Time Essay: The Uncommonness of Common Sense

There are three kinds of senses: physical, common and non.

The first is used (and abused) by everyone. The last has become the property of infants, absurdists and politicians. And the one in the middle? Strung between the poles of the superrational and the occult, it suffers from disuse and neglect. The nation suffers along with it.

There was a time when native intelligence was the salient American virtue. When Citizen Tom Paine wished to incite his countrymen, he titled his pamphlet Common Sense. His colleague Benjamin Franklin made a career of common sense; Poor Richard was a seed catalogue of utilitarian philosophy ("The used key is always bright"). By the early 19th century, De Tocqueville noted that Poor Richard had gone public. "Without ever having taken the trouble to define the rules of a philosophical method," he wrote, Americans "are in possession of one, common to the whole people."

The method: shrewd conclusion based on empirical observation. What the eyes could see, the wits could solve. At the zenith of the Darwinian revolution, Oliver Wendell Holmes assured his countrymen: "Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper-chamber, if he has common-sense on the ground floor."

But in the 20th century, that floor became cluttered with the jargon and rhetoric of specialists and experts. Occasionally, a native wit would appear and be lionized for his logic—Will Rogers, for example, or for that matter, Dr. Spock, who shrewdly titled his 1946 volume The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. But by midcentury, sense was no longer common. Today the American public can be intimidated by those who ask Chico Marx's question: "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"

ITEM: The Energy Crisis. As every driver knows, automobiles, not nations, now stand accused of the abuse of power (65% of American workers inefficiently drive to their jobs—most of them sans passengers). Common sense, then, would dictate new attention—and funding—for railroads, buses and subways. Instead, the House of Representatives has just refused to allow new funds for mass transit. Meanwhile, as fuel supplies dwindle, new appliances are creating absurd demands. Among other concerned legislators, Senator Henry Jackson concludes: "We need to ask whether we must despoil the hills in Appalachia to air-condition sealed-glass towers in New York. We need to ask whether we must put ourselves in hock to Middle East sheikdoms to keep roads clogged with gas-hungry cars." As yet, Americans have not answered, nor even asked, those sensible questions.