Culture and Common Sense

In the random meanderings of my aging mind I believe I may have stumbled across a most interesting question that I doubt has ever been much researched: Is the concept of” common sense” a human universal? This may appear a simple question, but I assure you it is not at all simple. Let us use as our definition of common sense that of Merriam-Webster: “sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts.” Let me begin with some examples from our own culture. We have at the present time laws and rules that prevent children from bringing guns to school. There has been at least one case where a small boy brought a 2 inch plastic replica of a gun to school. This was confiscated and the boy was sent home (I don’t know if he was otherwise punished). It would seem to me that here is a clear case of violating common sense. There is no conceivable way a 2 inch plastic replica of a gun could be in any way a threatening or dangerous act. The common sense approach would have been to simply ignore this exceedingly questionable breaking of the rules. In another case an eight year old girl was having a tantrum and was out of control at her school. This was in full view of a number of adults and at least one police officer. She was tasered! Now, would common sense have not favored simply subduing her physically and removing her from the situation, after all there were several adults present at the time. How about this case? A number of boys with their dates, all dressed in their rented tuxedos, their dates in formal gowns, were 10 minutes late to the prom. They were refused admittance because of being late, as that was the rule. Would it not have made perfect common sense to overlook the rule? I’m certain there must be many cases in our culture where people do act in common sense ways, but we don’t hear about those. We only hear about cases in which obvious common sense solutions were bureaucratically or otherwise ignored, and we wonder how anyone could be so stupid or devoid of common sense. If in the above cases the outcomes had been different we would have said common sense prevailed.

Viewed cross-culturally this becomes a much more difficult question. First, there are many things about other cultures that we automatically believe make no sense, common or otherwise. Anthropologists have spent years demonstrating that certain customs that seem repugnant and nonsensical to us, make perfect sense when seen in their cultural context. Senilicide among the Eskimo has long been an example. How could anyone leave their old people out in the cold to die? But when you consider that the survival of old people could potentially threaten the existence of the whole family it begins to make (common?) sense. Infanticide, too, has been an example. But in places like the New Guinea Highlands, when the threat of attack was always present and often occurred, a woman could not always adequately take care of more than one child, so if a second child came along too soon, it was often sacrificed to the necessities of survival. Some customs are much more difficult to understand. Honor killings, for example. If a daughter is raped, or elopes, or is suspected of doing something prohibited by the culture, her father or brothers, or all of them together, might kill her to defend the family honor. Or how about the custom of suttee, where a perfectly healthy young bride or wife is expected to climb onto the funeral pyre and be burned to death along with her deceased husband? To us Westerners these customs are irrational and despicable and make no sense at all. But obviously to the members of those cultures they are part of powerful belief systems that make sense to them. As Anthropologist Richard Schweder has said:

“There are cases where canons of rationality, validity, truth, and efficiency are simply beside the point—irrelevant. This third possibility is what the romantic rebellion against the Enlightenment is all about. What is that possibility? That there’s something more to thinking than reason and evidence—culture, the arbitrary, the symbolic, the expressive, the semiotic—that many of our ideas and practices are beyond logic and experience” (Richard Schweder, Thinking Through Cultures Expeditions in Cultural Psychology, 1991).

That is to say, much of our behavior is simply cultural and not subject to reason, etc. But what about common sense? Through our enculturative processes we come to believe in and practice certain customs that do not have to make sense, they just are, have been, and continue to be, no matter how irrational they actually are. If you ask New Guinea Highlanders why they do certain things they merely say, “fesin b’long tumbuna,” (the way of our ancestors). They have no idea why they do some things, especially ritual activities. In the U.S. we do not eat horse or dog meat , and we allow babies to sleep alone in cribs, and even sometimes in their own rooms, customs that in some cultures would be considered child abuse. We accept the idea that items should be priced at $1.99. or $5.98, or some other odd figure, instead of at even numbers which would be more sensible and efficient. We have lots of customs that tend to be irrational and inefficient and lack any cogent explanations.

All cultures, it would seem, have cultural traditions that do not necessarily make sense even to them. It is here we would have to look to discover any instances of common sense or its absence. That is, there would have to be a situation where the actors are aware of the norm, are confronted with a questionable situation on the periphery of that norm, and then use their common sense, or fail to do so. I do not have at the moment more than a few simple examples of what I might see as common sense in play or denied. A recent example might be seen in Saudi Arabia where a 75 year old woman is about to receive 40 lashes for allowing two men to enter her home while she was alone. One of these men she had actually nursed as a child, the other was a friend of his. The Saudis have a rule against a woman being alone in a house with men, not their husband or brothers. But surely this is a case where the rule could be overridden by common sense. After all, the woman was 75 years old, she raised one of the men, and neither of them could conceivably have been considered to be sexually predatory or whatever, nor couold she have been so considered. Alas, in this case, common sense apparently failed. I do not know if this proves that Saudis have no common sense, or if the cultural prescriptions and proscriptions are so strong they are absolute. It does suggest to me, however, that perhaps the Saudis do, at least in some cases, lack common sense. Obviously we would need far more examples and information about Saudi behavior.

In a case where you might be able to say common sense prevailed, I offer this perhaps questionable example. When my friend, Professor Philip Newman, worked in the New Guinea Highlands with some people known as the Gururumba, he recorded the following anecdote: You must first understand that when digging in the earth, people in New Guinea sometimes discover old stone tools they have no explanation for, other than believing they are put there by thunderbolts. Thus when there is thunder and lightning they rush to where they think it struck and dig in the ground looking for evidence of thunderbolts. One day, while Professor Newman was watching them do this, one man observed them briefly, got up and walked away, saying aloud, “there are no thunderbolts.” I’m not certain this represents common sense or just plain cynicism, but it is an example of an individual who knew the cultural belief but decided not to follow it.

A further example from New Guinea might be of relevance. There are periodic feasts where one group presents gifts of cooked pig to another group. Often this entails one group having to walk a long distance, spend a night, and then walk back carrying their gifts of cooked pig. As it is quite warm during the day, and they have a long distance to travel, they usually have to wait until the next day or two to consume the pig, which by this time has begun to spoil and smell bad. I have heard them say, “This pig stinks. If we eat it we’ll get sick.” But then they eat it anyhow. Is this a case where their common sense is telling them something but they reject it because of their desire for pork, their major source of scarce protein?

Here is one further example that I believe indicates that New Guinea Highlanders do understand the concept of common sense. When I had been living there for only a couple of weeks, and they were building a house for me, I asked my interpreter to go to where I was temporarily staying and bring me my axe. This involved a walk of at least one half mile and back. When he returned he had brought me a handkerchief. I was embarrassed because I realized my pidgin had apparently not been up to the task and, not wanting to embarrass him, I said nothing. One day, almost a year later, we were resting under some trees while on a long hike. Out of the blue he suddenly said, “You would never have sent me for a handkerchief.” I then explained to him that I had wanted an axe but my mouth was “heavy,” and I had not made it clear because of my limited pidgin. He had obviously thought about this for a long time and had concluded that such a request obviously violated common sense.

Perhaps this is a question only of interest to people like me. But I think this question of how universal the concept of common sense might be is an interesting one. Obviously I need many further examples, and much more thought. Any examples would be welcome.