Common Sense

Everyone seems to know what common sense is, but no one has ever been able to fully explain to me exactly what they mean by it.  One idea about common sense that I have gleaned from the various opinions I have surveyed is that it is something that cannot be taught.  You either have it or you don't.  Another is that it is somehow inversely related to formal education.  Often people who are lauded as having common sense do not have much formal education while the highly educated are sometimes thought to lack it.  Common sense seems to be a type of knowledge, but which specific knowledge constitutes common sense seems to vary from one individual to another.

My ex-father-in-law was someone who was said to have a lot of common sense.  He did not have formal education beyond high school, but he ran successful businesses and made wise investments, and thus accumulated enough money to retire very early and be quite comfortable.  He also had the fortune to invest in real estate during a time when values were always rising, a condition that no longer always holds true.  My impression of him was that he was very intelligent, hard working, and constantly learning about things that were important to him.  I don't think he was born with the knowledge he had.  Perhaps common sense in this case means learning from life experience and from paying attention to things rather than in a formal classroom setting.  I am not sure why we need to make this distinction.  To me, knowledge is knowledge regardless of how we acquire it.

When my oldest son was preparing to take the written driving exam to get his learner's permit, his friend dissuaded him from studying by telling him that it is all just common sense.  My son took the test and failed.  Then he studied the material and passed it.  So does he lack common sense because could not pass the test without studying?  Did he acquire common sense after he studied, or does that not count?  Maybe only those who pass the test without the need for study are the ones with common sense.  I suspect that this friend had already acquired the knowledge in other ways.  Maybe his parents talked to him about things and he paid attention.  This same son is very good at strategy games.  No one can ever beat him.  He seems to have an intuitive knack for it.  This probably just seems like common sense for him.

Reflecting on these and other experiences, I think I might be seeing a common thread to what people mean when they speak about common sense.  The best I can figure out is that it means "what is obvious to me."  Any two people will have some knowledge in common, and other knowledge that is unique.  My wife was playing a game on a mobile device and called her daughter for help on one of the levels.  Her daughter's response was, "You're having trouble with that one?!"  She found one of the levels difficult that her daughter found easy.  The rest of the story is that her daughter had already gone through a similar game consisting of maybe 100 levels and this was my wife's first one and she was perhaps on level 16.  There are many other subjects where the roles would have been exactly reversed.  We all know different things.

This leads me to the main reason for writing this post in the first place.  People sometimes express incredulity that someone else does not know something that is obvious to them.  This is often what gets labeled as common sense.  I think that this reaction is unkind and unnecessary.  In almost every case, the roles could be reversed if the subject were different.  The concept of common sense seems to be very egocentrically defined.  A better reaction would be kindness, patience, and the willingness to share our knowledge without making any value judgements about what others ought to know.  The flip side of this is the willingness to learn something from every person we meet.  Ralph Waldo Emerson summed up this idea very well.  “In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him."