Before getting into why I think we should be leery of commonplace notions, I should define what I mean by the term. First of all, merely suggesting that there’s something wrong with commonplace notions might itself sound wrong. After all, commonplace notions are commonly understood to be the agreed understandings of the world that keep the world on track. But when we see that in certain respects the world is not really on a track anyone would call a good track, we might want to look at the commonplace notions keeping it there as a reason for this. One of the ways I define commonplace notions is that they lead us astray and compel us into actions that betray our best interests. Both to make this argument and to further define the term I offer the following examples.

This morning for reasons that aren’t important I began thinking about the commonplace notion that fifty-percent of marriages end in divorce (well, maybe they are important: I listened to a radio show discussing the institution of marriage, in light of the Gores’ recent announcement that they are separating; a decision, I was told by the show’s host, that’s sparked a “national conversation” on marriage).

For as long as I can remember people have talked about a fifty-percent divorce rate. We have been told and told each other and told ourselves that one out of every two marriages ends in divorce. The effect of this notion is profound. It creates a backdrop against which we think about marriage. It turns marriage into a gamble — a crapshoot, or a coin toss — which in turn can make it seem as if a decision to end a marriage is all but fated. It corrupts the equally fraught notion of commitment.

The commonness of the fifty-percent notion is built upon a foundation of slipshod thinking. It turns out the fifty-percent statistic is an aggregate of all marriages, i.e., marriages in all age groups, in all economic conditions, in every social stratum, etc. The function of a commonplace notion is to personalize a general observation. For example, a person of any age, any economic circumstance, any background can come to believe that his or her marriage has only a fifty-percent chance of lasting a lifetime. That’s what the commonplace notion tells us. The data, however, show something else. For people from certain specific age groups the chances of having a marriage that lasts a lifetime are much better than fifty percent. This fact is much less well known than the commonplace notion that fifty-percent of marriages end in divorce.   

Commonplace notions seduce us into a faulty understanding of some part of the world and then to act in ways that disregard less well-known facts about that part of the world. And it is a seduction, speaking seductively to a pervading resistance to the subtler enticements of rigorous thinking. This phenomenon has direct application to work being done by public health officials, community agencies, government, academia and business to improve health by championing wellness and pursuing a social determinants approach to health. Again, an example might be helpful.

For several years the trend in health insurance has been to ask subscribers to assume more responsibility for their health. In the euphemistic vernacular of the industry this is called employee engagement. (It probably shouldn’t go unsaid that they’re also being asked to assume more of the cost for treatment when their health fails.) Asking this of subscribers runs afoul of the commonplace notion of health, which exclusively associates health with medical treatment, medical treatment subscribers don’t know how to value. Accordingly even for those with unmanaged chronic conditions health is a background concern; it’s a given until such time the condition flares up and they’re forced to seek medical treatment. Asking people to participate in wellness and prevention programs under the auspices of a health insurance plan is an affront to the commonplace notion of health; read, an affront to the way people have come to take a place in the world.

I wonder if the challenges and failures of employee engagement aren’t somehow evidence of this running-afoul of the commonplace notion of health-as-medical-treatment. It might be that for the ninety percent of employees who aren’t engaged (don’t take advantage of the benefits provided to them) it just doesn’t fit the norm to think of health in terms of wellness and prevention. Which means they’re not intrinsically motivated to take advantage of their benefits. Add to that the implicit admonition that attends messaging telling them to change the way they live, and it’s a wonder an employer can claim even ten percent compliance with the new dictates.

This is where a community/social/ecological approach can potentially change the game. If a community/social/ecological approach can be notioned as vitality (to pick one word not thoroughly usurped by the health-as-medical treatment notion), and if it can be partitioned from health insurance benefits, there is the possibility of people changing their behaviors, not because they’ve been told that what they’ve been thinking all this time is wrong but because they’ve been given the space and permission to think anew about their health.