The Non-Sense of Common Sense

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The term “common sense” has long been used as a weapon. Common sense has a variety of definitions, which include “Sound judgment from experience rather than study” (Taylor, 2011), “A cultural group’s body of shared beliefs about the world” (Fletcher 204), and “Ordinary or normal understanding, as possessed by all; good sound practical sense in everyday matters”⁠ (OED, 1993). However, the judgment of whether or not someone has common sense focuses on if they meet social expectations and conform to social mores based on class, religion, race, generation, education, or any number of other factors. “People with common sense are seen as reasonable, down to earth, reliable, and practical” (Taylor, 2011), but the admonition “They don’t have any common sense” is shorthand for “You are not one of us; you don’t understand the world the way we do.” The idea of a basic rationality shared by a society is a fiction that causes polarization and division. It allows one group to criticize another as having no common sense, dismissing their lived experience and cultural differences. Politically, common sense has historically been used by both liberal and conservative politicians, though in recent years, common sense has been embraced more fully by conservative politicians worldwide and used to exclude “the other” from citizenship.

Common sense as a concept increased in popularity in mid-sixteenth-century England, a time when the Reformation was beginning to change society. Common sense was often used as a counterpoint to religion and religious control of society; instead of religious education, you were said to understand the world through common-sense, experiential learning. Common sense represented knowledge outside of the church, allowing the people to take power back from church officials. The phrase was used by the middle and upper classes to exclude others while defining their beliefs and status in society. They had good reason to promote the idea of a universal common sense: by presenting their values, ideals, and views as normal and universal, they were able to gain power by marginalizing anyone who did not fit their narrow views of social order, including libertines, atheists, women, and the poor.

Today, some of what many assume is a collective American common sense comes from what Robert Bellah refers to as civil religion. This “collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things” (Bellah 8) instilled certain attitudes and viewpoints in American children who attended public school. These ideas are often reinforced by religion and tradition. As Bellah explains, “The civil religion has been a point of articulation between the profoundest commitments of the Western religious and philosophical tradition and the common beliefs of ordinary Americans” (Bellah 15). The shared beliefs we learn as public school kids become so ingrained that they seem obvious and feel like they are innate knowledge, a shared common sense. But there is nothing innate about it; specific concepts were selected by the state to teach American values and ideals. American social constructs are learned, and “conventional wisdom may differ sharply from group to group” (Fletcher 206) as well as from country to country and culture to culture. Worldwide and historically, there are many different ways of relating in a society and many different bases of knowledge.

The concept of common sense is not only used in terms of an individual’s personal speech; it is also widely employed in political speech and has been used throughout American history as a political tool. It can bring community together, but it does so by “highlighting the common sense of particular peoples in opposition to the perceived nonsense of others” (Rosenfeld 238). When someone brings up common sense, it is always in the context of specifying who is “the other,” those people who do not fit into a specific social role, political group, class, race, gender, nationality, or level of education. They are diminished and dismissed for being different, for not having the common sense to mirror the speaker’s background and experiences.

The history of invoking common sense in political speech is extensive, and it has been used by both conservative and liberal pundits, from politicians to preachers. For example, before the American Civil War, pro-slavery officials said it was clearly common sense that slaves could not reason and, therefore, could never be equal and could not have civil rights like voting. On the other side, abolitionists argued that “the moral wrong of slavery belonged to the category of truths that should feel so self-evident or instinctively correct to all sensible people that it precluded the need for demonstration at all” (Rosenfeld 233–234). In other words, your common sense should tell you that slavery is wrong. Each group utilized an argument for common sense to present its case and, perhaps more importantly, define its group members. By solidifying their so-called common-sense ideas about slavery, both pro-slavery and abolitionist politicians and preachers gained traction in the community by defining their core group. They also reduced slavery — a divisive and complex political and moral question with many cultural and economic repercussions — to a simple matter of common sense.

Over time, civil religion has become internalized, creating a sense of belonging to a certain nation. As more nations developed this sense of nationalism — with each nation supposedly having a single, distinct culture — the rhetoric of common sense ramped up, emphasizing the divisions between cultures as well as between those who “belong” in a country and those who do not. While both liberal and conservative politicians have called on a shared common sense, at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century it became part of the go-to rhetoric of conservative policy. Ronald Reagan said governing was easy if you just use your common sense, while the 2010 Tea Party Republicans went so far as to call themselves “common sense conservatives,” which is utterly meaningless unless you are part of their in-group.

In the US and Europe today, common sense is utilized as a way to emphasize white belonging. Donald Trump invoked common sense in his infamous June 16, 2015, presidential campaign speech regarding Mexican immigrants, in which he said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists… And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people…” (Time Magazine, 2015).

This same rhetoric is occurring throughout the West, with politicians like Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, employing the rhetoric of common sense to exclude “the other” as ineligible to be true citizens — in Hungary’s case, Muslim immigrants. In Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Orbán talked about the common-sense need to exclude immigrants from the EU. He wrote, “If Europe does not return to the path of common sense, it will find itself laid low in a battle for its fate… Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims. This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity… Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? There is no alternative, and we have no option but to defend our borders” (The Guardian, 2015).

The rhetoric of common sense oversimplifies complex issues and dismisses education, science, and history. The insistence that some people have common sense and others do not threatens to suppress debate and restrict new ideas, “convincing us that simple, kitchen-table solutions formulated by everyday people are necessarily better than complex or scientific ones” (Rosenfeld 256). In addition, the belief in common sense says there is a mythical innate American knowledge in which all Americans think the same and have had the exact same experiences. However, each person’s upbringing varies widely based on race, religion, gender, place, and countless other factors. Rural common sense is quite different from urban; the common sense of a Black man is vastly different from that of a White man; a woman’s common sense diverges widely from a man’s. At its worst and most divisive, the rhetoric of common sense is used by white supremacist and autocratic politicians to denote who is a legitimate citizen and who is not. Some people would argue that we need a shared common sense as part of our civil religion of shared ideas and ideals in order to have a successful democracy. But since common sense is subjective, changeable, and exists solely as a way to define in-groups and exclude “the other,” it would be healthier and less polarizing for our democracy to abandon the idea of common sense altogether and instead embrace the idea of using sound judgment based on facts, as well as thinking critically and questioning our assumptions about the world.

Sources
Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 1–21. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027022.

Fletcher, Garth J. O. “Psychology of Common Sense.” American Psychologist 39, no. 3 (March 1984): 203–13.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 2020 Edition. New York: International Publishers Co., 1971.

Time Magazine. “Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech,” June 16, 2015. https://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/.

Rosenfeld, Sophia. Common Sense: A Political History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Taylor, Jim. “Common Sense Is Neither Common Nor Sense.” Psychology Today, July 12, 2011. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/201107/common-sense-is-neither-common-nor-sense.

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 1, A-M. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Traynor, Ian. “Migration Crisis: Hungary PM Says Europe in Grip of Madness.” The Guardian, September 3, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/03/migration-crisis-hungary-pm-victor-orban-europe-response-madness.

Reviewing “The Mystery of Mrs. Christie”

Marie Benedict’s The Mystery of Mrs. Christie tells a fictionalized version of what happened when Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 days in 1926. Agatha had written a few books, but was not yet the famous, mystery-writing powerhouse that she became. No one knows what really happened; she claimed amnesia and no one ever came forward with a different story. Benedict takes that basic narrative and embellishes it extensively, exploring the years before the disappearance as well as the investigation around it and Agatha’s reappearance. The book’s chapters alternate between two timelines — 11 days in 1926 versus Agatha’s earlier life — until the timeline converges for part two. The chapters based in the earlier time focus on Agatha’s relationships with her husband, her mother, her sister, and her child. The 1926 chapters focus on the investigation and her husband’s reaction to her disappearance. It’s a successful structure for the story and the short chapters make for quick reading.

Spoilers are included below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know.

The Mystery of Mrs. Christie is somewhat engaging, though the daily look at the investigation drags a bit since it’s obvious what will happen after the prologue (and if you know anything about the disappearance). The non-investigation chapters move along at a good pace, jumping through time effectively. The book’s major flaw is that the characters are so completely unlikable. No one has any redeeming qualities, even the child. The police are pompous caricatures with no depth, the husband is a whiny, abusive narcissist, Agatha’s mother is overbearing and only worried about status and Agatha being a submissive wife, and Agatha’s sister is overbearing and belittles her at every opportunity.

Agatha herself is steamrolled by everyone in the book. She is one of the weakest woman characters I’ve read in a long time — perhaps ever. She has no identity outside of herself and is only motivated by other people’s thoughts of her. She doesn’t seem to have any internal life whatsoever. A few times, Agatha faintly thinks that maybe there is more to life than being subordinate to everyone around her but immediately quashes that idea in favor of being a wet rag of nothingness. Her mother tells her how to be a good wife, so she does that without question, even when her submission to her husband subsumes her. She has a vague idea to write, but her sister says she can’t possibly write well. She writes just to prove her sister wrong, not because she has needs of her own. Her motivation is external.

Her husband tells her what he wants in a wife, so she does that, no matter how abusive and cruel he is. The most incomprehensible plot point comes when Agatha announces she is pregnant and Mr. Christie whines that he doesn’t want to stop being the center of attention, so she emotionally neglects their daughter to keep him happy. Mrs. Christie is the ultimate enabler of an extreme narcissist.

The “twist” ending shows her suddenly become a mercenary, cold-hearted, scheming, vindictive woman. Are we supposed to believe that this complete about-face and development of a complex personality happened because of her husband’s infidelity? Benedict’s theory seems to be that Agatha Christie became the writer she is because her husband made her. She’s pushed into her life by outside forces and not driven by her own inner motivation, thoughts, or strength.

Women in the first part of the 20th century (and throughout history) were expected to meet societal expectations, often losing themselves in the process. However, women have always had personalities, ideas, and opinions — as well as actual thoughts and emotions. They were not mindless, simpering maids who existed only to serve their parents and husbands. Even the title The Mystery of Mrs. Christie indicates her lack of autonomy and personality: she’s Mrs. Christie, wife to a man, instead of Agatha Christie, an individual. Mrs. Christie was presented as a blank slate with little to no inner life, dominated by abusers. What should have been a triumphant and satisfying finding of oneself recasts her as a horrible, mercenary bitch. She still had no depth; she was a cartoon villain. This is not growth. This is a character’s traits being replaced wholesale by the opposite traits, with no trajectory of change indicated.

Rating: Not recommended, unless you like bad relationships and tedious characters.

“State Funeral” Shows Stalin’s Death in Found Footage

Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral (2019) is a found-footage film showing the announcement of Joseph Stalin’s death in various republics across the Soviet Union, Stalin’s body lying in state and the long lines of people waiting to view it, and the funeral itself, complete with a string of Communist Party leaders’ eulogies. 200 cameramen were sent across the Soviet Union, providing a fascinating glimpse of the vastly different Soviet republics and how their citizens live, dress, and react to the news of Stalin’s death. In 1988, Gorbachev’s perestroika policy allowed the archives to open up, making the film available for the first time since it was shot. The footage was shot in 1953, but the film-makers were able to clean up the images digitally so they are much crisper and cleaner than a lot of archival footage of the time. This crispness makes the people shown look more modern, more immediate — more like the viewer.

Stalin crafted a broad mythology of the Soviet Union’s strength, glory, and goodness and represented that mythology in human form. The cult of personality he created, lionizing himself and legitimizing anything he did in the service of the state, irrevocably tied the Soviet people to him. His widely promoted successes as a leader made the country safer and stronger. On his death, despite knowing of his many atrocities and experiencing the constant hardships of living under his brutal regime, many Soviets mourned him as a person, but also mourned what he represented. They grieved the loss of their national symbol and worried over who would take power next. Would their idealized concepts of the nation remain, or would everything change? Would their sacrifices under Stalin lead to a stronger, better Soviet Union or would they boil down to torture, misery, and death?

Before the funeral, Stalin’s body lay in state in the Hall of Columns in the House of Unions in Moscow. Thousands came to view the body. At one point, a crowd of people in Trubnaya Square squeezed together in a bottleneck and the resulting crush killed at least 109 people; unofficial death estimates are much higher. The mourners shown in State Funeral are much calmer than those in Trubnaya Square. The film shows no pushing, no urgency to the mourners. They calmly stand in line, looking dejected and sad, some crying but most just silent, waiting. Were these genuine mourners, or did they simply want to be able to say they saw Stalin’s body? Were they communism’s true believers? Or did they feel they needed to publicly mourn or risk being reported by their families and neighbors for anti-communist sentiment?

State Funeral uses the official communist party announcer’s voice as the invisible narrator and shows archival footage of Communist Party leaders speaking, the only people in the film to express the Soviet Union’s loss. “Death has come and everything is useless. Death has come and we are all alone.” At times, the announcer inadvertently references the police state, as when he says, “He was everywhere, he was always with us.” Stalin’s informers were always watching, waiting for transgressions. The announcer also ruminates on death and immortality, saying, “Stalin’s immortality is in his deeds… Long live Stalin’s immortal cause! Long live the great Soviet people, Communism’s builders, who will live to see the triumph of Communism! Stalin is dead, long live Stalin!”

There are no conversations, no interviews — simply speeches and eulogies from people in power, all shot in 1953. The thousands of citizens shown never speak, indicating they are one united monolith of grief. However, their silence also represents their powerlessness as citizens of a brutal dictator’s regime. Many of them live in fear and repression. They could not speak out about Stalin during his lifetime, and they cannot openly express their feelings about his death. This overwhelming silence creates a vacuum: using just found footage for this documentary removes all historical and social context, leaving the viewer adrift.

The footage of the funeral, Stalin lying in state, and the crowds who went to view the body was originally made to be used for a contemporary documentary, The Great Farewell, glorifying Stalin in death as he was in life. Because of the power struggles that ensued after Stalin’s death, the film was never completed and its 40 hours of footage was locked away, along with recordings of the eulogies and radio broadcasts of the death and funeral. The intent of the footage shines through, leaving the viewer feeling confused. Are we supposed to admire Stalin?

Loznitsa provides no commentary in the film and relies on the viewer’s knowledge of history to provide the missing context. The only perspective provided outside the found footage are a few toothless text statements about Stalin’s atrocities shown the final frames of the film: “According to historical research, over 21 million Soviet citizens were murdered, executed, tortured to death, imprisoned, sent to Gulag labor camps or deported during Stalin’s rule. A further estimated 15 million starved to death. In 1956, the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union condemned Stalin’s rule as a cult of personality and called for the de-Stalinization of the country.”

These few sentences are not enough, since it is impossible to learn anything about Stalin from the film itself. The film-maker seems to assume that his intent is clear, but the viewer has no idea if the two hours of film they have just watched is a glorification or a condemnation. Perhaps that is Loznitsa’s point, perhaps not. Some people do still respect Stalin. Most, however, understand him to be one of the most brutal dictators and the largest-scale mass murderer in history, which is not reflected in any way in the film’s footage. The film-maker calls his representation “the anti-world,” with a lot of energy and space still revolving around this dead dictator. However, only those who know history well will have the background to fully put the film in context and understand the “space” Stalin still occupies in the world.

In an interview led by Pietro Marcello following the film on the Mubi platform, Loznitsa discusses that the viewer’s education, culture, and upbringing will color their perceptions, so that some will see a tyrant and some a great man. “The thought I wanted to express in this film is very simple: Stalin is an allegory of all these people, who have a little Stalin in them, who share all these outlooks and who compose, like little bricks, this whole apparatus of totalitarian human destruction.” There is a “strangeness” of the people and culture that allows them to follow a dictator and both hate him and mourn him, “either annihilated or forced to serve evil” in a brutal regime. But without providing even a basic context to place the film in history, it fails to reach this goal.

A few interviews with those who experienced Stalin’s death and the funeral would have gone a long way in providing the viewer with information. Many Soviet citizens were confused by their feelings after Stalin’s death. They abhorred him, yet they mourned. This ambiguity and emotional turmoil would have been interesting to explore in the context of the exultant found footage. Perhaps I am asking the director for too much. Even a few days after viewing the film, I feel uneasy about the imagery and have many questions. That discomfort — making me feel the confusion and anxiety of the Soviets after Stalin’s death — may be Loznitsa’s aim. Overall, State Funeral is an interesting curiosity for students of Soviet history, but it leaves too much unsaid.

State Funeral is available to watch on Mubi.com.

5 Reasons to Love “Only Murders in the Building”

I am absolutely addicted to Only Murders in the Building (OMITB), the Hulu Original series starring Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez. Hulu is currently releasing an episode every Tuesday. I’ve watched eight of the ten episodes, and I’m impatiently waiting for the last two to drop like I used to finish Agatha Christie novels in a couple days. I need to know who did it!

If you’re not familiar with it, the show is about three strangers (Martin, Short, and Gomez) who live in the same exclusive building in New York City. They’re all true crime buffs, and when they find out fellow resident Tim Kono has died and get a look at the body, they decide it’s a murder and start their own true crime podcast as they investigate. In the long tradition of comedic mysteries, like The Pink Panther (1963), Clue (1985), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), and Knives Out (2019), OMITB is one of the best. Here are five reasons to love Only Murders in the Building:

Steve Martin and Martin Short’s easy chemistry
This is the obvious one, so let’s get it out of the way first. Steve Martin and Martin Short are great together. I can’t tell when they’re sticking to the script and when they’re riffing, but they’re always funny and sweet and just a little off their rockers. Especially Short — he’s delightfully weird in this show. Martin’s character has a lovely melancholy that slowly lifts as the show progresses, due in large part to his new friendships with Short’s Oscar and Gomez’s Mabel, along with the excitement and interest that the Tim Kono investigation brings to him.

Selena Gomez’s dry wit
Gomez is a master of sarcasm and has a beautifully dry delivery, and I love it. I never saw her on Disney shows and don’t know her music, so this is my first exposure. I absolutely love her style. The character Mabel is tough and direct, not a people pleaser. She’ll never smile just because she’s expected to (unless it’s necessary to get away with Hardy Boying). I respect that. Gomez’s interactions with Martin and Short are remarkable; she holds her own and is never upstaged by the two of them. It’s a really good, low-key but commanding performance.

It’s a solid mystery
I love mysteries. I grew up devouring Ruth Rendell and Agatha Christie novels, and I still love a good new whodunit. OMITB is a good, well-written mystery. For the first few episodes I had no idea who the killer was, but now with almost each episode my theory changes. I still have no idea who killed Tim Kono. In most TV mysteries it’s obvious from the second a character appears on screen that they did it because the actor plays it so guilty, but I love that I still don’t know because everyone seems to be acting suspicious. Maybe all New Yorkers just act guilty all the time…

Word play
There are some great puns and quality word play throughout the series. Martin and Short have some great scenes going back and forth that showcase their chemistry, like in the car while they’re following Mabel in episode five and they riff on catching various diseases in Long Island. And then there’s Jan, the professional bassoon player. I mean, come on — “I’ll see you bassooner or later” is brilliant. Mabel teaching Charlie and Oscar modern slang is always funny and just adds to the realism and depth of their inter-generational friendship. I’m a word nerd, so word play always makes me happy.

The tone
My favorite thing about OMITB is its tone and the writers’ willingness to experiment. The show has poignant moments and sad scenes (it’s about a murder, after all), but overall the characters seem to be having fun despite their ups and downs. The relationships between Charlie, Oscar, and Mabel are sarcastic and kind and funny, their antics as they investigate are completely not CSI-approved, and the performances are wonderfully low-key and quiet (mostly). Martin and Short have the ability to go big and broad but they keep their energy toned down in their roles, which makes for a far more interesting and intriguing show. The writers and actors keep a delicate balance between comedy and tragedy without being ridiculous or pathetic. Only Murders in the Building is beautifully written and beautifully acted, and I can’t wait to see where it ends up.