Eichenberger: Common Sense
by Dan Eichenberger M.D.
The words “common sense” and “nonsense” are used as weapons in politics today. Each side claims to own reality. Conservatives talk about “obvious truths.” The Left often calls those claims ignorance or cruelty. To understand why these words carry force, and why many policies feel detached from the real world, it helps to recover their original meaning and their link to basic Christian wisdom.
“Common sense” entered English in the late 1300s. It described the mental ability that takes information from the five senses and forms a clear picture of reality. It came from Aristotle and the Latin sensus communis. By the early 1700s, it meant the practical judgment ordinary people share. Philosophers took it seriously. Descartes said everyone has good sense, but few use it well. Scottish thinkers defended it against extreme skepticism. Thomas Reid argued some truths are so basic they need no complicated proof. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense made the term political, insisting independence from Britain was obvious to any reasonable person.
“Nonsense” appeared in the early 1600s as a word for ideas that lack meaning or sound absurd. It never gained a positive philosophical meaning. It remained a way to reject foolish thinking.
Scripture adds a moral dimension. Proverbs contrasts wisdom with folly. Wisdom includes caution, attentiveness and the ability to live in the real world without self-destruction. Folly is the refusal to face consequences or learn from past mistakes. Proverbs warns, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” Biblical wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord because human reason easily deceives itself. This helps explain why certain modern policies of the Left often get labeled nonsense: they contradict clear patterns in biology, economics, human behavior, and history.
One example is the rapid medicalization of gender-distressed minors. The 2024 Cass Review found that studies supporting puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors are “remarkably weak,” with no high-quality evidence of reliable long-term mental-health benefits. European countries that once led in this care have restricted these interventions because of risks to fertility, bone density, and brain development. Treating sex as infinitely malleable ignores biological reality and abandons the precautionary principle once standard in pediatric medicine. The Left continues to promote this approach.
Immigration, housing and criminal justice show similar patterns. Estimates using National Academies of Sciences methods place the lifetime net fiscal cost of an illegal immigrant at roughly $68,000 after taxes. Large-scale illegal alien releases have strained housing, schools, and emergency services. Rent-control expansions have reduced rental supply and slowed new construction. “Housing First” experiments for homeless individuals without treatment requirements have not reversed the problem in major cities despite billions spent. Chronic homelessness remains strongly tied to untreated mental illness and addiction.
Policing debates reflect the same blindness to incentives. The “defund the police” and reduced-enforcement movements after 2020 coincided with homicide spikes in many cities. Crime clearance rates fell, and visible disorder rose until some funding returned. Assuming lower enforcement would improve safety without trade-offs ignored decades of deterrence research. The Left still advances versions of this idea.
Election-integrity debates follow the pattern. Opposition to voter-ID requirements continues even though rigorous studies, including large NBER analyses, find no significant negative effect on registration or turnout, including among minority voters. Polls show broad public support. Basic verification routines in banking, alcohol and gun purchases or air travel are treated as uniquely suspicious in voting. People reasonably ask why.
Education and cultural policy reveal the same tension. Resistance to school-choice programs treats competition as a threat, even though many studies show benefits for low-income and minority students. Ideological content on gender and race has expanded in K–12 with limited parental opt-out, despite weak evidence of academic gain and growing public pushback. The system protects institutional monopoly while resisting reforms that could help the students most often invoked in progressive rhetoric.
Economic and healthcare proposals show parallel disconnects. Wealth-redistribution schemes and expansive welfare repeatedly produce reduced labor supply and poverty traps from benefit phase-outs. Single-payer healthcare promises universal coverage but underestimates rationing and long waits already seen in those systems. It is not possible to deliver the care Americans expect under pure single-payer. The United States continues to lead in new therapies because market incentives reward innovation.
These examples point to a wider habit on today’s Left: putting big system-wide theories and the goal of changing people’s hearts ahead of what the actual results show. When evidence appears about biological limits, how people respond to incentives, the real money costs or natural differences among people, it is often dismissed as prejudice instead of facts that should change the plan. As a result, the gap between good intentions and real-world outcomes keeps getting bigger.
Christian wisdom does not demand political uniformity. It demands humility before reality and a refusal to repeat patterns already shown to harm the vulnerable. Prudence weighs access against quality, compassion against accountability, equality under the law against engineered group outcomes, and merit against forced equity. Every tradition has insights and blind spots. The task is not to declare one side permanently wise and the other permanently foolish, but to recover the older meaning of common sense: the disciplined habit of testing claims against the world as it actually is.
When that habit erodes, nonsense fills the vacuum. The cost appears in irreversible medical interventions for minors on weak evidence, cities where disorder is normalized, markets that punish work, schools that resist proven reforms and institutions that lose public trust. Recovering common sense begins with the willingness to admit that some policies have failed their own stated purposes yet continue. That willingness is not cruelty. It is the beginning of prudence.
Dan Eichenberger, M.D., M.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, is an Indiana native with 30 years experience as a primary care physician, physician executive and healthcare consultant. He is the recipient of the Indiana University Southeast Chancellors Medallion.
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