Uncommon sense

Son of God (Mark 1:1) 

Mark was written in Greek. We do not have the original, of course, but, unlike many ancient texts, we have lots of early copies. This means that we can be pretty sure of the words originally written. Every time you copy a text by hand you get errors but if you have enough copies you can filter those errors out. It's a detailed and meticulous process of comparison and elimination and it yields very reliable results.

Occasionally though something gets through. There are too many copies that agree with each other and disagree with the majority to rule out the alternative being the original one. In the New Testament this is quite rare because of the large number of early copies but the phrase 'Son of God' is a good example. Scholars love to speculate about why the variation was added at an early stage (or taken away) and why it persisted as a variant. It gives them a job and something to do, poor loves, but it is, frankly, glorified guesswork, at huge odds with the detailed science that produced the fact of its existence in the first place. This set me wondering about common sense. 

The problem with common sense, as some wag has pointed out, is that it's not very common. So what is it? Well, as far as I can tell, sometimes it's an accurate knowledge of how the world works, like our textual variation, and sometimes it's unreliable guesswork, like out scholarly speculators. And the problem is that the phrase gives you no clue as to which you are dealing with this time.

I hate to be alarmist in my musings, but I suspect the small group that decided to quietly push under the carpet Mr Smythe's predeliction for smacking boys who were under his care at Christian camps saw it as a common sense approach. At the time it may have looked that way to them. It may be that, as they saw it, the problem went away and the good work could carry on. Now it rightly looks absurdly uncaring towards his victims and clearly self-serving to the camps.  

So when I hear the phrase 'common sense' used to justify behaviour, or indeed encourage people in their decisions, as some of our leaders, both church and state, are doing, I want to run to the hills. It may be knowledge-based wise action or it may be foolish and dangerous nonsense. We just don't know which. 

So my suggestion is this. In small matters do whatever you think is right, because it doesn't matter. If you wish to bolster your confidence (or ego) by calling it common sense feel free. However, in matters of life and death, like dealing with COVID-19, use that thing called science. Find out the safe way to behave by looking at best practice. 

Now there's a phrase we could use: best practice. Then at least we could leave 'common sense' to being common even if there's still no way of telling if it's sense or not. But, never mind, you can't have everything.

For some a weed, but I think it's beautiful