Dean Wolfe Manders - The Hegemony of Common Sense: Wisdom and Mystification in Everyday Life

The Hegemony

of Common Sense

Dean Wolfe Manders

The Hegemony

of Common Sense

Wisdom and Mystification
in Everyday Life

Epilogue by
David Norman Smith

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016915516

2016 Looking Up Press
San Francisco
ISBN: 978-0692775936

Cover illustration & design by Kathryn Joyce Rodriguez, 2005, 2016

For Shirley and Aaron; my mother and father. They initially made me aware of common sense, and first gave me the opportunity of questioning it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank the late Ralph Miliband for his invaluable help and critique at all stages in the (1979) preparation of this work. Without his support, encouragement and friendship, this book would not have been written. Thanks go also to Charlotte Weissberg, a sociology professor of uncommon integrity and personal honor, whose honesty made possible my passage through graduate school.

I also want to thank David Norman Smith, my long-time friend, for his invaluable epilogue to the present work in particular, and his editorial and substantive contributions to the entire essay in general. A profound thank you goes also to Anatole Anton. Without Anatoles help and patience, this book would never have been published. Finally, deep thanks go to Kathryn Joyce Rodriguez; for her talent as the neo-surrealist artist who composed the Magrittesque cover of this book, and for her enduring friendship.

Excerpts from Antonio Gramscis Prison Notebooks (edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, 1971) are reprinted by permission of International Publishers, New York.

CONTENTS

Chapter 3. American Common Sense:
Lived Content and Context

PREFACE

A Note on Common Sense

This book was written neither to extol nor to disparage conventional wisdom or traditional radicalism. Rather, the second edition of The Hegemony of Common Sense remains true to its original intention; to posit the desperate need for an integrated mode of thought and action, a praxis, which is extremely rare: the power to think and act critically.

By this I do not mean what is traditionally called critical thinking in higher education, which is seldom more than argument analysis and a vague expression of hope for personal thoughtfulness. Given the stultifying sway of anti-intellectual, taken-for-granted assumptions, given the hegemony of uncritical common sense, the chance that ordinary thoughtfulness will fight free of capitalist culture is not good. In a less-than-critical world, authentic critical insight fights a constant uphill battle.

Hence, the counter-hegemonic taskin this volume, unearthing the seeds of critical insight within the mystifications of common senseis quite daunting. It cannot be achieved by rigid adherence to left-wing ideologies or by radical liberal guesswork. origins and elaboration in everyday-historical life.

Herbert Marcuses remarks, in 1960, remain apt to this day: people experiencea world in which the unreasonable becomes reasonable and, as such, determines the facts; in which unfreedom is the condition of freedom, and war the guarantor of peace.

This world contradicts itself. Common sense and science purge themselves from this contradiction; but [thinking critically] begins with the recognition that the facts do not correspond to the concepts imposed by common sense and scientific reasonin short, with the refusal to accept them. To the extent that these concepts disregard the fatal contradictions which make up reality, they abstract from the very process of reality.

The unrevised book, below, elaborates this perspective from the vantage point of the late 20th century. But these insights apply equally when we consider the global economic and ideological crisis that began in 2008. Suffice to say that for tens of millions of the displaced and dispossessed, the underemployed and underpaid, the turmoil, despair, and episodic anger of the crisis remain ongoingan albatross weighing upon popular will and hope. The Great Recession and the oft-lamented jobless recoverya new normal, a horizon of scaled-back global expectations unfamiliar since the Great Depression of the 1930sengulfs all but the one percent in a world of savage inequalities.

The study offered here is an exercise in critical paroemiologythat is, in the critique of proverbs and other popular sayings, in order to discern and distill their contradictory implications. For a study of this kind, the disturbing effects of the Great Recession offer fertile soil.

Expertly seeking to assuage mass tension and strife, capital infuses the cultural marketplace with slogans that it sells not only to sell products but to sell identities. Thanks to encompassing mass advertising campaigns, we are awash in mottoes, maxims, and catch phrasessome of which actually catch on, and many of which seek to co-opt underlying rebellious sentiments, thus removing them from the radical, critical realm of Marx and Gramsci and rendering them toothless. Microsoft insists that, to do great things, sometimes youve got to break the rules. Audi exhorts us to Challenge All Givens. Cadillac agrees, issuing a commandChallenge Your

These and other pithy corporate commands rely upon the praxismic zeitgeist for their emotive appeal. Both subtly and insidiously, these particles of conventional wisdommystified and mystifying, promising limitless but empty consumer freedomfragment and redirect emerging discontent into routine, harmless, atomized acts of consumption. Public resentment is exploited and subverted, diverted into channels which, after endlessly repeated admonitions and advertisements, are intimately, infinitely familiar. The corporate capture of rebellion is almost frictionless, so well known are its strictures. Manufactured ready-mades and hand-me-downs are available, effortlessly, to one and all.

Beneath the tranquilized surface, however, late capitalist society is rife with contradictions and dissolutions: Our rapidly collapsing environment, ever-advancing bureaucratization and privatization, commodified and depersonalized public and private life, smart social media and devices which, all too often, are occupied by Wall Street.

To return to Marcuses prescient analysis of what remains our dilemma: the power of [common sense] facts is an oppressive power; it is the power of man over man, appearing as objective and rational condition.

Against this appearance, [critical thinking] continues to protest in the name of truth. And in the name of fact: for it is the supreme and universal fact that the status quo perpetuates itself through the constant threat of atomic destruction, through the unprecedented waste of resources [and a coming total environmental collapse], through mental impoverishment, andlast but not leastthrough brute force. These are the unresolved contradictions. They define every single fact and every single event; they permeate the entire universe of discourse and action. Thus they define also the logic of things: that is, the mode of thought capable of piercing the ideology and of comprehending reality whole. No method can claim a monopoly of cognition, but no method seems authentic which does not recognize that these two propositions are meaningful descriptions of our situation: The whole is the truth, and the whole is false.

As Marx had explained long before, people make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under