Common sense seems like a vague concept that people slap on to their areas of limited knowledge and bias. I often see it displayed without much basis in empirical knowledge or awareness that the people one is talking with have their own definition of common sense that differs from yours.
So taxing the rich is not a good policy and we shouldn't advocate for policies that ask them to pay their share for government services? And when someone asks my friend Pradeep "where are you from?" and Pradeep replies, "Kansas City," and then they say, "But where are you REALLY from?" and then someone explains how that might be offensive (which it is) they are just being a nuisance lecturing on micro-aggression and should shut up and stick to your parameters of "common sense"? Just seeking to clarify what it's okay to be progressive about, so I don't stray from common sense and cause conservatives to roll up into a fetal ball.
Well up to a point. I do think, actually, that some of the expert-sounding labelling that goes on is counterproductive. Your “ micro-aggression” example is a case in point. Who the fuck knows, on the proverbial Clapham omnibus, what micro-aggression is? “Cultural appropriation” is another one. There can be a tendency to lay a sort of minefield for ordinary people, with normal areas of ignorance and no ill intention, to stumble into and blow themselves up.
Asking where you “are really from” is not usually an act of aggression. All it is is a clumsy and thoughtless assumption that a person is a 1st generation immigrant, when they may well not be. Or it may be an expression of the innocent and reasonable idea that people have ancestry they take pride in. ( I was born in Scotland , my father was born in China and my mother in India, but I’m “really” English.) Misclassifying innocence, or clumsiness and ignorance as “aggression” will be resented by the people accused of it.
Ditto “cultural appropriation”: we all, I hope, learn and copy from cultures other than our own all the time. The implication that we should each stick to our own cultural silo (and who, pray, decides which one we are deemed to belong to?) strikes me as atrocious. Am I supposed to seek permission from the Indian High Commission before buying a Nehru jacket?
More generally the tendency to lecture everyone at every turn on how they, or their ancestors, have fallen short morally is bound to get their goat eventually. That’s what makes them vote Trump, or Farage. People who consider themselves “progressive” or, in US-speak “liberal”, need to avoid the temptation of moralising or using pejorative language. None of us is perfect, after all, and we all have our blind spots.
Walz by the way would never use such terms, I am sure, and that’s to his credit.
