Here’s an interesting quote to consider:  

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” 

This sounds flippant enough to have come from Oscar Wilde, but it’s actually attributed to Albert Einstein.

Albert Einstein had to deal with common sense because people argued against his theories of relativity (particularly that time passes at different rates depending on your frame of reference) on the basis that they didn’t accord with common sense.  

A fatuous argument such as this would have frustrated Albert Einstein, resulting in this dismissive quote.

So what is common sense?  Here are some dictionary definitions:

from Merriam Webster dictionary:

sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts.

from Dictionary.com: 

sound practical judgment that is independent of specialized knowledge, training, or the like; normal native intelligence.

from Collins Dictionary:

your natural ability to make good judgments and to behave in a practical and sensible way.

There are some interesting points in these definitions:

• that common sense is a natural ability
• that common sense is unrelated to what you learn
• that common sense is simple and accessible.

Common sense is what we believe to be our inherent understanding of what is right and wrong, true and false, and how we should interact with the world.  Common sense is like a deeply held opinion of how the world should be and how we should deal with it.

However, Einstein disagreed with this understanding of common sense.

So what does Einstein mean when he says “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”?

Einstein is saying that what we each see as common sense depends on how we were reared – what particular “collection of prejudices” were instilled in us as we grew up.  

Einstein is also indicating that common sense is based on ideas that aren’t critically assessed: the “prejudices” that form our common sense are acquired without evaluation.  

The term “acquired” indicates passivity – that we aren’t aware of the process of gaining those prejudices.

Einstein is indicating that common sense is neither absolute nor universal – it’s different for every person and is based on each individual’s experience as their world picture is built as they develop, a picture that becomes solid and internally unchallengeable at their maturity.  This inflexibility of common sense indicates that it cannot be applied to entirely new ideas and experiences.

Einstein’s quote signifies that he thought of common sense as an artifice, an illusion, an imaginary construct.

Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, had similar thoughts as Einstein about the nature of common sense, with the process of acquiring it extended out a few more years:

“Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works; anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary; anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.”

Einstein indicates that the process of acquiring common sense continues until we reach “age eighteen”, that is, maturity, at which point our ideas on the way things are and the way things should be become fixed.

Einstein’s quote could be taken as a definition of maturity – we feel we are mature when we feel that we have acquired common sense, we no longer need to be taught how to live, and we believe that we no longer need to consider new ways of thinking.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead  referred to this idea when she said: “I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had.” 

Margaret Mead believed that she kept her mind open by not becoming internally mature and consequently not being constrained by her common sense, so that she would be more open to original imaginative ideas.

Einstein also valued imaginative thought; here are a couple of Einstein’s quotes about the value of imagination:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

 “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”

We think of our common sense as a fixed and absolute thing – a set part of our existence like one of the fundamental forces of the universe, such as gravity.  However, the way we acquire common sense means that it’s not absolute, it is relative to who we are and the culture that we come from.  

Different cultures, different subcultures, and different periods of time have or have had different ideas of what common sense is.  The more similar our background the more likely we are to agree on what common sense is – the more different the background the more different the nature of our common sense.

For example: older Western people grew up with Newton’s laws of motion, and we feel that they are common sense rules for how things move.  Einstein’s laws of relativity (passage of time dependent on frame of reference) seems to not be common sense to us.  Educated young Western people are comfortable with relativity and see it as common sense.  Newton’s contemporaries may not have seen his laws as common sense.

Everyone tends to see their point of view as the one that represents common sense.  If common sense seems to be common amongst a group people that is because we usually associate with people who were reared in the same way as we were, and we tend to choose to associate with people who think as we do.  

Australian journalist Ben Eltham has this to say about the inconsistency of common sense:

"Common sense is a proxy, in a way, of all the things that seem self-evident in your own worldview.  Much like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder.  Unfortunately, those with a different view aren’t likely to agree."

Common sense is not usually a valid basis for a rational argument, because we presume its value on the belief that it is an absolute, universal, and fundamental characteristic of human makeup, and even of the makeup of the universe.  Common sense is none of those things – it is merely a characteristic of our individual history, which is an extension of the culture in which we were reared, that we acquire without critical examination.  

Common sense is a form of conservative thinking as it implies that things should conform with our existing ideas, and therefore they can never change – that the way thing are is the way that they always were and how they should always be.

While our faith in our common sense is useful for successfully moving through our ordinary life, we must be willing to put common sense aside when required so that we can be a critical free thinker – notably when we face new ideas or new ways of thinking. 

Sociologist Duncan Watts, author of "Everything is obvious" says this about common sense:

“The problem is that (common sense) feels so effective to us in (everyday situations) that we’re tempted to use it to make decisions and plans and predictions about situations that are not everyday situations.”

While Oscar Wilde didn’t create the opening quote, he did have something to say about common sense.  This is spoken by a character in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray:

"Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."

While in the novel this statement is part of the argument for an abandoned and selfish life, Wilde is also saying that common sense eliminates the risk and imagination that makes life worthwhile, so that too much common sense effectively ends life because it also ends original and imaginative thought, which Wilde would have seen as essential to life.

common sense and choose the future!

So how does common sense relate to the themes and concerns of choose the future!?  

To achieve a worthwhile sustainable future future we must make some important decisions about the issues that we need to resolve.  The changes that are required to resolve these issues will be new ideas, and we can’t make decisions about these changes using what we believe is our common sense, because common sense can’t address new ideas.  (“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” is also attributed to Einstein.)  

Some people will propose that we make these choices using our common sense, so it’s important that we understand the limitations of common sense, and think more creatively about our answers.  To make the right decisions about the issues that we face, we must put our common sense aside and use clear, imaginative, critical thinking. 

Doctor in psychology Jim Taylor wrote an excellent column examining common sense for Psychology Today; you can read it here.

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