What is a lack of common sense?

I’ve been watching Ken Burns’ Vietnam  War series, now that it’s reached a streaming service (and I am also still slowly crawling my way through the declassified Pentagon Papers). As I watched the series (and read the Papers), I was struck by many aspects of what I was seeing and reading. Ultimately, I will write about several (maybe many) of these, after I finish thinking about them. For the nonce, however, two incidents in Mr Burns series are:

• US forces physically destroyed a village in the 60s to “save it”, and
• Viet Minh forces – in the late 40s - killed people on that basis that they thought it was “better an innocent dies than one guilty [of association with colonialism /capitalism etc] person goes free” – in other words, killing the members of a society in order to “save” that society . . .

It is easy to respond to the first incident as it being a lack of common sense, and the second (although I know some hardline right wingers who would think it is fine . . . right up until someone close to them became a victim of it) is similarly lacking in, if not common sense, at least some sort of balanced perspective.

Is it lack of common sense, though?

Common sense is difficult to define (other than, as the joke goes, the rarest of senses). I’ve thought about this, and – in brief, as otherwise I won’t get any of this written down – now I am going to suggest that the best description of the flaws in the two episodes above is “lack or loss of humanity”.

In such situations, our human core should be offended to the extent that we say “hey, this isn’t right – I can’t explain why, but I know it isn’t right”.

If we can’t get to that thought, or we allow the thought to be suppressed (whether through the brainwashing of the Viet Minh version of “Marxism” or the fraught trials of military training), then we open ourselves to the “the spreading fungus of thoughtless evil” (Hannah Arendt, cited by Liam McLoughlin here; see also my post here)
 – and that leads to the cultist thoughts and deeds of both violent ideologies and military massacres (the interviews about My Lai in the series are particularly noteworthy) . . .
and . . . evil politics . . . the Newtonian worldview . . . devastatingly damaging collective unthinkingness . . . neoliberalism and the many problems that leads to (including union breaking). . . the crime of gossip . . . and the lack of a Will to Intervene that allows genocides and so-called “ethnic cleansing” to occur (yes, I consider all those to be comparable).

I’ve been noticing more being written on being moral: provided the “morality” is what I term BPM, that is good.

And that cautionary note raises a problem with my suggestion, which is that it can be difficult to discern between humanity and inculcated mores (such as homophobia).

Something to think about.