Opinion: Common sense more valuable than ever before

Common sense is not as common as it once was. 

Used to be, good ol’ horse sense would tell you that if a jury found a businessman turned politician guilty of every damn charge brought against him, he must be guilty. But now, way too many people have suspended their reason to see the convicted felon as nothing more than a victim of some unimaginable conspiracy against him. It makes no kind of sense, but that’s the Republican Party these days. 

The fact is, Donald Trump paid a porn star to keep quiet about their sordid affair so he could get elected president. Considering that and all his other sinful and unrepentant escapades, common sense should tell you that Trump is morally bankrupt, and yet he’s viewed as a savior by many of his most fervent supporters.

It defies common sense to believe he’s been chosen by God to lead this nation back to its own moral center, and yet that’s what evangelical Christianity is all about these days.

And how about our Supreme Court and its latest ruling against the ban on bump stocks for firearms?

Essentially, the majority on the nation’s highest court ruled that bump stocks are not legally defined as machine guns (which are banned for private use), so we can’t outlaw them. 

Never mind that they turn regular firearms into rapid-fire people killers, same as machine guns, our justices have suspended reason in favor of legislating from the bench instead.

Then there’s the rise of artificial intelligence, which is going to thrive with the suspension of common sense. 

Consider the handheld calculator and what it did for our math skills. With a calculator, you can do massive equations in a fraction of the time you used to spend doing it in longhand, but are we really smarter now that we don’t have to memorize the multiplication tables? Collectively, we can now do mind-boggling calculations with the touch of a button, but individually, our math skills have pretty much gone to hell.

I’ll bet if you can say off the top of your head what 12 times 12 equals, it’s because you went to school before calculators took over.

Common sense would suggest that AI is going to do the same thing. It’s going to make us humans dumber, not smarter.

Much has been said of the role of education in our culture wars — college-educated Americans are more likely to be progressive in their views, while blue-collar Americans have become more protectionist.

But maybe our formal educations aren’t the great divider. Maybe it’s just plain common sense, or the lack thereof, that’s pulling us apart.

Nowadays, confirmation bias trumps common sense, and it’s putting our democratic principles to the test.

If “We The People” are going to rule ourselves, we need be able to discern between fact and fiction, and that’s getting harder to do. We are now saturated with mis- and dis-information — so common sense should be even more valuable than ever before. 

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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