Common Sense Update

Nick, traxus4420 – this is a belated (and far from adequate) response to your comments.

“how is it possible to separate the positive powers of common sense from the dysfunctional legacies of primate evolution, for instance the 'intuitive' sciences Pinker describes” (Nick)

Firstly, I think that Pinker is a brilliant exponent of common sense:

This can be seen across the board in his writings, but particularly in his approach to language, which is very hands-on and evidence-based (in contrast to Chomsky’s pencil and paper analyses which lead to frequent absurdities (e.g. that children’s brains contain some form of information about 16th century root forms)), and in his rejection of pomo intertextuality and signification.paralysis.

His deployment of common sense is particularly effective when he lays into the parenthood advice industry, which preys on feelings of guilt and inadequacy to instruct parents as to how they can best shape their children’s intelligence and personality. The evidence suggests that genes, peer groups and chance are the main determinants of personality and that the behaviour of parents has comparatively little positive influence on the development of their children’s personalities. On hearing this, the knee-jerk reaction from parents who have invested energy and money in their children’s upbringing (and in the how-to-be-a-good-parent-industry) is to retort “So you’re saying it doesn’t matter how I treat my children?” And of course it matters because it’s clear they can have a massive negative impact through inflicting psychological or physical abuse. Evidence aside, common sense leads Pinker to ask why parents would even want to shape their children’s personalities, or buy into the belief that if they love their children their children they will turn out good, rather than love them because that’s what humans do in deep and satisfying relationships. We don’t try to shape the personalities of other adults, such as our partners, so why would we try to shape those of children?

“The fact that people can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern doctrines have taken us. They make it easy to think of children as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship… It is children, above all, who are alleged to be blank slates, and that can make us forget they are people.” (The Blank Slate 398-9)

Humans have been taken far from common sense when doctrinal authority dictates how a parent should relate to their offspring. An example of how parasitic memetic machinery manipulates and feeds off its host by unplugging common sense. Memes/ideologies/discourse have an amazing capacity for utilising the unknown, and fears about the unknown, at the expense of common sense, which is pretty well-equipped to get by.

These ‘modern doctrines’ include those which seek to tell us that: gender is a construct imposed by culture and society and has nothing to do with biology or innate psychology; and that rape has nothing to do with sex. ‘Healthy’ common sense rebels against such doctrines, instinctively dismissing them as absurd. And not just Western, post-Enlightenment common sense: non-pomo anthropology of an evolutionary bent asserts that all human societies acknowledge gender differences as biological and psychological givens. Evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics are providing plausible theories and evidence to support the gut reactions of common sense - sometimes we and the world are not as complicated and inexplicable as some would like to have us believe.

Pinker’s project in The Blank Slate was to a) describe how the doctrines of the Enlightenment - the ghost-in-the-machine/blank slate/noble savage memeplex – are proven wrong by strands of contemporary science stemming from the theory of evolution and the computational model of the mind, and b) describe how these doctrines still provide the scaffolding for much of current thinking - rational and absurd varieties.

When it comes to politics, Pinker is very pro-Enlightenment, in the sense of consciously assuming certain moral principles to be universal, by deliberately ignoring scientific facts:

“The case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically indistinguishable. It is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups to which the individual belongs. Enlightened societies choose to ignore race, sex and ethnicity in hiring, promotion, salary, school admissions, and the criminal justice system because the alternative is morally repugnant… Regardless of IQ or physical strength or any other trait that can vary, all humans can be assumed to have certain traits in common. No one likes being enslaved. No one likes being humiliated. No one like being treated unfairly, that is, according to traits that the person cannot control… The Declaration of Independence proclaims, “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.” The author, Thomas Jefferson, made it clear that he was referring to an equality of rights, not a biological sameness. For example, in an 1813 letter to John Adams he wrote ‘I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtues and talents…’” (The Blank Slate p145)

The premise for Paine’s Common Sense was that natural rights are metaphysical truths, for the author of the Declaration of Independence they were ‘self-evident’ truths, and for Pinker they are consciously upheld fictions. It would have been interesting if Pinker had traced the lineage of these ‘self-evident’ truths back to Locke, the initial target in The Blank Slate. The blank slate and natural rights come together as part of Locke’s Enlightenment package and it is only by retaining the concept of natural rights, after throwing out the blank slate, that Pinker prevents his evolutionary psychology from veering off into Social Darwinist fascism. Pinker is far more indebted to Locke than he acknowledges (or perhaps realizes).

Here Paine’s common sense has adapted to the point where it is now conscious that the assumptions it rests upon are in fact fictions, but judges those fictions to be worth clinging on to because the alternative is a return to pre-Enlightenment brutality.

A distinction has to be made between the rational, adaptive common sense that Paine deployed against the English government and intuitive bio-programs which are not likely to undergo much adaptive change in the near future (if left to their own devices). Enlightenment common sense actually counteracts intuitive programming, particularly in its English and American realizations. It’s possible to read Paine’s assault of monarchy as an attempt to prize humanity out of its deep-seated deference to the alpha male (the American revolution being profoundly anti-oedipal), and his attacks on the Bible in The Age of Reason , which lost him his friends, as a doomed attempt to terminate most of the god program in the human brain.

The difference between (Enlightenment) common sense and Reason would be/could be that common sense rests on assumptions, while Reason operates from, on and with assumptions. Paine didn’t actually have to do a great deal of thinking because Locke had done most of it for him. Common sense judges the current situation and argues from the assumptions it rests on, and it draws its efficiency from not analyzing them (too closely). Reason is brought to bear when new theories and novel situations emerge, and it forces common sense to adapt. So, weather permitting, an initially outrageous theory such as the theory of evolution can be absorbed into common sense. (Once upon a time people used to say things like this: “Anti-Oedipus is basically just common sense now.”)

The intuitive physics and economics Pinker describes operate at deep levels - the former tied into judging and controlling motion, and the latter plugged into food acquisition and consumption. Since these are so basic to the survival of our machinery, they evolved long before rational thinking and common sense – and are therefore not particularly susceptible to the charms of logic or adaptation. Intuitive physics is still pretty useful for us while we have these bodies on this planet, even if it is completely wrong scientifically. Intuitive economics is out of sync with our technocapitalist environment and is a lot more harmful, obviously. But are the decisions which drive intuitive economics based on assumptions? If they are, they are very stubborn and less amenable to revision than social-political assumptions or metaphysical beliefs. If common sense is involved in intuitive economics then this is an example of common sense working sub-optimally…

Coincidence or not, The Wealth of Nations, Common Sense and The Declaration of Independence were all published in the same year (1776), so economics really is bundled up with common sense.

“common sense as more like a syntax than a distinct set of thoughts and actions -- though prior to such a linguistic metaphor -- sub-mathematical, more like.” (traxus 4420)

This seems very plausible. It is very close to Pinker’s picture of mentalese – developed from Leibniz and Turing – where thinking is described as non-linguistic symbol processing. Common sense would be a kind of default setting for certain types of processes.

“Isn't 'de-subjectification,' one of hyperstition's recurrent themes, profoundly non-common sensical?”

I guess so, but if it’s borne in mind that common sense is just one tool among many, operating in a thoroughly baffling context, then I don’t think thinking about common sense does any harm.

Posted by sd at March 17, 2006 03:11 AM | TrackBack