Making Sense

Recovering from surgery recently, I came home with a catheter. Before this, I might have said I had “no idea” what that experience was like. But that phrasing is misleading. I had plenty of ideas about it — abstract notions, mental pictures, secondhand descriptions. But I lacked a sense of it: the physical reality, discomfort, and vulnerability, the way the body responds when something foreign is introduced to it. Ideas alone do not “make sense.” Only experience does.

The distinction between intellectual understanding and embodied knowledge is not a small semantic point. It reflects a broader cultural condition. Many people today grow up in cities or suburbs, far removed from the natural world. Their education takes place almost entirely indoors, mediated through books, screens, and abstract concepts. They are trained, implicitly and explicitly, to live in their heads. The result is a society in which intellectual frameworks often float free of the physical realities they are meant to describe.

Our language reveals the gap. We say things like “that doesn’t feel right,” “she’s out of touch,” “that sounds ridiculous,” “I see what you mean.” These are sensory metaphors, reminders that understanding is not purely cognitive. We rely on the body to evaluate truth, coherence, and meaning. When ideas fail to align with lived experience, we register the mismatch somatically before we articulate it intellectually.

I grew up in the country, and my early life was shaped by physical work. I picked apples, cut hay, hoed squash down long rows to keep the weeds at bay. I caught polliwogs in algae-filled eddies, rode my bike for miles, and hiked through the woods to fish in a nearby pond. Nature gave me freedom, but it demanded a price: blisters, bruises, scrapes, an occasional sprained ankle. The old farmers I knew lived in a world where the body was constantly at risk — dealing with large animals, heavy equipment, unpredictable weather. Many walked with a limp or had missing fingers. Their knowledge was not theoretical. It was earned through contact with the world.

This is the world of working‑class people. They build houses, install plumbing, tend gardens, drive delivery trucks, and stand on their feet all day. Their bodies are engaged, stressed, and often exhausted by the end of a shift. They inhabit a reality that pushes back. It resists abstraction. It forces ideas to prove themselves.

A significant part of our political divide has its roots in this difference. Intellectuals — especially those trained in the humanities and social sciences — occupy a very different world. They are highly educated, fluent in theories, and skilled at manipulating concepts. They dominate universities, media institutions, and much of the policymaking apparatus. They are referred to as “elites,” and operate in a realm where ideas are primary and experience is secondary. This is not to condemn intelligence or education. Not every smart person is an intellectual, and not every intellectual is disconnected from reality. Many people with advanced degrees are grounded, pragmatic, and attentive to the world as it is. But the structure of intellectual life — especially in certain academic fields — encourages a detachment from the constraints that shape most people’s daily existence.

The contrast gets clearer when considering STEM fields. Scientists, engineers, and mathematicians work with ideas, but their ideas must withstand the test of reality. A plane must fly. A bridge must hold. A medical device must not injure the patient. If a theory fails, it is discarded. Reality enforces discipline.

This is often not the case in the humanities and social sciences, where ideas can persist long after evidence has contradicted them. Theories become moral commitments rather than descriptions of the world. When data conflicts with the theory, the data — or the people who embody it — are treated as the problem. A simple example. If someone claims the earth is flat, we can test the claim. We can gather evidence, run experiments, and evaluate the results. The world pushes back. But when someone claims, for instance, that “there are no meaningful differences between the sexes,” the claim is not treated as a hypothesis to be tested. It is treated as a moral stance. Any evidence to the contrary is dismissed as biased, oppressive, or socially constructed. The theory becomes unfalsifiable.

This pattern appears across a range of issues. Moral aspirations — people should not be racist, materialistic, aggressive, or prejudiced — are transformed into empirical claims about human nature. When the empirical claims fail, the response is not to revise the theory but to condemn the people who fail to conform to it. The problem becomes the world itself, not the idea.

This inversion — where ideals dictate what reality is allowed to be — is a hallmark of intellectual overreach. It is also a source of deep frustration for people whose lives are shaped by physical constraints. Working‑class people do not have the luxury of ignoring reality. A carpenter cannot build a house based on how the wood should behave. A mechanic cannot repair a truck by appealing to moral principles. A farmer cannot harvest crops by insisting that weather patterns ought to be fairer. Their world is governed by forces that do not bend to ideology.

When intellectuals propose policies or cultural norms that contradict lived experience, the result is predictable: distrust, resentment, and polarization. The living, sensuous world — reality — exacts a price but can be transformative. People who know this generally reject ideas that do not make sense — ideas that have not been tested against the world they love and know intimately.