is a return to common sense!” It’s an appealing notion, and drew loud applause at the time, but I couldn’t help wondering what it was that he meant by it. After all, two years earlier at the 2007 Davos meeting, much the same mix of businesspeople, politicians, and economists were congratulating one another on having generated astonishing levels of wealth and unprecedented stability of the financial sector. Did anyone suspect that they had somehow taken leave of their common sense? And if not, then how exactly would it help to return to it? If anything, in fact, what the history of financial crises, both before and after the advent of high-technology trading, ought to teach us is that—like truth in war—it is common sense, not computer models, that is the first casualty of a financial mania.24 And much the same is true of failures in politics, business, and marketing. Bad things happen not because we forget to use our common sense, but rather because the incredible effectiveness of common sense in solving the problems of everyday life causes us to put more faith in it than it can bear.
TOO MUCH INTUITION
But if common sense is so bad at dealing with complex social phenomena like political conflicts, healthcare economics, or marketing campaigns, why are its shortcomings not more obvious to us? After all, when it comes to the physical world, we also have plenty of intuition that we use to solve everyday problems—think of all the intuitive physics that is required to chase down and catch a fly baseball. But unlike in the social world, we have learned over time that our “commonsense physics” is easily tripped up. For example, common sense tells us that heavy objects fall under the force of gravity. But consider the following: A man stands on a perfectly flat plain holding a bullet in his left hand and a pistol, loaded with an identical bullet, in his right. Holding both pistol and bullet at the same height, he simultaneously fires the gun and drops the bullet. Which bullet will hit the ground first? Elementary high school physics will tell you that in fact the two bullets will hit the ground at exactly the same time. But even knowing this, it is hard not to think that the bullet from the gun is somehow kept up for longer by its velocity.
The physical world is filled with examples like this that defy commonsense reasoning. Why does water spiral down the toilet in opposite directions in the northern and southern hemispheres? Why do you see more shooting stars after midnight? And when floating ice melts in
a glass, does the water level go up or down? Even if you really do understand the physics behind some of these questions, it is still easy to get them wrong, and they’re nothing compared to the really strange phenomena of quantum mechanics and relativity. But as frustrating as it can be for physics students, the consistency with which our commonsense physics fails us has one great advantage for human civilization: It forces us to do science. In science, we accept that if we want to learn how the world works, we need to test our theories with careful observations and experiments, and then trust the data no matter what our intuition says. And as laborious as it can be, the scientific method is responsible for essentially all the gains in understanding the natural world that humanity has made over the past few centuries.
But when it comes to the human world, where our unaided intuition is so much better than it is in physics, we rarely feel the need to use the scientific method. Why is it, for example, that most social groups are so homogeneous in terms of race, education level, and even gender? Why do some things become popular and not others? How much does the media influence society? Is more choice better or worse? Do taxes stimulate the economy? Social scientists are endlessly perplexed by these questions, yet many people feel as though they could come up with perfectly satisfactory explanations themselves. We all have friends, most of us work, and we generally buy things, vote, and watch TV. We are constantly immersed in markets, politics, and culture, and so are intimately familiar with how they work—or at least that is how it seems to us. Unlike problems in physics, biology, and so on, therefore, when the topic is human or social behavior, the idea of running expensive, time-consuming “scientific” studies to figure out what we’re pretty sure we already know seems largely unnecessary.
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