When Common Sense Trumps Science

Why we need to take our intuition seriously

Note: This post is partly inspired by John Carter’s piece, Why don’t conservatives trust science, and some of the comments it sparked.

This insight, too, is something you must already have—if not, I cannot help you.

~ Iain McGilchrist

By now, everybody should have realized that Science (with capital S) has in many ways replaced religion as the highest authority in matters of truth.

It has evolved from a specific endeavor and mindset that came to the scene under specific historical circumstances to a sort of Ersatz-church that has the final say: not only about all the facts relevant to a functioning society, but even about the big questions and the nature of reality.

These days, it is often enough to call something a “scientific result” to imbue even the most absurd, most meaningless, most trivial, or most obviously wrong statement with the aura of infallibility.

I think this totally overblown role of science has, in part, to do with various philosophical misconceptions, or rather a refusal to even engage in any kind of reflection about the limits of science. To put it simply, human thought, and especially human values, are prior to empirical science.¹ This means we do have a right to counter “scientific” claims if they obviously run counter to our better judgement.

You might object that this opens the door to relativism, and you would have a point. But only if we assume that empirical science is the only gateway to truth, and that all thought is created equal, which it is obviously not. There are better and worse ways of thinking.

I know, this is a bitter pill to swallow for some. Wouldn’t it be easier to just let the “scientific facts” decide? While I don’t deny that these are important, I don’t think it is that simple, and we need to grapple with the fact that judgements often can only be evaluated by deep thought and intuition rather than facts and numbers alone.

Otherwise, we might be susceptible to having our basic humanity shredded by pretentious declarations based on a vast array of dogmatic presuppositions that are to be found, and criticized, not in the lab, but in the history of ideas.

Let us not forget that using science to argue against common sense has a long tradition.

Such arguments often take a form like this: “You thought you knew that this or that was true, but according to (new) science, it is entirely different, and you were just under a primitive illusion.”

Making such arguments is a great temptation for scientists and the science establishment. One reason is that they have a certain shock value, a certain “wow-factor,” and are therefore fascinating. They can get lots of publicity. Another reason is that they establish science as the ultimate judge as to what’s real and what isn’t, the ultimate authority not only with regard to a limited sphere of specialized empirical inquiry but to everything—human values, the validity of human thought, philosophical questions, and everyday life.

Examples abound. At various points, it was claimed that we are all determined by our skull shapes, by hormones, by selfish genes, by our upbringing, by our sex drive, by society, by our brain activity patterns. It was claimed we are all rational choosers acting out the invisible laws of game theory abstraction, or that history unfolds according to the laws of class struggle, or Darwinism.

We have been told that the universe is made of moving billiard balls, that brains are computers, that humanity progresses on a linear trajectory correlating with the degree it embraces rationalistic science. And of course, science, especially since the 1930s, has bombastically claimed that all spirituality is an illusion, that all there is is dead matter, that life is “nothing but” [insert latest overhyped fad], and so on.

Clearly, we have been primed for a long time to accept nonsense, sold as the ultimate truth, against our better judgement, if only it is peddled by people with titles.

It is in this light that we should look at current examples such as this milestone of human intellectual achievement:

It is also in this light that we should look at some of the politically contentious issues, such as Covid and Climate Change. This may give us a clue to the relationship between values and facts, common sense and science.

The Primacy of Values: Covid, Climate Change, and the Rest

The whole Covid discussion saw us bombarded with numbers, interpretations of numbers, interpretations of interpretations of numbers, statistics, definitions, alternative definitions, and a cacophony of carefully selected reality chunks.

It reminded me of what had been going on during World War I in Germany, as Sebastian Haffner, in his must-read book Defying Hitler, described so well: every day, he and his friends—they were school children at the time—gathered around the newspaper stand and endlessly discussed the numbers: how many German soldiers dead? How many enemy soldiers? Was that a tactical retreat? What does this manoeuvre mean for Germany’s glory? Of course, Germany was always about to win, one way or another.

People played number games at the time, and they could do that precisely because the war was far away, unreal for them. The home front was untouched, except for the propaganda war. They could happily suspend any form of grounded judgement and intuition, of asking questions about the bigger picture.

In a sense, we have all become school children playing number games these days. Seldom do we ask the bigger questions.

Here’s one. Imagine we were dealing with the Spanish Flu instead of Covid, or even the Black Death. Would you, in that situation, be in favor of an authoritarian, technocratic, all-out micromanagement of society? Or would you rather leave the management of the catastrophe to local communities, doctors, and families—so that they can use their good judgement and common sense to react to, and deal with, a crisis as it unfolds specifically in their unique situation?

Here’s another one. Shouldn’t individuals be allowed to make their own decisions, from the heroic to the cowardly, from the paranoid to the brazen? In their own individual circumstances?

Heck, isn’t that the classic Kantian justification of human rights, including the right to life, in the first place: namely man's status as a moral agent capable of giving himself moral principles and then acting them out? In other words, doesn’t the very idea of “saving lives” collapse if we treat humans as mere objects, as a mere means to an end, as robots incapable of moral insight? Once we go there, we might as well say: let’s let half of the population die to save the other half; it might even save the planet.

Speaking of saving the planet: assuming for a moment that man-made global warming is a thing and will have severe consequences, would you want an all-out technocratic control of the world if it could “mitigate the climate crisis”?

The alternative to that technocratic nightmare would be, of course, to let it be, watch closely, and then adapt to different circumstances if and when they come, to find common sense solutions as specific problems unfold. Crucially, we would have to rethink some of our presuppositions, change our perspective, our outlook, in the face of a diverse range of challenges. We might even grow in the process.

But, but… Are you telling me we should just wait and see!? I know, this sounds revolutionary these days. It also happens to be common sense.

Here’s another example: the post-9/11 madness at the airports. Clearly, this over-the-top security apparatus has no purpose whatsoever. The simple reason is, assuming there are evil terrorists out there, that terrorists gonna terrorist. If you block their entrance to airplanes, they will bomb a Christmas market; if you block the Christmas market, they will bomb a train; etc.

Common sense can figure this out in 10 seconds.

Nonetheless, air travel has become a mixture of bus travel and a prison visit. Would you rather continue playing this charade at the airports, even if the risks were non-negligible, or would you like to simply dismantle the whole thing and go back to the old days, when people miraculously survived without all of that? Not because you do any kind of risk analysis and statistical number games, but simply because you say: that is how life should be, period?

What these examples have in common is that we don’t need numbers, statistics, or scientific theories to figure them out. We just need values and principles. And these always come first.

Common sense can solve these kinds of “problems” in a heartbeat, if only we gave it a chance, and if only its signal weren’t so jammed by the onslaught of nonsense from the media and science establishment.

Of course, it can be useful to use data and scientific arguments to make our case, if only to break through to people who have handed over their common sense to “Science” and have lost their ability to listen to their gut feelings and intuition. They might need to hear those things to reclaim their sanity.

But at the end of the day, we don’t need science to figure out that technocratic over-control is bad.

We don’t need science to know that kids raised by single-parents are worse off than those raised by happily married couples.

We don’t need science to know that there are differences between men and women.

Once we make such things about “scientific evidence,” we have already given away our moral and intellectual authority, our common sense, our conscience. This makes us susceptible to science’s pretentious claims, including those that cannot be easily debunked “scientifically,” but only philosophically, morally, or even spiritually.

But What if Common Sense Is Wrong?

People might object that our common sense can be wrong at times, and therefore counter-intuitive claims by science need to be accepted.²

Yes, our initial assessment might be wrong: we know that we can be easily deceived, even by ourselves.

We might shy away from certain uncomfortable conclusions because they touch our most fundamental beliefs—what R. G. Collingwood called “absolute presuppositions.” These are often unconscious, which makes it even more difficult to see through them.

We might react emotionally to certain claims and dismiss them out of hand.

But this only shows that indeed, “scientific facts” are not all that matters here: we bring a whole lot to the table, too.

It is not so much that our common sense isn’t working when we deceive ourselves, it is that it is buried under a pile of emotional baggage, dogma, and sacred cows. There is a difference between genuine instinct, genuine gut feeling, and emotional reactions based on the drive to avoid the painful truth.

Finding the truth, then, is often a matter of rediscovering what we have known all along. As Iain McGilchrist put it:

An understanding can never be given to another; it has to be awoken within them, and so must be there, in latent form already.³

This again points to the fact that data and evidence are not the whole story: we often find arguments and certain views convincing because they seem to connect with our common sense, with what we have, deep down, suspected already. We “tune in” to an author’s or speaker’s inner world, and he or she tunes in to our inner world, and we find that we connect. We sense the sincerity, the genuine curiosity, the values, the honesty and depth of the arguments presented. Although it is a cliché, the idea that we “resonate” with certain information has its merit.

Others may resonate with different, opposing information, and may believe things that our own common sense rightfully flags as utter nonsense. This might be because they have buried their intuition to the point that it cannot be awoken, or because it isn’t there in “latent form already,” as McGilchrist expressed it, in the first place. Humans are different, after all. But this shouldn’t keep those of us who do possess this knowledge in latent form, who do have at least some access to genuine common sense and intuition, from standing by it and expressing it as coherently as possible.

In other words, while presenting evidence is important, there are other factors at play here that have to do with what we have in us already, and with our intuitive detection of sincerity, of “overall sense.”

Science is a great human endeavor, if done humbly and in the spirit of genuine curiosity and intellectual depth.⁴ But in this day and age, we desperately need to reclaim our sanity, our common sense, and defend ourselves a priori against sophists in white coats who are filling the void created by the nihilistic malaise and intellectual meltdown of our times. Otherwise, we risk becoming fair game for their shenanigans.

1. For a very useful discussion of the primacy of thought and value over empirical facts, see R. G. Collingwood’s Essay on Metaphysics as well as his An Autobiography.

2. A common example is that people believed the earth was flat at some point until science set them straight. While I don’t deny that sometimes evidence has shown common sense to be wrong, I think the flat-earth story is more complicated than what the official narrative has us believe (for example, it was known long before that the earth was round; the church’s position was more nuanced; it is debatable whether most people felt a strong common sense towards the flat-earth position at the time etc.). In fact, some of the “official story” of science’s heroic battle against the dark forces of superstition sounds much more like a creation myth than anything resembling actual history.

3. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things, Perspectiva Press, 2021, p. 606

4. I recommend reading some of the books and works the physicists in the first half of the 20th century have written (Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, Einstein etc.) to get a taste of the deep, humble philosophical reflections these giants of science had been engaged in all their lives. This makes it clear, once more, that real science depends not so much on some idealized version of some “scientific method,” but simply on truly great minds and souls who wanted to know.