I note that it’s not so common only because we still cling to the notion that the common folk really are imbued with a greater sense of right and wrong, that they are somehow more pure, less apt to be impressed by sophistry and flim-flam. We genuinely believe that rural folk, uneducated folk, farmers and the like are innately more practical, more resourceful, more clever than those made mentally soft and physically flaccid by a whole bunch of “book larnin’.” And some of them certainly are: Thomas Edison was largely self-taught and certainly brilliant, as were Henry Ford and Benjamin Franklin. But while Einstein did poorly in school, he later proved himself through accepted scientific and mathematical means. And Franklin was an autodidact: he didn’t remain uneducated; he simply took his education into his own hands—by reading books, no less. By that
he was a better man, not perfect, perhaps, but sophisticated enough to out-fancy the French at a most sensitive time in Revolutionary history, and he certainly retained a much higher moral sense than the irascible Edison or the bigoted Ford. And for all his technical acumen, Edison would have done well to have taken a course or two in Economics or business, as he succeeded in those realms, when he did, despite his intuitions rather than because of them.
Statistics bear out the idea that the common folk aren’t quite as morally enlightened as our myths would have them: the most fundamentalist, least educated part of the country, the South, also harbors the most executions and the most divorces per capita. They are also the least compassionate, spending less for social programs and producing fewer good high-tech jobs. A few places, Houston and Atlanta come to mind, are exceptions, but they are also large metropolitan areas where ties to the “salt of the earth” type lifestyles we so revere are marginal at best. People go to big cities like these to escape their backwards hometowns, not to recreate the city in the image of them.
Yet we cling to the idea that the poor and ill-educated are wiser than the rest of us like leaky inner-tubes of nostalgia in these choppy seas of post-modernity. The exurban experience that feeds the mega-churches and the Republican junta that now controls things is a weak attempt to live both lives at once. We don’t really want to live the squalor, filth, and social isolation that is the rural lifestyle, but we also don’t want to admit to identifying with the slick sophistication of a New York or a Philadelphia. Instead of buying actual farmhouses next to actual fields that we might then be expected to actually farm, we build in what was a field last week. We can pretend to be rural, commonsense people and drive our pick-up trucks and listen to our George Strait. As compromises go, it’s a bad one, supplying neither the “true” life we claim to want nor the values we claim to live.
Those commonsense Red States are also much more likely to support aggressive war, excise sex and evolution from public education (or to not fund it at all), and to pollute their rivers and air. None of this should be surprising, of course. Common sense tells us that we should get revenge and hate our enemies, even though this flies in the face of the Christianity so popular among our good, country people. Common sense tells us that we can drive all we want and dump all we want in the water and on the ground; since we don’t see the effects directly they must not be real.
The humanities, that study of all that is effete and despised by our commonsense people, also tend to make us humane, more likely to see the value in those who are different, more able to imagine life from another’s perspective. But they require book learning and a sort of sophistication that goes quite beyond the gut reactions of a cornered cat.
Evolution, while in and of itself a fairly simple idea, requires a little more than an “ain’t biblical” approach to critiquing theories of the natural world. It took Darwin 20 years to really come to terms with his idea, and common sense just doesn’t have that kind of time.
And illicit sex, while much practiced by our earthy salts, is, perhaps, its singlemost sensitive subject. Biblical imprecations aside, the guilt of having made bad choices would be enough to make common sense people wary of “givin’ the young ‘uns any ideas.” But, naturally, them young ‘uns are going to have ideas no matter what, and rather than having them molest the family goat, a more sophisticated approach would say that we should inform them of better options. “Birth control” was once called “family planning” by its advocates not simply as a euphemism to placate the uptight but also because it is absolutely crucial for an industrial or post-industrial society to practice. More farm hands would be important if any of us farmed anymore, but even in the rural areas, very few do.
The commonsense state I live in, Kansas, has managed to pollute 90% of its rivers and streams to the point that contact with them poses a threat to health. Most of this is from “non-point source” pollution, aka agricultural runoff. There is no more commonsense a profession than farming, and the most commonsense approach to it is to maximize production per acre. That this spoils the very resources a productive ecosystem relies on to maintain its productivity isn’t factored in since that’s book larnin’ and therefore no longer common sense. The fact that this has created overproduction and depressed commodities prices also doesn’t seem to register with the commonsense farmer to whom more is necessarily more and thus necessarily better. Macroeconomics? Book larnin’.
Ironically, the old common sense, pre-industrial agriculture, called for crop rotation and moving livestock frequently to prevent overgrazing. It called for the recycling of agricultural waste as fertilizer and for producing only as much as your land could sustain. Today we call that “organic,” and it’s largely ridiculed as “tree hugging” and un-American by our pure, wise, unsophisticated folk.
Last, common sense tells us that the leadership of a single man is more stable than the insights of an enlightened populace, that the foreign is hostile, that the queer are evil. It tends to choose fascism and a politics of destruction. That the current occupant of the White House got there by presenting himself as a down-to-earth commonsense person is no irony, and that those commonsense folk who elected him bear the worst of his wars and regressive economic policies provides an uneasy sense of justice. That they have largely failed to learn from their error should be a lesson to us all.