". . . common sense is culturally defined. That is the way it should be."

WHAT!??

Conrad, there are many, many things that were accepted as "common sense" by various cultures and at various times in history that are patently irrational, some so irrational that they constitute abominations. Others have mentioned some of these above, such as public beheadings for things such as adultery, chopping off hands for minor crimes such as petty theft, witch-burning or being burned at the stake for not believing properly, or just being accused of not believing "properly."

The idea that the earth was the center of the universe was the universal belief of practically all cultures. It was common sense. You could see just by looking about you that the earth stayed in one spot and all of the heavens moved around it. And then Galileo pointed this newly fashioned gadget called a "telescope" at the skies, saw that things were not as everyone believed them to be. Rather than being a perfect sphere, the moon had mountains, valleys, craters; Jupiter was not a wandering star, it was another world—and it had smaller worlds circling about it. Could it be that—? Not only "could it be," but it turned out that this is indeed the way it is. The earth is not the center of the universe.

This meant that Man, God's greatest creation, was not that all-fired important in the Grand Scheme of Things after all!

Of course this flew in the face of "common sense." So much so that the Church offered Galileo the choice of either repudiating what he had seen with his own eyes or being burned at the stake.

"Common sense" is often at odds with the way things ARE.

Does this mean that Reality has changed? No, it means that "common sense" was wrong.

Once again I cite the kultur in Nazi Germany. Ridding the world of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the handicapped, and anyone who was not blond and blue-eyed was "common sense" to many presumably modern, educated, and "civilized" people—"common sense" to a sufficiently large percentage of the population that even those who had the courage to protest and say, "This is wrong!" were either ignored or themselves arrested and sent to the death camps.

If you have a degree in anthropology, Conrad, then you are living proof that having a sheepskin in a particular subject does not mean that one has any kind of fundamental understanding of that subject.

And you would take Art, bring it down to the lowest common denominator by castrating it and turning it into nothing more that a pretty little pile of flavorless goop.

Don Firth