by Christopher Horner

In daily life we get along okay without what we call thinking. Indeed, most of the time we do our daily round without anything coming to our conscious mind – muscle memory and routines get us through the morning rituals of washing and making coffee. And when we do need to bring something to mind, to think about it, it’s often not felt to cause a lot of friction: where did I put my glasses? When does the train leave? and so on.

So, we get on well in the world of medium sized dry goods, where things can be dropped on your foot and the train leaves at 7.00 AM.  Common sense carries us a long way here. For common sense is what we know already, what we can assume and the things we know how to do because we know what they are.

There are limits, though. We begin to run into difficulties when we apply the categories of the understanding – the normal way we think of things – into areas which look as if they are same kind of thing, but are not. I’m thinking of anything to do with long term change, of the way in which structures underlie what we see, of the complex interactions of the economy and politics. The kind of thinking that we might call common sense is the ‘spontaneous ideology of everyday life’, and it has problems with the larger and longer-range things that both run through our lives and have a history that we should try to grasp.

If we fail to make that effort, we typically find ourselves falling back on the notion that these are just things that we can assume to be the case. This can lead to quite problematic positions.  So, a friend of mine – intelligent, well educated – announced to me, apropos of Trump et al ‘half of America is just sick’. Perhaps on reflection he’d think that a bit inadequate, but it does represent the baffled contempt many have for the people who support a party and a politician who they see, rightly, as a threat to whatever democracy remains in the USA. Read more »