When I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University in the late 1950's, the university's president was Milton Eisenhower, whose older brother Dwight was then president of the United States. Influenced by the media, I considered "Ike" to have ordinary intelligence, because his performances at press conferences were inelegant and characterized by tortured syntax. In this, he preceded by over 40 years a later president, George W. Bush, whose tortured syntax-unlike Ike's-revealed a very ordinary intellect. Milton defended his brother, by saying that while he was not an intellectual in the academic sense, he possessed more "common sense" than any man he had ever known. The problem with Bush, on the hand, is that he seems more than a little lacking in common sense.
At the time I considered Milton Eisenhower's characterization of his brother a strange form of praise, as I valued book learning and verbal facility above all else. Today, on the other hand, I consider such a statement to be a very high form of praise, especially when it causes a leader to avoid the kinds of catastrophic mistakes that were committed by several of Eisenhower's more verbally facile successors: Kennedy in the Bay of Pigs and the escalation in Vietnam; Johnson and Nixon in getting us even more deeply mired in Vietnam. In contrast, Eisenhower made an explicit decision not to get involved in Vietnam, when he turned down a desperate plea from the French to help with their losing cause. He reasoned that it would be folly for America to become involved in a ground war in Asia, especially after he extricated the country from the Korea quagmire he inherited from Harry Truman.
In short, Eisenhower's common sense translated into his ability, flowing from deep experience in matters military, logistical and organizational, to make correct decisions under conditions of uncertainty, emotion and danger. In short, Eisenhower's common sense contributed to his understanding of risk and when to avoid it, and this quality is what causes him today to be viewed as one of the wisest and most effective leaders that the United States produced in the 20th century. The history of America and other countries, and of countless business CEO's, has been replete, however, with examples of leaders (Bush in invading Iraq, Gerald Levin in merging Time-Warner with AOL) who graduated from prestigious colleges (Bush from Yale and Harvard; Levin from Haverford and Penn) but who lacked the sense to know when to say "no" to a disastrously bad idea.
Common sense (a term first coined by Aristotle to refer to an intuitive path to everyday knowledge) is often considered another term for wisdom. The role of risk-awareness, while implicit and under-emphasized in discussions of wisdom, is much more overtly mentioned in discussions of common sense, as in the folk expression "it is common sense to look both ways when crossing the street." See also this advice in a rock-climbing guide: "Should you drop or knock anything, it is customary to yell ‘below' or ‘rope below' to ensure that the people around become aware of the hazard. Also it is common sense that you should not look upward upon hearing someone shout as such, to protect your face." These lay conceptions of common sense appear to differ from lay conceptions of wisdom in the degree of obviousness of risk-awareness that is called for.
I would describe a wise person as someone who can perceive hidden and subtle risk which is not obvious to the average person. In contrast, I would describe a foolish person as someone who demonstrates a lack of awareness of risk which is obvious to most people. Common sense would appear to occupy a middle ground between foolishness and wisdom in that it involves the ability to spot risk (such as not crossing a street without looking both ways) which is obvious to the average person. What makes it obvious is that it calls upon very basic knowledge (for example, that cars are fast, deadly and often difficult to hear approaching) that all but those who are either very young or very cognitively impaired possess.
One insight that flows from this hypothesized continuum from foolishness (unawareness of obvious risk), to common sense (awareness of obvious risk) to wisdom (awareness of non-obvious risk) is that Milton Eisenhower would have been more accurate in describing his brother not as possessing exceptional common sense (which I perhaps correctly saw then as a relatively low-level skill) but rather as possessing exceptional wisdom. In line with that insight, it is also more accurate to describe George Bush and Gerald Levin not as lacking in common sense but rather as lacking in wisdom (although there was a sizeable minority at the time who saw the risks in both courses of action). Milton Eisenhower himself could have used more wisdom, not to mention moral courage, when he agreed to serve as the first director of the War Relocation Authority (the U.S. agency which forcibly interned close to 100,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry in World War Two) in spite of reportedly having had some reservations about a policy that later came to be viewed as egregiously misguided.
Because risk-awareness is a major concern in the field of engineering, there is more discussion of the connection between risk-awareness and common sense/ wisdom in engineering than, ironically, there is in psychology. In an online newsletter titled "TheEngineeringDaily.net", one finds the following assertion: "common sense is very clear while wisdom is fuzzy. Perhaps when some particular common action is proven wise then it graduates to becoming common sense. All proven human behavior that results in a wise result is common sense." This view of common sense as more basic and established than wisdom is close to my formulation, but differs from it mainly in the degree to which it can be accessed intuitively (my view) as opposed to verified empirically.
Leaders of organizations (including nations) are paid to be "deciders" (to use Bush's term) but their best actions are often the ones they have the sense not to take. The survival of an organization, as well as of a person, often rests on the ability to recognize and avoid obvious and non-obvious risk.
Copyright Stephen Greenspan
