Symbols and Nationalism

Posted on August 12, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

As I discussed yesterday, Walter Lippmann’s viewed ‘public opinion’ as an entirely manufactured entity. On the individual level, we each have our biases and stereotypes which shape how we interpret and interact with the world around us. The thing we call public opinion is formed when elites use symbols to manipulate our individual stereotypes into a collective and relatively cohesive whole.

This leads to Lippmann’s theory of nationalism:

These great symbols posses by transference all the minute and detailed loyalties of an ancient and stereotyped society. They evoke the feeling that each individual has for the landscape, the furniture, the faces, the memories that his first, and in a static society, his only reality. That core of images and devotions without which he is unthinkable to himself, is nationality.

Nationality, then, is perhaps the ultimate stereotype – it is a myth expanded beyond an individual’s view, a shared stereotype which shapes our collective reality. Importantly, we hold these stereotypes not only of other nationalities, but of our own. Indeed, Lippmann argues, such national stereotypes are central to an individual’s identity. It’s little wonder we fight so hard over what it means to be a “real” American.

John Dewey seems to respond almost directly to this point in his 1927 book The Public and It’s Problems. Symbols, he argues, aren’t constructs to be warded against: they are the very thing which make community possible. Symbols “depend upon and promote communication.” Dewey argues:

Events cannot be passed from one to another, but meanings may be shared by means of signs. Wants and impulses are then attached to common meanings. They are thereby transformed into desires and purposes, which, since they implicate a common or mutually understood meaning, present new ties, converting a joint activity into a community of interest and endeavor. Thus there is generated what, metaphorically, may be termed a general will and social consciousness: desire and choice on the part of individuals in behalf of activities that, by means of symbols, are communicable and shared by all concerned.

Lippmann sees ‘public opinion’ as intrinsically a manufactured myth; constructed by elites to create the illusion of national will. Dewey sees the opposite: in the great community, public opinion would be a genuine expression of a people’s shared ethos. This vision builds on Dewey’s broader sense of ideal citizens: each an “individually distinctive” community member indelibly co-created by the citizens and society around them.

It strikes me that these visions are not necessarily at odds.

Consider Dewey’s vision applied to the microcosm of family life. It seems reasonable to argue that a person’s core identity – who they are and what they believe – is deeply shaped by their intimate interactions at a personal family level.

This intricate interconnectedness has implications for the family as a community – families share stories, signs, and symbols. Siblings develop a shared sense of identity. Family members are individual distinctive, yet deeply connected. It is a great community, albeit on a very, very, local level.

If Lippmann’s skepticism of national identity seems more accurate then, if Lippmann is the practical-headed theorists to Dewey’s foolish idealism, it is not necessarily the concept that is wrong, but rather the scale.

When we see a person we don’t know, Lippmann argues, we by necessity see that person as an object which we interpret through out stereotypes. It is contested whether we can ever really truly know another, and it is debatable whether we even truly know ourselves, but surely we can agree that no person has the capacity to truly know all other beings. As Lippmann explains:

In a circle of friends, and in relation to close associates or competitors, there is no shortcut through, and no substitute for an individualized understanding. Those whose whom we love and admire most are the men and women whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than with types, who know us rather than the classification into which we might fit. For even without phrasing it to ourselves, we feel intuitively that all classification is in relation to some purpose not necessarily our own; that between two human beings no association has final dignity in which each does not take the other as an end in himself. There is a taint on any contact between two people which does not affirm as an axiom the personal inviolability of both.

Thus, we might each divide the world into two circles: one is the intimate circle of people we know and who know us, those few “whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than with types.” Into the other circle we dump everyone else, not as an intrinsic judgement, but rather a practical matter. For all those “others” – the mass of humanity – we are left with little choice but to interpret their existence as best we can economically: through heuristics, stereotypes, and bias.

Dewey would like to see us consider all people as intimately and humanely as we consider our family; Lippmann argues that is just not possible.

Lippmann may have the practical edge in this debate, but throughout his work he overlooks a key detail: a critical reason we should not be satisfied with his model.

Lippmann argues that the myth of public opinion is what does the public harm. That symbols and nationalism are little more than tools for elite manipulation. I am inclined to agree with him on this point.

But his solutions to this practical reality assume a just society. If all people have equal power and standing; if it makes little difference whether most people ‘other’ me because an intimate few do not; if society really were a collection of identical objects which we each view through our own narrow lens, then perhaps Lippmann’s practical vision would do.

But the fact is, through our biases and stereotypes we do far worse than divide the world into an intimate circle of acquaintances and a mass of unknown person.

Rather we divide the world up into numerous circles of concern. We care more, generally speaking, for people who are “more like us.” White Americans are inclined to care more for white Americans than for Americans of color; to care more for Americans than for foreigners; and to care more for the citizens of white nations than for others around the world. This is problematic and can have devastating repercussions.

As Peter Singer points out, some of this prioritizing may be justifiable – loving your children more than a stranger, for example, is hardly something to be discouraged. But passed family and close friendships, Singer argues that the moral justification for these circles of concern breaks down.

Particularly, odd, Singer finds, is the fervent embrace of nationalism. For all the reasons discussed above, it makes sense to love those people you know personally. But nationalism brings this love to abstraction:

Though citizens never encounter most of the other members of the nation, they think of themselves as sharing an allegiance to common institutions and values, such as a constitution, democratic procedures, principals of toleration, the separation of church and state, and the rule of law.

Here we get back to Lippmann’s signs and symbols. Nationalism created by a false sense of shared identity.

Lippmann offers little solution but to recognize this sense as a falsehood. To disempower ‘public opinion’ and to recognize it as little more than a construct.

Dewey wants to make this shared sense have real meaning – building a global great community of mutually interdependent beings.

Singer for his part, takes a somewhat different tack. We have a constructed sense of national identity, which is false and ultimately meaningless, he argues – but it does bring a beneficial sense of community. Perhaps we cannot achieve a Deweyian vision of great interdependence, and perhaps we cannot simply destroy the constructs which govern our lives. But we can, he argues, push those circles of concern outwards.

We can reimagine ourselves not as citizens of a nation, but as citizens of the world.

Symbols, Stereotypes, and Power

Posted on August 11, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Walter Lippmann was very concerned about the inaccessibly of Truth. “The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes,” he wrote in his 1921 work, Public Opinion.

He repeats this concern numerous times. “We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.”

Lippmann, an American journalist with an intimate familiarity with propaganda and war-time rhetoric, had reason to be concerned. “Rationally, the facts are neutral to all our views of right and wrong. Actually, our canons determine greatly what we shall perceive and how.”

Lippmann’s concern is perhaps most concisely expressed as Bent Flyvbjerg’s more recent axiom: power is knowledge.

We each have a unique experience of the world, and we each filter our experiences through our constructed stereotypes of meaning.

Lippmann, in fact, coined the word stereotype. Writing in Public Opinion:

In untrained observation, we pick recognizable signs out of the environment. The signs stand for ideas, and these ideas we fill out with our stock of images. We do not so much see this man and that sunset, rather we notice that the thing is a man or sunset, and then see chiefly what our mind is already full of on those subject.

There is economy in this. For the attempt to see all things freshly and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting, and among busy affairs practically out of the question…Modern life is hurried and multifarious, above all physical distance separates men who are often in vital contact with each other, such as employer and employee, official and voter. There is neither time nor opportunity for intimate acquaintance. Instead, we note a trait which marks a well-known type and fill in the rest of the picture by means of the stereotypes we carry about in our heads. He is an agitator. That much we notice or are told. Well, an agitator is this sort of person, and so he is this sort of person. He is an intellectual. He is a plutocrat. He is a foreigner. He is a ‘Southern European.’ He is from Back Bay. He is a Harvard Man. How different from the statement: he is a Yale Man. He is a regular fellow. He is a West Pointer. He is an old army sergeant. He is a Greenwich Villager: what don’t we know about him then, and about her? He is an international banker. He is from Main Street.

These stereotypes – helpful heuristics which help us make sense of a busy world – are comforting. “They are an ordered, ore or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves,” Lippmann writes. “We feel at home there. We fit in there. We are members. We know our way around.”

It is perhaps because of this comfort that we cling so desperately to our stereotypes.

Lippmann remarks that what matters is “the character of the stereotypes and the gullibility with which we employ them.” That those who hold the wise philosophy “that each man is only a small part of the world, that his intelligence catches at best only phases and aspects in a coarse net of ideas,” are more likely to “to know that they are only stereotypes, to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly.” But this is easier said than done.

Our stereotypes are such a familiar comfort that “any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the foundations of our universe, and where big things are at stake, we do not readily admit that there is any distinction between our universe and the universe.”

Thus, even the wise intellectual, aware of their own stereotypes and open to altering them, may easily make the mistake of taking individual truths to be universal truths; and to take those individual truths to be self-evident.

“What is alien will be rejected, what is different will fall upon unseeing eyes. We do not see what our eyes are not accustomed to take into account. Sometimes consciously, more often without knowing it, we are impressed by those facts which fit our philosophy,” Lippmann warns.

These stereotypes, “loaded with preferences, suffused with affection or dislike, attached to fears, lusts, strong wishes, pride, hope” can then be evoked by manipulative elites through the use of symbols.

“The detached observer may scorn the ‘star-spangled’ ritual which hedges the symbol,” Lippmann writes, “…but the leader knows by experience that only which symbols have done their work is there a handle he can use to move a crowd. In the symbol emotion is discharged at a common target, and the idiosyncrasy of real ideas blotted out.”

Lippmann is widely considered to be an elitist – marked by his fear of how easily the “bewildered heard” of the masses are manipulated – but I’ve tended towards a kinder reading. If the public cannot be trusted, it is because elites are corrupt, because those with power actively seek to shape the knowledge and beliefs of the public at large.

Flyvbjerg’s warning “power is knowledge” gets at exactly that point. Power defines reality. Power determines what knowledge enters the public domain and how that knowledge is presented. As Flyvbjerg writes in a detailed urban planning study, “Rationality is penetrated by power, and it becomes meaningless, or misleading – for politicians, administrators, and researchers alike – to operate with a concept of rationality in which power is absent.”

So perhaps it is to be expected that those with power will deploy symbols to keep the masses in thrall, and perhaps it is to be expected that such magic tricks have great effect. It is not, inherently, the people who are flawed, it is the system. Power is knowledge and power defines reality.

The Self and the Great Community

Posted on August 10, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

John Dewey saw democracy as an ideal expression of associated living.

That’s a bit of an understatement though, because for Dewey, democracy is much more than “a special political form, a method of conducting government, of making laws and carrying on governmental administration.” Such institutions are an element of democracy, but fundamentally, Dewey argued, democracy is a way of life.

To Dewey, democracy is recognizing “the necessity for the participation of every mature human being in formation of the values that regulate the living of men together: which is necessary from the standpoint of both the general social welfare and the full development of human beings as individuals.”

This concept of democracy is deeply tied to Dewey’s understanding of humanity. Indeed, Dewey argued, democracy is the process through which people learn to be human – and being human is the process through which people exercise democracy. As he eloquently described in The Public and its Problems:

To learn to be human is to develop through the give-and-take of communication an effective sense of being an individually distinctive member of a community; one who understands and appreciates its beliefs, desires and methods, and who contributes to a further conversion of organic powers into human resources and values.

I’m particularly struck here by Dewey’s vision of the democratic citizen as one who perceives themselves as an “individually distinctive member of a community.” Dewey clearly embraces the idea of “I” as unique and self-aware being, and yet there’s something in his language which nods to a broader understanding of “self.”

He goes on to talk about the illusion of a false psychology:

…Current philosophy held that ideas and knowledge were functions of a mind or consciousness which originated in individuals by means of isolated contact with objects. But in fact, knowledge is a function of association and communication; it depends upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed and sanctioned.

Associated living, Dewey argued, is “physical and organic,” but communal life – embracing the “self” not strictly as an isolated being, but as a being created by and reflective of its many associations – is moral: it is “emotionally, intellectually, consciously sustained.”

We differentiate humanity from animals by celebrating our consciousness, by claiming that we alone have the capacity to recognize that there is an “I” and by embracing self-awareness as a distinctively human trait.

Perhaps this is not far enough.

Not only is it unlikely that self-awareness is a uniquely human capacity, but it fails to capture humanity’s true gift. Dewey writes, “For beings whose ideas are absorbed by impulses and become sentiments and interests, ‘we’ is as inevitable as ‘I’.”

In short, “self” is not the unit we should be thinking in. There is a self, Dewey seems to argue; there is something about ‘me’ which is uniquely distinctive from ‘you’. But my self and your self are not as unique an independent as we might imagine. We are intricately tied up, interconnected, and interdependent. I cannot exist without you. I make you and you make me.

We are each of us, indelibly, co-created.

Recognizing and embracing that interdependence is what makes Dewey’s Great Community possible. Our biology ensures that we are associated beings – a baby, after all, cannot survive on its own. But through conscious and intellectual decisions, by recognizing that it is not only our fates but our very beings which are intertwined, we make communities.

We are far from achieving this yet – certainly terribly far from it on a global scale. As Dewey writes, “the old Adam, the unregenerate element in human nature, persist. It shows itself wherever the method obtains of attaining results by use of force instead of by the method of communication and enlightenment. It manifests itself more subtly, pervasively and effectually when knowledge and the instrumentalities of skill which are the product of communal life are employed in the service of wants and impulses which have not themselves been modified by reference to a shared interest.”

Yes, the old Adam persists. We hang doggedly to the idea that I have made my own way and that there is an isolated ‘I’ which has a way to make. We forget that we are fundamentally associated beings, and we underestimate the pockets of community collectively built. The old Adam persists, but a new vision is slowly taking its place; an awaking to ourselves as individually distinctive member of a community. Distinctive, perhaps, but inextricably intertwined.

Open Carry in Ohio

Posted on July 18, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

With the Republican National Convention taking place in Cleveland this week, and on the heels of deadly police shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge, the Cleveland Police Union is pushing for a temporary ban on that state’s open carry gun law:

“We are sending a letter to Gov. Kasich requesting assistance from him. He could very easily do some kind of executive order or something — I don’t care if it’s constitutional or not at this point,” Stephen Loomis, president of Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, told CNN. “They can fight about it after the RNC or they can lift it after the RNC, but I want him to absolutely outlaw open-carry in Cuyahoga County until this RNC is over.”

In preparation for the convention, the City of Cleveland has announced a ban on at least 72-items within the “event zone.” The list includes tennis balls, ice chests, metal-tipped umbrellas, and locks. The ban also includes a general provision against “any dangerous ordinance, weapon, or firearm that is prohibited by the laws of the State of Ohio.”

There’s just one thing: there’s not that much banned by the state of Ohio.

While the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” the Ohio State Constitution takes a somewhat differs tact:

The people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security; but standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and shall not be kept up; and the military shall be in strict subordination to the civil power.

While there are some restrictions on the use of firearms within a motor vehicle and establishments with a liquor license, Ohio State law generally allows for the open carry of firearms and does not require a permit or license for purchase.

For his part, Governor Katich declined to implement a temporary ban, arguing through a statement from his spokeswoman Emmalee Kalmbach:

Ohio governors do not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights or state laws as suggested. The bonds between our communities and police must be reset and rebuilt – as we’re doing in Ohio – so our communities and officers can both be safe. Everyone has an important role to play in that renewal.

On the surface, I am inclined to agree. It may seem absurd that tennis balls are banned as dangerous while firearms are permitted, but state law is quite clear in this area. The City of Cleveland explicitly banned only those weapons which are banned by state law because they don’t have the power to ban anything further. The Governor may have state-wide purview, but he still doesn’t have the power to suspend the state constitution.

There’s an interesting argument that was made by gun rights activists during the debate on whether to prohibit people on the terror watch list from buying guns: the terror watch list is notoriously bad. Using it as a filter creates a dangerous precedent for arbitrarily restricting citizens’ constitutional rights.

If the government proposed restricting the 1st amendment rights of citizens named by some poorly formulated, clearly imprecise list that it is nearly impossible to get off of, I would be justifiably upset.

Quite frankly, when it comes to the 1st amendment and conventions, I’m not even a fan of so-called “free speech zones,” areas where protestors are pushed off to the side, hidden from media, and delicately repressed in the name of safety.

A temporary ban on firearms seems constitutionally quite similar to this – though the danger posed by free speech is quite less.

Interestingly, Cleveland was planning a Free Speech Zone around the convention, but following a suit from the ACLU was forced to minimize restrictions on 1st amendment rights.

Also interestingly, firearms are explicitly banned within the arena itself – this area falls under the jurisdiction of the Secret Service which, from what I can tell, has the purview to ban whatever it wants.

All of this, however, relies on the argument that the 2nd amendment is the same as the 1st amendment.

If I would have a problem with the temporary suspension of the 1st amendment, I should logically have a problem with the temporary suspension of the 2nd amendment – or any other amendments for that matter. Just because I have a personal distaste for a certain amendment doesn’t give the state the right to treat the amendment differently.

This all makes sense and sounds rational on paper, but – here’s the thing: the 2nd amendment isn’t the same.

The Bill of Rights exists to protect me, to protect citizens, from an overbearing, centralized government. The Bill of Rights stands as a testament to the ideal that this government will never be able to strip be of my fundamental rights.

But the 2nd amendment doesn’t make me feel empowered, it doesn’t make me feel safe. It makes me feel scared of my fellow citizens.

I have to image that those who uphold the 2nd amendment feel much differently – that they genuinely see themselves as part of a well-regulated militia, ready to jump into action to ensure the freedom of the State.

But to me, the 2nd amendment is very different. I worry about a government which can strip our right to protest. I worry about a government which can have secret trials and which can unreasonably search its citizens.

I don’t worry about a government which restricts the ability of people to keep and bear arms – I’m more worried about the functioning of a government which can ban tennis balls but not weapons.

Human Capacity to Govern

Posted on July 15, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

One core question of political theory centers around how much trust we should put in humanity. Theorists tend to interpret that question through their own judgements of which types of people ought to trusted, but the fundamental question remains the essentially the same.

Earlier this week, for example, I compared the work of Walter Lippmann – who had a great distrust of “the people” as a mass entity – with the analysis of James C. Scott, who highlights the awful acts elites can execute if given too much power.

Both differ in their specific fears, but they share a similar conviction that humanity is imperfect and fundementally lacks the capacity to engineer a better society.

Scott is particularly concerned with the danger of believing the opposite: it is not just elites who wreak havoc, but elites who are audacious enough to believe that they do have the capacity to engineer a better world.

Lippmann, too, shares this concern in his own way. It is not only that the people are not up to the task of governing, but that our current political failings can be traced directly to the belief that humanity does have this capacity. Until we recognize the public as the “trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd,” until we put the public “in its place,” our system is doomed to failure.

Lippmann’s argument is often contrasted with that of his contemporary, John Dewey. While Lippmann bemoaned the rule of the people, Dewey encouraged it. To Dewey, the problem wasn’t that the people had too much power, but rather that they had too little. The nominal role of citizenship encouraged people to not fully engage in democracy as a way of living, it undermined the who democratic endeavor.

Dewey was certainly aware of humanity’s imperfections, and he agreed with Lippmann on the general prognosis of civil society, but his remedy was entirely different. Rather than penalize the public for poor political acumen, he argued that the flaw lay in the systems and institutions. Give the people a real voice and real agency in their political lives and they will rise to the challenge. If civil institutions educated citizens to live fully; to see themselves as intricately connected to the whole and to engage with others in collaborative imagination and problem-solving, a Great Community would be realized.

He didn’t aim for some perfect, static utopia – impossible to achieve because needs and contexts are always changing – but Dewey imagined a future in which diverse people could work together as equals to continually grow and improve themselves and the world around them.

As Erin McKenna describes of Dewey’s philosophy, faced with current problems and our imperfect system, “we must try to do something. Old ideas often hang on because we have nothing with which to replace them. Here, imagination must fill in and try on new possibilities and critical intelligence must evaluate how well they work.”

The limiting factor, then, isn’t humanity’s fundamental capacity to achieve a vision, but rather a lack of imagination to conceive those visions.

Roberto Unger takes this vision to extremes. In False Necessity, Unger argues: “People treat a plan as realistic when it approximates what already exists and utopian when it departs from current arrangements. Only proposals that are hardly worth fighting for – reformist tinkering – seem practicable.”

He proposes wild and dramatic changes to current political structures, and argues for creating a branch of government solely tasked with uprooting and reforming and institutions which have become complacent.

Unger fully embraces the capacity of humanity. Our current systems are so broken that we must boldly reimagine them, and we shouldn’t let ourselves be held back by concerns about what seems practical or achievable. We must stage a revolution in which every institution as we know it is wholly reformed.

Implicit in this argument is the assumption that we – or whomever stages the revolution – are capable of designing better systems. It is exactly this sort of brazen social engineering which Scott fears.

Lippmann, Dewey, Unger, and Scott cover a range of political views, but their all of their work circles around this question of humanity’s capacity.

If you assume that people are and always will be flawed, that there are serious limits to any person’s capacity to design good social systems, then you might lean towards the work of Lippmann or Scott – building institutions with a humble sense of your own failings and the failings of those who will govern after you. These systems seek to diffuse power, to protect a people from themselves. But in doing so, they may create the very citizenry the designer’s fear – people who are incapable of governing.

If you have a fundamental faith that some people do have the capacity to govern – whether you put this trust in all human beings or only in certain strata of society – then you may find yourself pulled towards the radical revolutions of Unger or the egalitarian optimism of Dewey. These approaches favor systems which are open to change and reformation; governments which truly empower people to shape the world around them. In doing this, though, you build a system that is vulnerable to corruption or poor judgement, in which serious damage can be done at any point in time by empowering the wrong person or persons.

Democracy of Manners

Posted on July 14, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Listening to an interview with historian Nancy Isenberg, author of the new book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, I was struck by Isenberg’s reference to the United States as a “democracy of manners” – an idea, she says, which came from an Australian writer.

“We accept huge disparities in wealth while expecting our leaders to cultivate the appearance of not being different,” Isenberg argues. Our democracy is all about manners; success is all in the performance. I highly doubt this is a unique American phenomenon, but in building off Isenberg I will keep this post in the American context.

From Andrew Jackson to the current presumptive Republican nominee, populist candidates have been successful by showing themselves able to play the part of a poor, white American – to eat the right foods, to say the right things with the right mannerisms. These are the candidates you want to have a beer with.

Importantly, the actual background of these candidates is not particularly relevant. Jackson did grow up in rural Appalachia, but more recent populists have come from among the upper tiers of society. But that doesn’t matter; what matters is the act.

Embracing a democracy of manners is a failure of genuine democracy. It encourages citizens divest their civic responsibilities to actors who can merely play the part of representing them.

I haven’t yet had a chance to read Isenberg’s book, but I get the impression this democracy of manners is a core challenge which creates a self-perpetuating cycle along several dimensions. In dismissing the fundamental human value of the white poor, white elites create a class they can scapegoat for all of society’s ills. Obvert racism among white poor allows upper classes to pretend as though racism only exists among the uneducated poor. It creates a class who will protect themselves by tearing down any other groups poised to breach elite power.

And, through the democracy of manners, it creates a class that will continually vote against their own self-interest, supporting candidates who look like them and talk like them, but who ultimately serve elite interests.

Elites and The People

Posted on July 12, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Following the Brexit vote, the rise of Donald Trump, and numerous other political trends around the world, I’ve heard two equally plausible narratives for the increase of populist sentiment.

In one version, “the people” populist movements purportedly support are easily misled. While some versions of this narrative are generally dismissive of so-called average people as lazy, stupid, or uninformed, it’s important to note that disparaging “the people” is not required for this narrative to work.

In the UK, for example, Brexit leaders actively misled voters and rescinded key promises shortly after the election. Whether you attribute people’s belief in those promises to mere stupidity or to reasonably placing their faith in political leaders who only later turned out to be corrupt, the net result is roughly the same: there was a failure of popular opinion.

Walter Lippmann, who famously decried populist rule, eloquently summed up the many issues which may lead public opinion astray:

Thus the environment with which our public opinions deal is refracted in many ways, by censorship and privacy at the source, by physical and social barriers at the other end, by scanty attention, by the poverty of language, by distraction, by unconscious constellations of feeling, by wear and tear, violence, monotony. These limitations upon our access to that environment combine with the obscurity and complexity of the facts themselves to thwart clearness and justice of perception, to substitute misleading fictions for workable ideas, and to deprive us of adequate checks upon those who consciously strive to mislead.

Even if you had ideal citizens, Lippmann argues, public opinion should not be trusted: it is simply not possible for even an intelligent, well-informed person to truly understand the nuances of every issue. Add to that the facts that even well-intentioned citizens are too busy to devote significant time to becoming fully educated and that there will always be corrupt leaders seeking to mislead, and it quickly becomes clear that popular opinion ultimately means nothing.

Any derision of the intelligence or ability of average people simply cements this view.

In my charitable reading of Lippmann, he is not a strict technocrat, rather encouraging a system where people engage on this issues that they are informed on and stay silent on issues they know nothing about.

Either way, though, it seems fair to say that Lippmann’s core argument is that “the people” – as a mass entity – should not rule. Today’s proponents of this view point to the rise of populist movements as proof of this claim. There would be far less chaos and instability if educated elites instead orchestrated political matters.

A different narrative comes from the other side: today’s political uncertainty is not the fault of the people; rather the blame lies primarily with elites.

Populist movements may or may not be ultimately good for the people who support them, but just as the first narrative doesn’t require a distain for the people, this narrative doesn’t rely on the validity of certain political outcomes.

Our global economy is in turmoil. People have lost their jobs with little hope of finding a new one or of successfully retraining for the new economy. Feeling trapped and hopeless in the grips of poverty, people are justifiably angry and looking to reclaim a sense of autonomy. Perhaps their electoral choices will relieve their trauma; perhaps they are desperate enough not to care. Perhaps upsetting the system – which has failed them so miserably – is enough. At least that way they know they can still affect something in their lives.

I’ll leave aside here issues of racism or xenophobic nationalism as motivators for these movements. While its no coincidence that hate groups are on the rise in the US and that far-right parties in Europe are flourishing on racist rhetoric, this is a topic which could well cover a whole post on its own.

Furthermore, the issue of racism can similarly be told through these two narratives. On the one side, “the people,” acting out of hate or a sense of dwindling power, are not to be trusted to lead. In the other narrative, the explicit hate professed by some in populist movements can be better interpreted as an expression of the broader, systemic racism we are all complicit in. That is, in the U.S. context, blatantly racist rhetoric may be distasteful, but let’s not pretend that Northern, liberal racism is not a thing. We’ve all got a lot of work to do.

This second narrative is not intrinsically populists, but rather urges an understanding and appreciation for the current actions of large portions of the population. Elites may have led us astray, but it remains uncertain whether “the people” will be able to guide us back.

If the core element of the first narrative is that the people cannot be trusted, the core element of the second is that elites cannot be trusted.

“The people” may have a great deal of flaws, but the greatest destructors of society are elites who assume they know what is best.

The danger of this line of thinking is well described in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. The worst disasters of the twenty century, he argues, were brought about by elites who were “uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production.”

Bolstered by power and a weak civil society, leaders around the world engaged in “utopian social-engineering,” audaciously believing that humans generally, and themselves in particular, had the capacity to plan and build a better world.

“The Great Leap Forward in China, collectivization in Russia, and compulsory villagization in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Ethiopia are among the great human tragedies of the twentieth century, in terms of both lives lost and lives irretrievably disrupted,” Scott argues.

What I find interesting about this perspective is that it is less concerned with arguing that elites led us into this mess to begin with, but is deeply concerned with how we get ourselves out of it.

In this narrative, diminishing the power of the broader population may seem like an appealing response to current affairs, but that impulse is incredibly dangerous – even more dangerous than the unfettered rule of the people.

I’m afraid I have no satisfying conclusion to this post, but perhaps that is for the best. If there is one thing Lippmann and Scott have in common it is a distrust of human rationality. Perhaps, in the end, none of us can be trusted.

Process-Model Utopia

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

In The Task of Utopia, Erin McKenna argues in favor of a “process-model” of utopia. This vision is built largely upon the work of John Dewey, who dreams of democracy “as a method of living by which individuals are fully engaged in the experience that is their lives.”

We must move away from considering “end-state” models of utopia as a perfect, static, society and instead embrace our role as critical builders and shapers of our future world and selves.

For one thing, a static utopia is simply unattainable: “Social living is an ongoing process, not a perfected life. No harmony is lasting. Each satisfying moment passes over into a new need for which we must alter our world and/our ourselves to meet.”

But more deeply, a static vision strips people of their agency, takes away what really makes us alive. If an end-state utopia were achieved, there would be nothing for people to do, they’d have no role to play in perfecting themselves or perfecting their future. Any change could only represent a move away from perfection.

While that may be a small price to pay for establishment of utopia, McKenna argues that “the unfolding of the future is not determined separate from us, but is intricately connected with us.” Nearly by definition, an end-state utopia is not sustainable: across generations, people must continually work to sustain utopian institutions, but without a process-model there is no way to prepare future generations for this important task.

This idea fits well with Dewey’s model of democracy which, as McKenna writes, “requires that we recognize how our participation affects what the future can be. It requires that we recognize that there is no-end state at which we must work to arrive, but a multiple of possible future states which we seek and try out. John Dewey’s vision of democracy prepares us to interact with our world and guide it to a better future by immersing us in what he calls the method of critical intelligence”

Notably, Dewey sees democracy as a process rather than an end state: “democracy is not participation by an inchoate public, nor is it a perfected end-state to be attainted. It is the development of critical intelligence and a method of living with regard to the past, present, and future.”

Dewey urges us to consider ourselves as connected, interdependent beings. Connected and dependent not only on those who care for us as children, but broadly connected and dependent our past and present societies. Our individual selves are shaped by collective history and defined by innumerable interactions, and we each have a role to play in affecting the current lives of others and shaping the future contours of society.

As McKenna explains:

Our social situation is not something that simply happens to us, however. We appropriate and integrate our environment into experience. Whatever our situation, we participate in its future development. It does not develop separately from us. Our activity partially defines our social situation, and our social situation goes a long way to guiding our activity. There is an interplay of the determinant and indeterminate by which we realize the potential of the future. We are a perspective, influenced by our experience, through which we organize our participation and structure the community so that future experience is meaningful to us.

We create ourselves from our environment, and we create our environment through our selves.

This places a great responsibility on each of us to work for utopia. We must constantly and critically examine ourselves and our world, imagining better possible futures, and actively working towards and adjusting these visions.

We must each, as Dewey writes, learn to be human.

There is something compellingly beautiful about this vision; about the idea of a society which seamlessly integrates the individual and the whole, the past and the future. A society in which we all see ourselves as intrinsically interconnected and interdependent, working together to perfect ourselves, each other, and our shared experience.

Yet, perhaps this is far too much to hope for. The biggest complain about Dewey, most notably from Walter Lippmann, is that this vision is too unrealistic, too naive about the biases of people and the abuses of power.

As McKenna herself writes:

Even if the process model can prepare people to be the critical citizens it needs (a huge task in itself), how can it ensure that they actually will participate and take on their responsibilities? The process model asks a great deal of people in terms of time and effort. Apathetic or lazy citizens will not take up the critical stance easily. Where the end-state vision does not ask enough of people, or give enough responsibility to them, the process model may ask and give too much.

But, McKenna for one, finds reason to hope:

While the process model may require more of people than we are prepared to give now, visions on this model can provide us with insight into the means available to change our attitudes and action and show us the possibilities of the future if we are willing to try to change and become Dewey’s integrated individual…Utopia visions are visions of hope that can challenge us to explore a range of possible human conditions…the first step in understanding the responsibility each of us has to the future in deciding how to live our lives now.

For those less inclined towards hope, perhaps one can at least find some grim humor in this concluding note from McKenna’s final chapter:

One can hope that here, in the United States, the elections of 2000 have awakened people to the importance of their responsible participation in the political process.

The process model asks a lot, indeed.

A Month of Mourning

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

It’s been a weekend of horror. Or, perhaps, a month of horror. Or, perhaps…

Over 300 people have been killed in terrorist attacks within the last month.

Attacks which have heavily targeted civilians in the Muslim world, wreaking terror in Istanbul, Turkey; Mogadishu, Somalia; Al Qaa, Lebanon; Dhaka, Bangladesh; Medina, Qatif, and Jidda Saudi Arabia; and Baghdad, Iraq – where a bombing of a crowded marketplace killed over 200 people.

This is the holiest time of the Islamic calendar. A month of spiritual reflection, of fasting, of peace.

The attack in Medina took place outside the mosque which serves as the resting place the resting place of the Prophet Mohammed. The second holiest site in Islam, millions of pilgrims travel there each year, “to pray in his mosque, to sit where he once sat.” Especially now, during the last ten days of Ramadan. As scholar Haroon Moghul put it, the attack on Medina was “an assault on Islam itself.”

In Baghdad, one witness described the scene before the attacks as a “delightful atmosphere.” The attack took place at night, after the day’s fast. The streets were crowded with people “shopping and celebrating ahead of the upcoming Eid al-Fitr holiday on Wednesday, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan.” These are the people who died.

If there was ever any doubt that the brutal horror of Daesh is anti-Islamic, let that thought be put to rest.

I hardly know what else to say.

There is enough hate in the world already, enough hatred of difference, of plurality. Too many people have died, too many keep dying. Terrorists are waging a war of hate, a war they can only win if they convince us to hate each other.

But hate is too great a burden to bear; I have chosen love.

Discontent of the Commons

Posted on June 29, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

In a session on “The Politics of Discontent” at this year’s Frontiers of Democracy conference, democracy scholar Alison Staudinger proposed considering “discontent” as a common pool resource. I am deeply intrigued by this idea, and interested to understand just what that might mean.

In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin popularized the concept of the “Tragedy of the Commons,” describing the game-theoretic prisoner’s dilemma which communities of people face when utilizing some common resource:

Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain….the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another… But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

This idea has been applied to a wide variety of resources which can be broadly categorized along two spectrums: excludable and subtractable. As the names suggest, excludable indicates whether or not people can be easily excluded from a resource while subtractable indicates whether use of a resource by one person restricts use of the resource by another.

The clothes I am wearing are both excludable and subtractable – I can prevent your use of them, and you cannot use them while I am using them. Wikipedia is non-excludable and non-subtactable – I cannot prevent your use and my use does not diminish yours. If Wikipedia added a paywall or if a State blocked its use, it would become excludable.

Seen as a common pool resource, discontentment would seem to fit in this non-excludable, non-subtactable category. I cannot stop you from feeling discontent, and I can be discontent without infringing on your ability to also be discontent.

Yet, this is perhaps not the most helpful framework. The political challenges we face today are not so much that people feel discontent – rather the challenge is the causes and repercussions of that discontent.

It is a fundamental aspect of a pluralist society that not everyone will agree all of the time. We each have different needs and wants, and our desired outcomes will at times be in conflict. We can’t all get what we want.

Under a simple definition, then, a person is discontent if they do not get their way. Since not everyone in a pluralistic society can simultaneously have their way, it is intrinsic that some portion of people will be discontent with any given issue.

This presents at least two possible social challenges connected to discontent. If discontent is inequitably and systemically distributed, those who have more discontent with have reason to see the system as unjust. If people experience the system as treating them unjustly, they will have reason to try to change the system – minimizing their own discontentment while making someone else more discontent.

Here, discontent seems to no longer be a resource – rather can be better interpreted as the absence of a resource.

The word that comes to mind here is power.

People with power can get the outcomes they desire, minimizing their discontent; people without power are subject to the whims of those with power – increasing the likelihood that they will not get the outcomes they desire and increasing their discontent.

Power, I would argue, is an excludable and subtractable resource. Those with power have certainly been known to exclude others from acquiring power, and if I have power, it does, I think, diminish your ability to have power.

This model unites people from all sides of the political spectrum who feel discontent under current systems and institutions. Some may feel they are losing power, some may never of had much power in the first place.

And the highest elites may feel most secure in the continuance of their power if everyone else is busy fighting over who gets whatever scraps are left.

Elinor Ostrom, the brilliant economist who argued that the drama of the commons need not be a tragedy, traveled around the world empirically studying communal and institutional management of common pool resources.

In Covenants, Collective Action, and Common-Pool Resources, Ostrom argues that conflict and destruction arise when “those involved act independently owing to a lack of communication or an incapacity to make credible commitments.” On the other hand, if members of a community “can communicate, agree on norms, monitor each other, and sanction noncompliance to their own covenants, then overuse, conflict, and the destruction of [common pool resources] can be reduced substantially.”

Managing common pool resources, then, is difficult but not impossible.

“If those who know the most about local time-and-place information and incentives are given sufficient autonomy to reach and enforce local covenants,” she argues. “They frequently are able to devise rules well tailored to the problems they face.”

In addition to this autonomy of the people, communication is essential:

“When symmetric subjects are given opportunities to communicate and devise their own agreements and sanctioning arrangements, then the outcomes approximate optimality,” Ostrom writes. “These findings are surprising for many theorists, because the capacity to communicate without an external enforcer for monitoring and sanctioning behavior inconsistent with covenantal agreements is considered to be mere ‘cheap talk’ having no impact on the strategic structure of the game.”

In seeing the rise of populism, in watching discontented people making bad political decisions, in seeing the mismanagement of a common pool resource, the liberal impulse is often to solve the problem through stronger regulation – to create institutions nominally managed by the people which can step in with rules and authority in order to overcome the destructive self-interest and poorly-informed actions of individual actors.

But perhaps Ostrom’s work on common pool resources ought to give us pause – “the people” may not collectively be wise, but they have the ability to surprise us; to work out their differences and to successfully self-manage in ways that external enforcing institutions could never accomplish.

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