Of "Common Sense"

Those who speak of something as "common sense" usually seem to mean that what they describe as such is how all right-thinking people naturally apprehend a matter, with no argument to be brooked on that score.

Of course, subtler and finer minds recognize that this is simply not so--this apprehension they take so naturally a matter of unspoken and unreflected upon prejudices that may or may not lead to a correct apprehension in an instance, such prejudices being a culturally relative thing.

Certainly it is so in the work of Thorstein Veblen, who would describe the "common sense" of a barbarian who thinks in terms of transcendence and personal force as very different from the "common sense" of a civilized person who thinks in matter-of-fact cause-and-effect terms for example--with, reflecting the vast distance between the two positions and the slow progress of peoples across it, many gradations existing in between.

That few appreciate that make much of the ranting about common sense being on their side an expression of their small-mindedness and nothing more.