Com­mon sense, as defined by the Cam­bridge Dic­tio­nary, is “the basic lev­el or prac­ti­cal knowl­edge and judge­ment that we all need to help us live in a rea­son­able and safe way.”
Sounds clear and sim­ple enough. So why is there such a dearth where it’s real­ly needed?

In  her 1946  essay “Reflec­tion on the Atom­ic Bomb”,  Gertrude Stein wrote: “Every­body gets so much infor­ma­tion all day long that they lose their com­mon sense.”
Today, that could be blamed on social media and the 24 hour news cycle. It cer­tain­ly goes  some way to explain­ing why the “Dooms­day Clock”, con­jured up in 1947 by among oth­er sci­en­tists Albert Ein­stein, to warn human­i­ty how close were are destroy­ing our world, “now stands at 90 sec­onds to midnight—the clos­est to glob­al cat­a­stro­phe it has ever been.”
And – sur­prise – to para­phrase a line from Jim­my Buffet’s “Mar­gar­i­taville”,  “it’s our own damn fault”. Which is anoth­er way of say­ing lack of com­mon sense.
Com­mon sense would define nuclear war as “the dumb­est, tru­ly exis­ten­tial thing we can do”.
But, despite the 1985 avow­al by then U.S. Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan and Sovi­et leader Mikhail Gor­bachev that “a nuclear war can­not be won and must nev­er be fought”, some gen­er­als today actu­al­ly think the opposite.
Thus: “All of the nuclear-armed states are increas­ing or upgrad­ing their arse­nals and most are sharp­en­ing nuclear rhetoric and the role nuclear weapons play in their mil­i­tary strategies.”
One would have thought the MAD (Mutu­al­ly Assured Destruc­tion) premise as a deter­rent to war would be destroyed by com­mon sense. How­ev­er: “It is still in oper­a­tion today between the nuclear forces of the U.S. and Rus­sia, and experts have sug­gest­ed that MAD is the rea­son that small states such as Israel are thought to have devel­oped nuclear missiles.”

                    WHEN MORE REALLY IS LESS

The jus­ti­fi­ca­tions or oth­er­wise of Israel’s region­al strate­gic think­ing can be argued until the Dooms­day clock has one sec­ond left to tick, with­out reach­ing a uni­ver­sal­ly accept­ed answer. That aside, nukes are use­less as a solu­tion to Israel’s most intractable prob­lem, and region­al nuclear con­flict “has the poten­tial to cause mass star­va­tion world­wide through envi­ron­men­tal effects.”
Com­mon sense ought to make that some­thing to be avoid­ed at all costs, except nei­ther the Israelis nor the Pales­tini­ans seem capa­ble of grasp­ing that war between them is a no-win.
The late Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin made a clar­i­on call for com­mon sense when he signed the Oslo Peace Accords on the lawn of the White House in 1993: “Enough of blood, and tears, enough!”
This is what his hopes for peace have come to: “Friday’s attack was the dead­liest on Israelis in years, and put the region on the brink of a major esca­la­tion. On Thurs­day, an Israeli mil­i­tary raid killed nine Pales­tini­ans at a refugee camp in Jenin, the dead­liest sin­gle oper­a­tion in the West Bank in near­ly two decades….”
The far right zealots some Israeli vot­ers felt it was com­mon sense to elect, pro­pose deny­ing Israeli Arabs (20 per­cent of the country’s pop­u­la­tion) cit­i­zen­ship and the right to vote, and evict­ing Pales­tini­ans en masse. They also want to give the Israeli army author­i­ty to shoot with­out ask­ing ques­tions (a lot of Pales­tini­ans think that’s already a stand­ing order), and  loosen gun laws for Israeli civilians.
They don’t seem to have noticed that in the coun­try with the world’s loos­est gun laws, “From 2000 to 2021, few­er than 3% of 433 active attacks in the U.S. end­ed with a civil­ian fir­ing back.”
Maybe it’s worth Amer­i­cans con­sid­er­ing whether the “well-ordered mili­tia” part of the Sec­ond Amend­ment means “com­mon sense”, rather than a soci­ety awash in guns that fea­ture in week­ly mass shootings.

                         ANOTHER DEFINITION

But that would require an under­stand­ing of and adher­ence to the Mer­ri­am-Web­ster dictionary’s def­i­n­i­tion of com­mon sense: “Sound and pru­dent judg­ment based on a sim­ple per­cep­tion of the sit­u­a­tion or facts.”
Which brings us to Cana­da and the lat­est not only lack­ing com­mon sense, but non­sen­si­cal bit of ‘woke’ or what­ev­er the ‘feel-good-and-don’t‑think-about-it’ buzz of the day is.
A tax pay­er-fund­ed the­atre organ­i­sa­tion just announced “Black Out”, an event first intro­duced on Broad­way in 2019, that will only allow “Black-iden­ti­fy­ing audi­ences” to attend.
In the wake of cries of “Cul­tur­al Apartheid,” and “are they plan­ning on doing a whites only show?”, the per­for­mance is now being adver­tised as “an event that ‘will wel­come Black audi­ences’ with­out spec­i­fy­ing that non-Black patrons should make oth­er plans.”
I sup­pose one could cred­it them with show­ing a mod­icum of com­mon sense. Sure­ly, how­ev­er, one of the best ways to com­bat racism is to mix and min­gle to learn about, under­stand and appre­ci­ate cul­tur­al, reli­gious and oth­er such prac­tices and beliefs.
 The 18^th cen­tu­ry French Enlight­en­ment philoso­pher Voltaire’s ‘Philo­soph­i­cal Dic­tio­nary’ has it right: “Com­mon sense is not so common.”

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