Common sense and sense experience

The socially acceptable posture in life these days is perpetual waiting: waiting for the relevant studies to emerge before making a decision. The studies people love best are those that demonstrate how backward and wrong we are about everything. “You thought that this was a good way of losing weight, but this study shows that everything you thought you knew was wrong!”

Nothing is quite so insufferable as the inexperienced bourgeoisie quoting headlines about poorly conducted studies as proof of realities of which they know virtually nothing. The smugness with which such undeserved certainty is pronounced is almost cause for apoplexy. The feigned intellectual mastery brought by “evidence-based” “best practices” by which is meant collating endless studies to arrive at artificial opinions unrelated to us and our lived experience is laughable.

What is problematic about attempting to be as cerebral and detached from our decisions as possible? A lot, as it turns out, because we are embodied creatures. Being emotionally detached and seeing things as much as possible through the lens of rationality is desirable. However, if our decisions circle in the ether as disembodied abstractions, we’ll have a terrible time coming down to Earth when we implement the solution.

Additionally, the solutions we dream up may have little to do with the way we actually live our lives. It’s all well and good to commit to a ketogenic diet, a rigid sleep schedule, a counterintuitive home organization system, and scientifically well-spaced children. Trying to live the life of Dr. Spock is not a recipe for success or joy for most of us.

At the root of our obsession with statistics and studies might be cowardice, an unwillingness to take responsibility for the decisions we make. Outsourcing our thinking to graduate students fixating on the world’s perceived problems seems like a way of relying on “experts” to determine aspects of our lives that we don’t want to have to muddle through. The belief that we can avoid the muddling, outsource jobs we don’t like, and feel satisfied in a life we didn’t create is a strange one.

The more uncomfortable position, which seems closer to reality, is that we are fallible people. Though we are often misled, we can, in fact, rely on our sense experience to reveal natural and even supernatural truths. The process of discerning Truth through our limited and imperfect senses is an art; only through hard-won experience can we understand the intuitions we can trust versus the shaky instability of being an ordinary person. Unfortunately, these vital skills for living atrophy the more stock we put in someone else’s studies.

The inimitable Leila Lawler reflected on these subjects on her delightfully named “Happy Despite Them” blog. Recalling her mother’s reticence to accept shoe store X-ray machines, she wrote, “I learned from my mom that you have a right to your intuitions. You can evaluate claims, even if you are not an expert, because every claim, no matter how technical, nevertheless has to relate to reality, and everyone has a basic level of ability to test things against reality.”

There’s no reason we can’t keep studying things. There’s nothing inherently pernicious about tabulating who does what under which circumstances. It’s all about the weight we choose to lend to these conclusions. Whatever novel perspectives we gain from data analysis, the most meaningful information will be that which enhances our common sense and sense experience rather than throw it into question.