Joel  00:04

On January 7, 2025, a series of devastating wildfires began in the Santa Monica Mountains, quickly sweeping through huge swaths of Los Angeles, burning countless homes and killing 29 people. By the time the fires were contained, more than 40,000 acres had been destroyed. 

 

Barbara Leckie  00:27

What happened in Los Angeles was violent and it was devastating. It was the latest in a growing number of catastrophic weather events that have caused immense destruction and upended lives. This is unlikely to change anytime soon.

 

Joel  00:52

I'm Joel Westheimer. And I'm Barbara Leckie. And this is Commons Sense produced by Mary Stinson, a series where we ask how common sense relates to the climate crisis.

 

Barbara Leckie  01:09

In this podcast, we're going to tell a story about something most listeners know a lot about, and something else that most listeners know very little about.

 

Joel  01:17

What people know a lot about is what counts as common sense. If we asked you, you could probably tell us.

 

Barbara Leckie  01:23

What people don't know as much about is the commons. In fact, when we asked people, there was a huge range of responses. 

 

Speaker 1  01:31

I’m not sure. I don’t know. 

 

Speaker 2

Like a collective place, I guess, I don’t know, maybe.  

 

Speaker 3

Wow, the Commons is, I guess those areas that are open to everyone. 

 

Speaker 4

 

This feels like a trick question to be honest.

 

Joel  01:51

We're going to be talking a lot about the commons, but for now, let's just say– and these ideas will be debated– that the commons includes the physical, natural, and cultural resources we all share, like the land, water and air, public education and public transit, shared conversations and collective action.

 

Barbara Leckie  02:09

Why are we bringing together common sense in the commons? Because based on our interviews for this podcast, it is precisely by working together and sharing common resources that we can most effectively address the climate crisis.

 

Bill Ayers  02:25

Every society struggles with the question of me versus the question of we, but in reality, of course, there is no me without we. We need to interrupt that narrative, and we need to challenge it with the social and the collective and the commons.

 

Stephanie LeMenager  02:39

I do think that considering ourselves as a collective is the only way forward in a climate change future. 

 

Larry Glickman  02:51

We've had 4, 5, 6, 7 decades of ideological warfare against the idea that there is a commons, that public goods are a valuable thing, and the only way that I see us surviving is if we win that argument.

 

Joel  03:04

You may have guessed it. That's why this podcast is called Commons Sense, that’s Commons with an S. For this first episode, let's start at the beginning with a simple question, what actually counts as common sense?

 

Barbara Leckie  03:19

It's a phrase that gets thrown around constantly by politicians, pundits, and even your neighbor at the grocery store.

 

Barbara and Joel 03:26

It's common sense. Common sense. Common sense. 

 

Joel  03:29

Exactly. It often sounds like this is obvious. This is the only way. There are no alternative ways to think about things, and if there are, they're either stupid, naive or dangerous. 

 

Max Liboiron  03:39

The things that seem so normal that you don't have to think about them. 

 

Joel  03:43

Common sense works best when it isn't questioned. In this episode, we've decided to question it.

 

Barbara Leckie  03:50

What if the ideas that we're told are self-evident, aren't self-evident at all? What if it's time to unsettle them? What if there are other ways to think about common sense?

 

Carolyn Lesjak  04:00

I think of common sense as the given, and the very thing that needs to be upended and unsettled.

 

Larry Glickman 2  04:08

Common sense, like a lot of terms, is what philosophers call essentially contested.

 

Joel  04:13

In other words, we're going to pull apart how common sense gets shaped and who gets to define it.

 

Barbara  04:18

And we're asking, is it possible to change what counts as common sense. We'll talk about neoliberal logic, climate narratives, and how to change what seems impossible to change. 

 

Joel  04:29

And we'll start right there with a phrase most of us have heard 100 times. It's just common sense.

 

Joel  04:44

Let's start with Carolyn Lesjak, who's from Simon Fraser University. We're going to hear a part of that interview where she defines common sense. But before we do that, I just wanted to ask you about a couple of things, if that's okay. One is, I know she references Antonio Gramsci, who uses the word hegemony. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

 

Barbara Leckie  05:04

Gramsci is an Italian philosopher writing in the early 20th century, and he revises the understanding of hegemony. It's been used for a long time before he rethinks it, to capture the idea of power that's exercised, not only by force, or not even by force at all, but by culture, ideas, communication. And that asks people to consent to it, to agree to it, instead of having it imposed on them, we all participate in it. And that's a rough sense of how he understands hegemony. 

 

Joel  05:35

Yeah, I can see how that's going to connect to common sense, because that's the way we commonly think about things. Okay, one other question, she also uses the word doxa, which is a word that before we did this podcast, I didn't know. So, can you tell us a little bit about doxa? 

 

Barbara Leckie  05:52

Sure, I'd be happy to. But first, I should note that you're right, the hegemony does connect with common sense, and I wouldn't want to not note that Gramsci talks a lot about common sense as well. But onto doxa. I think lots of people are unfamiliar with the term, it doesn't come up very often in ordinary conversation. But it means opinion, what everybody knows, what doesn't need to be explained or defined.

 

Joel  06:15

Is it the same root of the word that we hear in, for example, Orthodox?

 

Barbara Leckie  06:18

Or heterodox? Yeah, it's the exact same root, and it's a word, doxa, that will come up a lot in this podcast.

 

Joel  06:24

Well let's listen to Carolyn's understanding of common sense. 

 

Carolyn Lesjak  06:28

I think I here am very much in line with, kind of, Gramscian understanding of it as the universal or collective language of thought. Essentially what gets established as common sense or the doxa of a society, such that change literally requires a new common sense to come into being. I think of common sense as the given and the very thing that needs to be upended and unsettled. And again, because of the sort of ways in which that neoliberal viewpoint and language has just pervaded every register of social and political life that it's an enormous task to think about how to do that and how to unsettle what people perceive of as common sense.

 

Joel  07:41

That was Carolyn Lesjak from Simon Fraser University. Next, we're going to listen to a longer clip from our interview with Imre Szeman from the University of Toronto.

 

Barbara Leckie  07:50

And Imre’s written a lot about the idea of common sense, and it's really shaped a lot of our thinking on the topic. In fact, since we did the interview with Imre, he's come out with a new book, Futures of the Sun, that's all about common sense. It's great. I really recommend it.

 

Joel  08:06

And he talks about common sense as a political category, right?

 

Barbara Leckie  08:09

Right. And the idea of common sense as political might surprise people, because we tend to think of common sense as apolitical, as enduring over time, and as obvious. But Imre gives us an insight into how it actually is political. 

 

Joel  08:23

Okay, and he's also going to talk about myth and everyday things. Is that right?

 

Barbara Leckie  08:27

I’m glad you ask about that, because when we were just talking about hegemony, and Gramsci, and Carolyn's comments, myth works in a similar way and chimes again with how we're thinking about common sense– gives it a different inflection that will be helpful as we continue to listen.

 

Joel  08:42

Interesting, great. Okay, here's Imre. 

 

Imre Szeman  08:48

Common sense is the most political of all categories. It's a variant of the center. It's supposed to be this base that is completely free of political determinations, and then it has all kinds of legitimacy as a result. So, you can't question common sense, supposedly. It's something that emerges anytime there's actually, like a lot of contestation. It's outside of political determination, it's maybe it's a material reality, it's given by the nature of things. And that's a really, really powerful claim to make, right? It's made over and over again, right? It's the ultimate way of shutting down politics. I also think, though, that it's, as a result of how powerful it is, it's something that I would love to see those who want a different version of common sense take up more seriously as a space of politics that they should be trying to occupy. And I think that's something that is not happening, and I think that's a mistake, and we can maybe talk about that along the way, like quite explicitly if we have different views about the common sense that are being offered right now or that are being insisted upon, we need to have our own set of ideas which we then insist upon is common sense.

 

Barbara Leckie  10:02

Going back to the point you introduced already, really interestingly and provocatively, of how we address that. Do you want to expand at all on how one can move from one idea of common sense to another that challenges that idea of common sense?

 

Imre Szeman  10:21

I think in some ways it's to assert. So, let me explain what I mean by this. I'm going to appeal to a text that I use a lot, and also then talk about my own experience. So, the text is Roland Barthes book Mythologies, and it's “Myth Today,” which is the section that I like so much. It's at the end of that book Mythologies. It's almost like a standalone essay. Now, Barthes's own politics are confusing, and I wouldn't necessarily want to be with him at a rally or something, but one of the things I think he really talks about are the limits of what he calls left wing myth. He was looking at what the right does well. So, the right has ideas, maybe what he means by myth is common sense. They have clear ideas about what marriage should be like, what the home should be like, what the law should be, what you should be like to be a good person. And all these are very much–the articulation of these are tactics. They have no real content. They're an utter fiction. So that's clear. When they're a fiction, it doesn't mean that they don't work. It doesn't mean that they aren't elaborated in order to pick up on fears that people might have, or some kinds of things they might not understand that well. It's this kind of calling into existence that I suppose the classic description of ideology would have. 

 

Now I lay all that out because what Barthes says about the left is in this context, that there's no left-wing myth, or very little. It doesn't have the same kind of set of myths across, I think the way he describes it is kind of across the field of a surface of insignificant ideology, he says. So all of these places, like how you're supposed to raise your kids, what a meal is supposed to be like, I mean really banal things honestly, like how you're supposed to set up your cutlery around a dish for a dinner party. Why you should even have a dinner party? The left doesn't have a set of codes like this that it could introduce as a separate kind of quotidian givenness that is amazingly powerful politically. What it does instead, what a lot of its politics are, what I think, for instance, you and I share, perhaps, as academics, is we point out over and over again that the right, all those things are just fictions. And that has a kind of a power, but we don't give anything as a substitute. We might give something that is elaborated in complex terms. That might be something like saying, well look at this terrible system of capitalism. We don't do a very good job of articulating something that could stand in its place that has that same density of relationships. So, I can explain to you over and over again about why I think capitalism is fundamentally exploitative, it's in the nature of the thing, that doesn't work very, very well on my neighbor, even if my neighbor and I share basically the same kind of political ideas, the neighbor is very committed to his common sense at the same time, because it's scary without some kind of sets of commitments that might be different. 

 

The reason that Barthes came back to me was when I ran for election in 2019 representing the Green Party, and I was also at that time, the Shadow Minister for Environment and Climate Change in the Green Party. I had thought, still, despite all of my studying and so on, that it was about learned discussion. You're going to convince somebody at debates, you're interviewed by radio stations or by newspapers, and you change somebody through those ideas. What I learned very quickly from my opponents, especially the Conservative Party opponent, is that you don't have to provide any content, and that the mistake was to provide the content as opposed to provide a vision. So, you know, one of my colleagues, when they were really troubled by something that happened to them on the campaign trail, they would retreat to their basement and they would do 15 minute long YouTube videos where they outlined how their opponent was wrong on a whiteboard. And I would have to tell her that, first of all, nobody watches a YouTube video for that long, and also that you are doing the wrong kind of work. So I was really trying to think through, like, what would I offer that would be a kind of a myth of the kind I'm describing. So it's a myth. It's an invention, but an invention doesn't mean it doesn't have work, doesn't do work. 

 

Common sense is, as I said before, as I think you agree, it's a meaningless concept in some ways. It points to a strategy. It points to a desire. How does one use it as a strategy? How does one use it as a desire? To get across and to make legitimate your positions versus others? And it's especially difficult if you're doing it in relationship to a status quo that has this depth of common senseness, you know, from the get-go. So, you and I can list all of them. They're very hard to unnerve. And it can be everything from the family in its current structure, and there's an endless insistence on that and re-insistence on that. You know, I won't go on and on, but if you want, we can list all of the things that make up this kind of level of the center of the givenness of what it is that it's hard to shake.

 

Joel  16:01

So, Imre notes that it's kind of hard to get out from under common sense, because it's the dominant knowledge system. It's hard to step away from it. 

 

Barbara 

Yeah, it's “hard to shake.” 

 

Joel

And he also says that the political right seems better than the left at creating myths that become common sense. Like the right is good at communicating common sense through these universal practices, like around food or dinner parties, and that the left doesn't really have that so much. He called it the quotidian givenness of life. And I love that phrase, quotidian givenness.

 

Barbara Leckie  16:34

Yeah, I love that phrase too. And that strikes me as right, that there's not a common set of practices on the left that makes the left, as a myth, cohere. And there aren't a common set of practices that embodies the thinking of the left. 

 

Joel  16:47

Yeah, like maybe potlucks or something like that?

 

Barbara Leckie  16:51

Right. Ursula Franklin actually refers to the potluck as an example of a mode of dinner, a practice of having a dinner party that that corresponds to lefty values. One thing that's interesting is our sound producer was pointing out that the left tends to accommodate more perspectives, and when you accommodate more perspectives, it's harder to have the myth cohere.

 

Joel  17:20

Next, we're going to be listening to the scientist Max Liboiron, a Professor of Geography at Memorial University in Newfoundland. Their book, Pollution is Colonialism has really helped us think about many of the ideas we're discussing here. In our interview, Max talks about how it's hard to move out of dominant knowledge systems, and in fact, it's also difficult to bridge them with any other way of seeing things right?

 

Barbara Leckie  17:42

And Max makes the point that dominant knowledge systems are also paradigms, called paradigms, and they're drawing on Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And the point that Kuhn raises about how paradigms work and how when they change, so too does what counts as knowledge, and so too does what we're calling here the dominant knowledge system. By this point in our conversation, you could probably hear a number of different terms that are meaning a similar thing. So, we have, dominant knowledge system, doxa, hegemony, myth, paradigm, and common sense, and they're all coming together.

 

Joel  18:19

This is great. We're accumulating a lexicon for the podcast. Yeah, all right, let's listen to Max.

 

Max Liboiron  18:26

Because of the type of work I do, which is trying to bridge knowledge paradigms, I understand common sense as the dominant knowledge system. So, the premises, the automatic next thought, the things that seem so normal and that you don't have to think about them– those come out of a dominant knowledge paradigm. And the problem with that is that people can do things like, call me a pioneer, and I'm like, what the actual F is that? You can't call an Indigenous person a pioneer and think that, so it doesn't even occur to people that pioneers were a primary form of, like, tactic of genocide, indigenous genocide, and therefore not an inherently good thing, and something you should never call an Indigenous person. And that's what common sense is. It is not about someone being a jerk. It's about that person being in the dominant knowledge paradigm, and so inheriting all of this stuff. 

 

And so, what I work on is, especially as a scientist, is trying to trying to navigate competing dominant knowledge systems, competing common senses. As a Western trained scientist in Indigenous lands, doing science, dominant science, with Indigenous researchers who often aren't scientists. And that is some tricky stuff, and I make so many mistakes, mostly because—and this goes back to like Thomas Kuhn and ideas of paradigms—you actually can't do logic across them. What makes sense, what seems true and truthy, what makes an argument valid, are actually fundamentally different in those spaces, and so you don't ever actually bridge them or integrate them. You can only sort of slap them next to each other and, like, maybe shift within them. But they don't, they don't integrate. And that's really tricky as someone who works in the knowledge sphere like a scientist.

 

Barbara Leckie  20:15

I love the way you go through land, nature, resource, oh, there's another one, and property in terms of what makes sense, and using dominant models, and then discussing the way that you want us to make sense of them.

 

Joel  20:34

The music you hear in this podcast was composed and performed by award winning musician and educator Jesse Stewart. You can find out more about Jesse's music by visiting our website, commonspodcast.com.

 

Max Liboiron  20:51

I think what's important when I critique common sense is like your baggage, your political baggage, is that common sense and therefore your dominant knowledge paradigm is not inherently bad, right? Like Newtonian versus Einsteinian physics, you know, one fits the world's better, but it's not like Newtonian physics is inherently bad or sinister or evil or stupid, or, you know, whatever. But it can also be the American Left and Right. It can be white feminism versus black feminism. It can be dominant science versus Inuit Knowledge Systems, both trying to deal with ice. Neither one of them is inherently bad, but the relations between them can be, can cause violence or not. So sometimes people feel guilt, like, appeal to the commons, I'm like stolen land, people automatically feel guilt. You shouldn't feel guilty for being in the dominant knowledge system. It's not like you have an active choice to be there. You can start exercising choices to broaden that and sort of interrupt the seamlessness of that, which is the condition that you can then, like, move into other paradigms, maybe, or just recognize them. But no one should feel bad for like speaking English in a country where English is the dominant language, for instance. Whether or not you learn Spanish, whether or not you learn Michif or Inuktitut, that is up to you, but the fact that you only know English right now is not actually because you're a jerk. It's because of the system. 

 

Barbara Leckie  22:12

That was Max Liboiron. Max gives us a window into how common sense relates to their work and science, and reminds us of the power of systems to inform and shape how we understand the world. And it's a nice contrast, I think, taking the scientific perspective and then thinking about Imre’s comments and observations in relation to politics, and his presentation of a political platform in the context of common sense. And we see these different tugs on what they can and can't say.

 

Joel  22:40

Yeah, that does contrast nicely. And Max also brings Indigenous perspectives to the conversation. 

 

Barbara Leckie  22:46

Yeah, both in relation to common sense and how Indigenous perspectives relate to science and the idea of paradigms. We'll be returning to these ideas throughout the podcast. Our next guest is Larry Glickman, Professor of History at Cornell University. Larry's written a lot of books, including Free Enterprise: An American History, and in that book, he gives us some sense of the 20th-century history of common sense. Joel, I noticed in this interview that you and Larry talk about politics a lot. 

 

Joel  23:13

Well, I was talking to Larry in January of 2025 just after Trump's inauguration, so it would have been hard to stay away from politics. But there is something political that, of course, runs through all of this and runs through Larry's comments. He talks about common sense as the way things are like it's determined by nature or by god, you know, there's no choice about it. And when you say it's just common sense, it's like the air we breathe and that, of course, might dictate how things are, but it precludes other options for how things could be. That theme really runs through what Larry and I talked about. Politicians, especially politicians on the right, I think, use common sense to do political work. When they say it's just common sense, they're eliminating any other options for the way things could be. 

 

Barbara Leckie  23:57

And those comments remind me of Imre’s point that common sense is the most political of categories, and you also introduce a really important distinction here between common sense, naming common sense and not naming it. So common sense typically works when it's tacit or unnamed, as you note, and works by not referring to it. But politicians sometimes will use it to flag something unnamed that they know everybody understands by saying it's just common sense, and that does a certain amount of political work for them that's worth noting and trying to understand what's happening when it happens. 

 

Joel

Yeah, that's right. 

 

Barbara

The two of you also talk about the free market economy, and this seems like an important piece of what Larry wants us to understand. 

 

Joel  24:41

Yeah. Well, this is classic neoliberalism. Free markets for some time now, are most often thought about as just common sense. That's the way to solve all our problems, right? Is through the free market. It's what counts as common sense, and most importantly, it's often unspoken.

 

Barbara Leckie  24:57

Yeah, once again, it's the tacit, it's the unnamed. Okay well, let's listen to Larry.

 

Larry Glickman  25:02

I mean, I think common sense, like a lot of terms, is what philosophers call essentially contested. In other words, you know, it's always going to have multiple meanings, but it is striking in the United States, at least, how I think it's been largely associated with conservativism, and I think there's a couple of reasons for that. Partly, it's what you said initially, which is that if you connect what is natural, what is sort of given by nature or by god, as the way things ought to be, and you take certain arrangements, either economic or racial, there's a sense of what is natural and what is artificial. And what is natural is associated with the masses, with the people. What is artificial is associated with elitism, with bureaucrats, with people who are trying to change things that really oughtn't or can't be changed very easily. And so, you could see how that would tie into a kind of conservativism, because the idea of changing or altering something that is natural seems dangerous to a lot of people. 

 

Of course, one of the ironies is that a lot of what is taken to be common sense conservativism is not natural. It's obviously constructed and political, like everything else in the world, and often, you know, involves quite radical remakings of our communities, the way we relate to each other, our economic system and so forth. So, it's kind of a backdoor way of claiming a sort of historical lineage and a not radical, but sort of evolutionary path to the best way of organizing society. You know, it is used by the left sometimes, but I think far less effectively. In fact, I remember a couple of years ago, you may remember this too, but whenever anyone would talk about gun control, they would say common sense gun control. 

 

I remember when Twitter was still a thing, I remember tweeting like, let's stop saying common sense gun control, let's just say gun control, because common sense kind of seems like it's apologetic when people in the progressive world do it. And so you could see how it aligns with a particular kind of conservativism that is really dominated today, which speaks in the name of anti-elitist, anti-expertise, and kind of in the voice of the people, even though you've got people like Elon Musk claiming to be, you know, represent the mantle of common sense, or Trump common sense populism, which, you know, in my view, they don't represent that at all. But that's what it's come to stand in for. So, you know, I think in a culture that suspects intellectuals, there's not a lot of trust in government and so forth, you could see how this kind of discourse could be very powerful if you can claim the mantle of common sense. In that sense, you can win a lot of political, at least rhetorical battles I think. 

 

Joel  28:01

Yeah, so, the current conservative use of common sense. Yesterday, Trump used the term common sense. 

 

Larry  28:08

Did he? Do you remember the context? 

 

Joel  28:11

It was, it was the context of the trade. How we're, the U.S. is getting a raw deal, you know? And it's just common sense that we act on it. And then, we in Canada, we have Pierre Poilievre, who uses the same thing. He uses the term common sense. So, yeah.

 

Larry  28:27

Interesting, yeah. One of the things I noted in my free enterprise book, and this is super Trumpian, is that there was a tweet from Trump, I forget, I think, when he was running for president the first time, where he called himself a high IQ person with common sense, and that's kind of classic, because normally, if you're claiming common sense, you're not going to show off about how smart you are, but sort of how ordinary you are. But Trump manages to pull off the kind of what you might say, the anti-elite elitism. And I don't know what this Canadian politician does, but that's what Trump seems to have been successful in doing. And obviously what he's doing is very radical of unwinding in international political order that's been in place since World War Two. So, there's nothing, you know, inherently common sense. I mean, you might say, let's blow up the world economic order for some reason, but probably that reason wouldn't be that it's common sense.

 

Joel  29:22

I mean, and we're living through a time, I mean, Trump in particular, where this, there's sort of redefining of common sense, like in, in real time, right? In, in all kinds of ways. 

 

Larry  29:36

I think that's absolutely key, Joel. The real time thing, because, again, this gets at the kind of tension in common sense which is supposed to be, I mean, theoretically, you shouldn't have common sense today that you didn't have yesterday, right? That's not common sense, that's something else. That's, you know, that's maybe the scientific method, where some experiment shows something different than what we all thought. But that's not, you know, scientists don't usually talk about common sense in that sense. It's really people who are invoking a kind of traditional, again, evolutionary belief in how societies and politics develop. But I hesitate to say this is brand new, because historians will always say there's, for a precedence, but a combination of social media, the internet, all that mean that, you know, it is very, I mean, we've seen very rapid overturning of, you know, kind of norms and beliefs that most of us thought were sort of embedded, and how easy it is to just say, no, you know. That's what Trump's genius is, I think, is to just assume that, I mean, not assume that people will automatically revolt when he declares a new common sense, but a lot of people will go along with it. And, you know, I think that gets into complicated questions about media experiences that people have and all that. But I think that is, I mean, I guess maybe for the left and the right at the revolutionary edges of both, this is a very exciting development, because it means that, you know, people might think something totally different tomorrow and revolutionary transformation is possible. But it's also a bit scary, I guess, for people like me, who are kind of in the liberal left, the idea that you know, that we could be saying, you know, why shouldn't, 

 

I think I mentioned this in a text train we were on where I was watching CNN at the gym last week, and they had their pollster on, and the whole proposition was, should America take Greenland? And they had their pollster going through the data as if he was discussing some horse race political campaign. There was no attempt to say, what the hell like? What is this like? This is just crazy that Trump is proposing. Instead, it was like Trump has put this on the table, and now our only job is to see how Americans are reacting to it, not to kind of put it in the context of an imperial history, or a history of Trump dissing our allies and giving succor to our enemies. And I was thinking, this is how it happens, CNN, you know, their pollster who last month was talking about elections, is this month, and he was saying, like, well, there's not a lot of American support for it. But I kind of feel like that was besides the point. The point was he was taking it as a serious story, and I could see him next week coming back on and say, whoa, 40 more percent of Americans are on board with this. And so it kind of takes out all ethical questions and puts it in the, you know, the court of public opinion, in a way that, I mean, we all respect democracy, and think it's obviously very important principle, but the way in which these seemingly radical unAmerican, or at least, you know, a lot of us would like to think unAmerican ideas can quickly take off and become common sense, super frightening.

 

Barbara  32:59

That was Larry Glickman. I love the way he refers to revolutionary transformation as possible, and that feels really inspiring to me. 

 

Joel  33:09

Well who doesn't love revolutionary transformation. 

 

Barbara  33:17

Especially in this moment. But I was also struck by super frightening in the context of where we are with common sense today. And it makes me think back to the beginning of this episode, and a question we asked: is it possible to change what counts as common sense and how to change what seems impossible to change? And these are ideas, I think, are a nice segue to the next episode. Maybe you could talk a bit about that, Joel. 

 

Joel  33:36

In the next episode, we're going to talk about how common sense can be changed. But it's hard, and today it seems even harder, given where we are, both here in Canada and, of course, especially in the United States, but we do know that it can be changed, and that's the good news. We're going to hear from some people who think and write about and take action to shift what's considered common sense. So, join us in episode two of our podcast, Commons Sense. That's Commons with an S.

 

Astra Taylor  34:10

I see common sense as something that is actually in motion.

 

Stephanie LeMenager 4  34:15

We're at a point where coming together, even across profound historical differences and positionalities, I think is almost the only choice for not only ecosystem survival, but for the survival of anything like social good. 

 

Max Liboiron  34:32

What do you need? Here you go. What do you need? Here you go. What do you have? Great. Off we go. That's sort of coming together. Everyone pitches in. 

 

Astra Taylor  34:38

And what you see is that, what people think in general, which is kind of what common sense refers to, right a kind of aggregate doxa or opinion really can dramatically change.

 

Joel  34:54

I want to remind our listeners that bios of the people we interview are on our website, commons podcast..com and you can also find information on any people referenced in the interviews. Again, that's commonspodcast.com. Support for Commons Sense comes from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the shared online projects initiative at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. And from Re.Climate, Canada's National Center for Climate Communication and Public Engagement. Special thanks to Rhianna Philip for the technical production of this podcast.

 

Joel  35:39

You might think it's common sense that music requires instruments, but the music you hear in this podcast is composed and performed by award winning musician and educator, Jesse Stewart. Jesse creates music with found materials like bicycle spokes and ice. To learn more about Jesse's music, visit our website @commonspodcast.com