Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [9]
Another important consequence of the socially embedded nature of common sense is that disagreements over matters of common sense can be surprisingly difficult to resolve. For example, it may seem remarkable to people who have grown up with the impression that New York is a crime-ridden cesspool, or at the very least a cold, hard-edged city full of people you can’t trust, that, according to a recent news story, there is a small cadre of Manhattan residents who don’t lock their doors. As the article makes clear, most people in the city think that the “no lock people” are crazy. As one woman said, “I live in a high-rise with a doorman, I’ve been there fifteen years, and I’ve never heard of a burglary in the building. But that has absolutely nothing to do with it—it’s common sense [to lock your door].” Yet the only thing that seems shocking to the people who don’t lock their doors is that anyone else would be shocked by it.12
What’s curious about this story is that the language of the people involved almost precisely mirrors the experiences of Geertz, who noted in his study of witchcraft in Java that “when the whole family of a Javanese boy tells me that the reason he has fallen out of a tree and broken his leg is that the spirit of his deceased grandfather pushed him out because some ritual duty toward the grandfather has been inadvertently overlooked, that, so far as they are concerned, is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the matter: it is precisely what they think has occurred, it is all they think has occurred, and they are puzzled only at my puzzlement at their lack of puzzlement.” Disagreements over matters of common sense, in other words, are hard to resolve because it’s unclear to either side on what grounds one can even conduct a reasonable argument. Whether the issue is a Western anthropologist discussing witchcraft with preindustrial tribes in Indonesia, New Yorkers disagreeing about door locks, or the NRA disagreeing with the Brady Campaign over the sorts of guns that Americans ought to be able to buy, whatever it is that people believe to be a matter of common sense, they believe it with absolute certainty. They are puzzled only at the fact that others disagree.13
SOME RESERVATIONS
That what is self-evident to one person can be seen as silly by another should give us pause about the reliability of common sense as a basis for understanding the world. How can we be confident that what we believe is right when someone else feels equally strongly that it’s wrong—especially when we can’t articulate why we think we’re right in the first place? Of course, we can always write them off as crazy or ignorant or something and therefore not worth paying attention to. But once you go down that road, it gets increasingly hard to account for why we ourselves believe what we do. Consider, for example, that since 1996 support among the general public for allowing same-sex couples to marry has almost doubled, from 25 percent to 45 percent.14 Presumably those of us who changed our minds over this period do not think that we were crazy fourteen years ago, but we obviously think that we were wrong. So if something that seemed so obvious turned out to be wrong, what else that we believe to be self-evident now will seem wrong to us in the future?
Once we start to examine our own beliefs, in fact, it becomes increasingly unclear even how the various beliefs we espouse at any given time fit together. Most people, for example, consider their own views about politics to be derived from a single coherent worldview: “I’m a moderate liberal” or