Appeals to ‘common sense’ are frequently excuses to avoid thinking

By David McElroy · June 29, 2011

It used to be common sense that black people were inferior to white people. It used to be common sense that man couldn’t build heavier-than-air machines that would fly. It used to be common sense that fireproof asbestos was a wonderful substance to build with. And it used to be common sense that a rocket couldn’t possibly operate in the vacuum of space.

We all recognize each of those as fallacies today, but they were the accepted conventional wisdom of their days. When are people going to learn that what they see as “common sense” is frequently just a sum total of the biases they’ve picked up along the way?

It’s frustrating to me that so many people have no patience for intellectual complexity and nuance. They’re so impatient (and fundamentally anti-intellectual, in some cases) that they can’t take the time and effort to understand something other than the conventional wisdom that they know — even if they complain about the status quo. They can’t see outside of a very small box.

I was involved in an online discussion last night about balancing the rights of parents to exercise their religion with the need to protect children from unreasonable harm. It’s a complex subject, whether you’re a statist or not. (It’s actually even more complex if you oppose the state, but that’s a topic for another time.) For several people, it wasn’t a complex subject, though. There wasn’t even anything to discuss, because it was obvious that the state should seize children when parents don’t follow conventional medical wisdom. Here was part of a comment:

“These lengthy ‘intellectual’ debates are a waste of time. Whatever happened to good ’ole common sense?”

Of course, when people appeal to “common sense,” what they generally mean is that people should agree with them, because the correct answer is obvious — just as it used to be obvious that blacks were inferior and that machines couldn’t fly and that asbestos was wonderful and that rockets wouldn’t function in space.

On Jan. 13, 1920, the New York Times lectured an early pioneer of rocketry about the error of his ways. Dr. Robert Goddard was busy figuring out how to make rockets work better and how they might function in space. Here’s what the Times said about him:

“That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”

It’s certainly true that some people are unable to function in the normal, everyday world because their minds are so tied up in an abstract and philosophical world. But it’s just as true that even more people are such slaves to what they already believe they know that they can’t see that much of what they believe is nonsense.

By the way, the Times eventually published a correction to the 1920 editorial — three days before the men of Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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