Category Archives: Citizens & Civil Society

Kazo

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I recently finished reading Voyage to Kazohinia by Hungarian author Szathmári Sándor. It’s a great book, and I highly recommend picking up a copy. As it turns out, the full English text is also available online. So you really should go read it.

I have a lot of reflections after reading this striking social satire and expect to be posting more about it throughout the week. But, as a simple start today, I share the concept of kazo.

Kazo is a core element of the novel and, quite frankly, one of those terms that I’m not sure how I’ve managed so long without having in my lexicon.

But, let’s back up a bit.

It is 1935 and the world is on the brink of a second great war. Our hero, whose travel diary we read, is a respectable British Naval officer. While on en route to be stationed aboard the Invincible off the coast of Japan, our intrepid traveler – Gulliver – is shipwrecked and finds himself among a strange people in a strange land.

You have no doubt grasped that this presents an indelible opportunity to satirize western culture, and Kazohinia does not disappoint.

In the land of the Hins – as its people call themselves – Gulliver marvels at the lack of police force:

Human life and freedom seemed to have no protection here, at least until then I had seen no policeman, nowhere was there anybody with pistol or bayonet. How could they sleep at night?

Our hero finds himself similarly confused by the Hins’ inability to differentiate between ‘crime’ and ‘punishment.’ While the proper Englishman tries to explain to a hapless Hins why social order demands that a crime be met with punishment, the Hin simply shakes his head and remarks:

It is not enough that you commit crimes, you even punish as well.

In a discussion about private property, one Hin explains that such a thing cannot exist – the only thing which belongs to a person is their body. Gulliver objects:

There are certain cases when citizens must sacrifice their lives for their country, so at such times the fatherland has our bodies at its disposal. But let us not stray too far from the point. Clothes are private property that other people cannot take away.

While our hero ironically misses the conflict in his statements, he does at first find the Hins to be a near perfect culture.

I may say, it was very strange to my European eyes, seeing this society whose every member was rich without having a single penny. As if the whole society had formed a single household in within which there were no financial problems, no written regulations, no prohibited areas, and no work status problems, but where the members of the family went about freely, helping each other with the housework, and helping themselves from a dish in the middle of the table. I felt a warm, friendly, and intimate atmosphere that I had never before felt among any such people.

And how is this peaceful synchronicity possible? Kazo.

As our author explains:

Kazo is somewhere between chivalry, impartiality, patience, self-respect, and justice. It connotes a general rightful intention but cannot be translated with any of these words…Kazo is a strict mathematical concept for equality of service and counterservice, similar to the principle of action and reaction in physics. If someone who does more strenuous work also eats more, that is kazoo to them. If somebody eats more because his stomach requires it, then that is also kazoo. And if an invalid who does no work wishes to have finer food, then this, too, is kazo.

…The more talented, the stronger, produce more. To us this appears to be an injustice, but to the inhabitants of this land it is as natural as to expect a bigger output with less fuel consumption in the case of a more efficient machine.

Quite simply:

Kazo is pure reason that perceives with mathematical clarity, in a straight line, when and how it must act – so that the individual, through society, reaches the greatest possible well-being and comfort.

You might wonder how such a thing is possible. How could a whole society of people possibly effortlessly coordinate their efforts in such a way?

A Hin has a perfect parable to explain this to us:

There is a species of ant, for instance. If one ant finds honey, it will take its fill. Now, if it meets a companion that has not found honey and is hungry, it will stick its mouth into the other ant’s mouth and thus the full any will transfer honey from itself until each of them is equally satisfied. How does the full any know that the other is more hungry, and how do both know when each of them is as satisfied as the other? …They know because the fuller ant gives honey to the hungrier one, and they will be equally satisfied when they part.

Kazo, then, can perhaps best be described as the natural path towards perfect equilibrium. The ants don’t need to discuss when enough honey has been shared, nor do they need to ‘know’ in our common sense exactly how much to share. They simply do what is right. Naturally. It is kazo.

It is this principle which allows Hin society to function so smoothly. Without government or economy, without wars or hunger. As we’ll see more tomorrow, our hero is impressed, but distraught, by the functionings of the Hins:

It came to light that everything took place entirely without money. Factories turned out goods but nobody received payment. Goods, on the other hand, lay in warehouses for one and all, and indeed everyone took as much as they wished. I could not imagine how maintaining order was possible in this chaos. 

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Is Diversity Enough?

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I’ve been reading Manin’s critical Democratic Deliberation: Why We Should Promote Debate Rather Than Discussion.

At the core of his argument, Manin complains that liberal theorists traditionally conflate “diversity of views” with “conflicting views.” Holding that a necessary and sufficient condition for good deliberation is “that participants in discussion hold diverse views and articulate a variety of perspectives, reflecting the heterogeneity of their experiences and backgrounds.”

To be clear, Manin isn’t suggesting that diversity of thought isn’t critical to deliberation – rather, he argues, it is not sufficient.

“Diversity of views is not a sufficient condition for deliberation because it may fail to bring into contact opposing views,” he writes. “It is the opposition of views and reasons that is necessary for deliberation, not just their diversity.”

There are many ways in which the mere presence of diversity may not result in the articulation of divergent views. Social psychology research has well documented the challenges of confirmation bias, where people “systematically misperceive and misinterpret evidence that is counter to their preexisting belief.” Or even avoid conflicting evidence all together.

To make matters worse, Manin points to research which further finds that “groups process information in a more biased way than individuals do, preferring information that supports their prior dominant belief to an even greater extent than individual people.”

More broadly, diverse experiences and views may not always translate directly into divergent opinions or perspectives on a given topic. Manin asks us to imagine a community facing a very reasonable and rational fear: say, a serial killer is on the loose. Discussing a proposal to expand police powers at this time of crisis, “the variety of perspectives and dispersion of social knowledge among them will ensure that many arguments, each deriving from the particular perspective, experience, or background of the speaker, are heard in support of expanding the prerogatives to the police.”

That is, the diverse reasons may all support the same view.

And finally, in a large heterogenous society, diverse opinions and experience may become polarized as fragmented, separate communities. That is, “a variety of internally homogeneous communities will coexist, each ignoring the views of the others.”

And, of course, there is the deep problem of power. Divergent perspectives will often go unspoken in situations where one group or groups have been systematically oppressed and silenced. Where even explicit invitations to freely share their views are rightly perceived as hollow or out-right disingenuous. This is a dynamic which John Gaventa documents powerfully in his study of poor, white, coal miners in the Appalachian Valley.

The damaging impact of this dynamic cannot be understated, as Gaventa argues, “power serves to create power. Powerlessness serves to re-enforce powerlessness. Power relationships, once established, are self-sustaining.”

Finally, there is the simple social challenge that “encountering disagreement”, as Manin writes, “generates psychic discomfort.” People don’t really like to argue.

(Of note here, there is little cross-cultural consideration in Manin, so while mainstream America’s distaste for argumentative discourse is well documented in numerous places, I’m not sure how broad a claim this properly ought to be.)

The solution to this seems simple: argue more. Take “deliberate and affirmative measures” to ensure lively debate and critical discussion. Don’t just assume that if diverse people are present, diverse voices will be heard. Seek out divergent views and conflicting arguments. If no one else says them – argue for them yourself.

This last point, I think, is particularly critical in looking at deliberation through a power-lens. If you are a position of power you are responsible for ensuring that diverse view be heard. This can mean working to create a safe space where people genuinely feel welcomed to share their views – or it can mean saying the unpopular thing yourself, putting it out there as a valid idea, worthy of further consideration.

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Predictive Accuracy and Good Dialogue

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While I’m relatively new to the computer science domain, one thing that’s notable is the field’s obsession with predictive accuracy. Particularly within natural language processing, the primary objective of most scholars – or, perhaps, more exactly, the requirement for being published – seems to be producing methods which edge past the accuracy of existing approaches.

I’m not really in a position to comment on the benefit of such a driver, but as an outsider, this focus is striking. I have to imagine there are great, historical reasons why the field evolved this way; that the mentality of constantly pushing towards incremental improvement has been an important factor in the great breakthroughs of computer science.

Yet, I can’t help feel like in this quest for computational improvement, something important is being left behind.

There are compelling arguments that the social sciences have done poorly to abandon their humanistic roots in favor of emulating the fashionable fields of science; that in grasping for predictive measures, social science has failed its duty towards the most critical concerns of what is right and good. Perhaps, after all, questions of such import should not be solely the domain of philosophy departments.

It seems a similar objection could be raised towards computer science; and no doubt someone I’m not aware of has raised these concerns. Such an approach would go beyond the philosophical literature on moral issues in computer science, probing more deeply into questions of meaning, interpretation, and structure.

Wittgenstein questioned fundamentally what it means for two people to communicate. Austin argues that words themselves can be actions. And there is, of course, a long tradition in many cultures of words having power.

None of these topics, while intrinsic to natural language, seem to be deeply embraced by current approaches to natural language processing. Much better to show a two point increase in predictive accuracy.

And to a certain extent, this dismissal is fair. While I myself have a fondness for Wittgenstein, I imagine computer science wouldn’t advance far if, instead of developing algorithms, practitioners spent all their time wondering – if you tell me you are in pain, do I understand you because I, too, have had my own experiences of pain? How can I know what ‘pain’ means to you? 

Yet, while Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations may be too far afield, it does highlight some practical issues. Perhaps metaphysical concerns about what it means to communicate can be safely disregarded, but this still leaves questions about what it looks like to communicate. That is, it seems reasonable to assume that miscommunication does happen, but what happens to dialogue plagued by such problems? What does it look like when people talk past each other or when they recognize a miscommunication and take steps to resolve it? Can an algorithm distinguish and properly parse these differences? Remembering, of course, that a human, perhaps, cannot.

In a recent review of literature around the natural language processing task of argument mining, I was struck by the value of a 1987 paper focused on understanding the structure of a single speech-act. It evoked no Wittgenstein-level of abstraction, and yet brought an important element of theory to the computational task of parsing a single argument.

I couldn’t find – and perhaps I missed it – no similar paper exploring the complex interactions of dialogue. Of course, there is much work done in this area among deliberation scholars – but this effort is not easily translated into the mechanized logic of algorithms.

In short, there seems to be a divide – a common one, I’m afraid, in the academy. In one field, theorists ask, what does it mean to deliberate? What makes good deliberation? And in another they ask, what algorithms can recognize arguments? What algorithms accurately predict stance? 

And, while both pursuing important work, the fields fail to learn from each other.

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Expertise

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A common theme in community work is questioning what it means to be an expert. 

Given the complex and technical issues our communities face, it seems reasonable, perhaps, to rely on the knowledge of experts. After all, there’s a reason why people undertake years of schooling to become urban planners, architects, or other types of experts.

A prevalent challenge to this model is that it over looks the knowledge which “average” community members have. An architect may know how to design a building that won’t fall down, but the ‘community’, broadly speaking, knows what aesthetics and functionality are most important and needed. They are experts in their own right.

I was reminded of this debate earlier this week though, surprisingly, an article in Nature about quantum physics work by J. J. W. H. Sørensen et al.:

With particles that can exist in two places at once, the quantum world is often considered to be inherently counterintuitive. Now, a group of scientists has created a video game that follows the laws of quantum mechanics, but at which non-physicist human players excel.

There are few interesting points here. First, the work is advancing human understanding of quantum physics. Second, the human brain seems to be more capable of understanding quantum physics than we previously thought.

Finally – and germane to the point above – the physicists on the team who designed the game…found it extremely challenging. Being a physicist, or having expertise in physics, didn’t determine someone’s ability to succeed at this quantum game. Gamers, on the other hand, when their own type of expertise, did better than the physicists and the computer models combined.

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Deliberative Democracy and Who Gets to Speak

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There is a radical idea at the core of deliberative theory: every person’s voice is important.

I say this idea is radical because it’s the kind of thing one generally feels they ought to say without necessarily being the kind of thing one is genuinely inclined to believe.

Believing every voice is important has the virtuous quality of implying an egalitarian sense of justice and equity. Being in favor of the continued oppression of the oppressed is hardly popular in most circles.

But making this claim, truly believing this claim, goes beyond the nobel argument that those who are most vulnerable, who are most silenced should, too, have a voice in our collective creation of the world.

Believing that every voice – every voice – is important means supporting blowhards and bigots, the ignorant and the idiots.

That is a difficult belief to bear.

One can try to resolve this conflict through imposed norms of consideration and inclusion, but such measures fall short of being deeply satisfactory. For one thing, it raises complex normative questions as people’s core identities conflict – cries of religious discrimination and reverse racism are sure to follow; arguably trading one person’s silence for another.

More deeply, while such norms importantly shape the safety of an otherwise hostile environment, they do little to eradicate the deep, systemic issues underneath. Being ‘color blind’  may have made overt racism impolite, but it has done little to resolve the structural racism of our society.

These are, of course, meaningful topics to debate – perhaps it is entirely worthy to ask a person of privilege to step back so that someone else has the opportunity to step up. Perhaps the harm done in silencing a bigot is little compared to the harm done in letting them speak.

But such discourse also highlights the deeper, theoretical tension: who gets to speak? whose voice is important?

So in this sense, believing that every voice is important is indeed radical.

That’s not at all to say that deliberative theorists want to support bigots and idiots, but it’s a narrow path to follow.

In most deliberative discussions, participants begin by setting their own ground rules. Sometimes rules are suggested to get them started, but this is the group’s first critical task of co-creation.

Because no one else can set these rules for them. No facilitator or outside person can tell them what to think or how to behave. The members of the group need to think about what kind of conversation they want to have and they each need to agree to the rules collectively set out.

Respect is typically among the first of these values – respecting the voice and experience of every person; those you agree with and, importantly, those with whom you don’t.

This is the only way out of this tangle.

Because to believe in the value of every voice means also to believe in the power of deliberative dialogue. To believe that when every person is truly valued, when diverse perspectives are thoughtfully exchanged – that it is this collective experience which truly has the power to transform us and move us towards the ideal democracy we all separately seek.

It is radical, this belief, and – despite the possible complications – ultimately the greatest benefit to those who have been silenced; who have been deeply taught to believe that their voices, minds, and experiences don’t matter.

After all, you cannot believe that every voice is important if you don’t first find your own.

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The Death of Dr. Martin Luther King

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On April 4, 1968 – forty-eight years ago yesterday – at 6:01 pm, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as he stood on the second floor balcony of room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Four days later,  Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) introduced legislation to establish a national holiday to honor Dr. King. That legislation was eventually signed into law on November 2, 1983; fifteen years after Dr. King’s death.

On the occasion of the bill signing, President Ronald Regan declared:

…our nation has decided to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., by setting aside a day each year to remember him and the just cause he stood for. We’ve made historic strides since Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. As a democratic people, we can take pride in the knowledge that we Americans recognized a grave injustice and took action to correct it. And we should remember that in far too many countries, people like Dr. King never have the opportunity to speak out at all. 

But traces of bigotry still mar America. So, each year on Martin Luther King Day, let us not only recall Dr. King, but rededicate ourselves to the Commandments he believed in and sought to live every day: Thou shall love thy God with all thy heart, and thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself. And I just have to believe that all of us—if all of us, young and old, Republicans and Democrats, do all we can to live up to those Commandments, then we will see the day when Dr. King’s dream comes true.

Perhaps, in the optimistic spirit of Dr. King, it is right that we remember his legacy on the day of his birth. Yet this observance is cruel in kindness, somehow – a soft celebration of our darker days.

As a democratic people, we can take pride in the knowledge that we Americans recognized a grave injustice and took action to correct it. 

Took too little action, I’m afraid.

We made progress, no doubt, but far too little compared to the difficult work still ahead of us. The legacy of our history, the deeds of our ancestors, are not so easily wiped out. It’s shameful to pretend otherwise.

Yet once a year, we blithely celebrate our victory; we take pride in our justice and imagine that we, if given the opportunity, would have been on the right side of history. Such tragedies would never happen in our America.

And little do we note the day of Dr. King’s passing; the day white violence took him from our world.

It’s an easy choice in some ways; far better to recognize a day of hope, to celebrate our better selves. But the murder of Dr. King is our legacy, too; a painful reality which is easier to ignore.

So perhaps we would do well to remember the speech Dr. King gave the day before his assassination.

Dr. King declared that he was happy to have lived “just a few years” in the current time. It was a dark and dangerous time, but he was happy because:

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”

Dr. King knew that there were threats against him. He knew that the FBI had invested him and urged him to commit suicide. He knew that there were many who would act to see him dead. But, he declared:

…it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.

And I don’t mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I’m happy, tonight.

I’m not worried about anything.

He was murdered the next day.

And his legacy lives on.

But his true legacy is not a reflection of the injustice behind us, but rather a reminder of the work still ahead of us. He had gone up the mountain; he had seen the promised land.

We have a long journey remaining, and there is much work to be done.

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Politics in an Ideal World

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Not long ago, a friend asked me why anyone would want to engage in politics for politics’ sake. We worry about such things because we have to, but wouldn’t it be better, in some theoretical, ideal world, if we didn’t have to?

Imagine, for a moment, a perfect world; a society so flawless that it was always just and fair without any need for engagement from its citizens. In such a world, people would have no need for the frustrating practice of politics – they would be free, instead, to devote their time to more productive endeavors.

Now, such a thought experiment immediately raises all sorts of practical concerns; but let’s for a moment put those aside and assume that such an ideal society is both attainable and sustainable. In such a world, what would the role of citizens be?

In thinking about this question, it seemed natural to turn to John Dewey, philosopher, educator, and unwavering proponent of what he called the Great Community . Dewey’s 1927 book, The Public and It’s Problems defended democracy and responded directly to the skeptical critique of Walter Lippmann.

You’ll note here a subtle shift in language – is the thought experiment one of politics or one of democracy? Much lies, I suppose, in the definitions of these terms, but I’ll borrow here from Dewey in detangling them:

We have had occasion to refer in passing to the distinction between democracy as a social idea and political democracy as a system of government. The two are, of course, connected. The idea remains barren and empty save as it is incarnated in human relationships. Yet in discussion they must be distinguished. The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best. To be realized it must affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion. 

To be clear, Dewey had little loyalty to the specific mechanisms of political democracy:

There is no sanctity in universal suffrage, frequent elections, majority rule, congressional and cabinet government. These things are devices evolved in the direction in which the current was moving, each wave of which involved at the time of its impulsion a minimum of departure from antecedent custom and law. The devices served a purpose; but the purpose was rather that of meeting existing needs which had become too intense to be ignored, than that of forwarding the democratic idea. 

So, if ‘politics’ is simply the act of engaging in a narrow system of political democracy whose mechanisms randomly sedimented over time, it’s unclear that Dewey would have much zeal for the idea of politics as an essential element of human life.

However, ‘politics’ can also be interpreted through the wider lens of democracy as a social idea; a concept to which Dewey was deeply committed.

For Dewey, democracy wasn’t a set of systems or an inventory of regulations; it was a way of life:

Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself.

In this sense, ‘politics’ is the very element which transforms the “physical and organic” stuff of “associated life” into the moral entity of community. The work of politics is the work of building the Great Community:

We are born organic beings associated with others, but we are not born members of a community. The young have to be brought within the traditions, outlook and interests which characterize a community by means of education…Everything which is distinctively human is learned…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 believes, desires and methods, and who contributes to a further conversion of organic powers onto human resources and values.

Importantly, Dewey argues that the two senses of politics cannot exist separately; without the broader understanding of social democracy, the mechanisms of political democracy reduce to nonsense: Fraternity, liberty and equality isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions.

It is only through the engagement of the people in this deeper politics, in democracy as a way of life, that we can ever achieve the mechanisms of political democracy we strive for.

If, some how, the ideal world described above were possible – if justice rained from the sky with no effort from below; such a society would still be lacking in the moral concept of democracy writ large.

Dewey was under no illusion that transforming the mechanisms of political democracy would be an easy undertaking – but it was a transformation he believed could only occur through the political work of the Great Community:

The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not a despotic master. It had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its consumption when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication.

 

 

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Education, Democracy, and The Establishment

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Last week, drawing on the work of Walter Lippmann, I raised several concerns about the about inclusion of popular voice in democracy.

In some ways, these concerns seem at odds – what is democracy if not the free governing of the people by the people? To reduce the voice of ‘the people’ in any political system is to draw it away from democracy and, perhaps more critically, to violate democratic ideals.

It cannot be denied that there is a tension here. A tension between the noble goal of empowerment of every day citizens and the truly hard work of governing itself.

What good is allowing the people to govern if ‘the people’ are not truly fit to govern?

At its core, this debate boils down to one of education versus problem solving. Myles Horton, educator, organizer, and long time director of the Highlander Folk School, spoke about this debate through the lens of organizing:

If the purpose is to solve the problem, there are a lot of ways to solve the problem that are so much simpler than going through all this educational process…But if education is to be part of the process, then you may not actually get that problem solved, but you’ve educated a lot of people. You have to make that choice.

If you’re a community organizer whose goal is to solve a problem in the community, you may need ‘the people’ in the sense that you need the strength of their support; you need the power that comes from numbers. Any good community organizer would also want the identification of the problem and definition of a solution to come from the community; but this is still a somewhat shallow form of engagement.

An organizer, working in partnership with the community they are organizing, guides the direction of action; provides professional feedback and support on what strategies and tactics are most likely to succeed. This type of organizing is more empowering than what community members might experience otherwise and can lead directly to much-needed positive outcomes in the community.

But it is not education.

Horton describes a particularly memorable scene in which, gun to his head, he refused to tell a community member what action to take. “Go ahead and shoot if you want to, but I’m not going to tell you,” he recalls.

In recollecting the moment, Horton explains his reasoning. If he had told what to do “all would be lost.”

He saw himself not as an organizer, trying to work towards a just system, but rather as an educator, developing citizens capable of building their own just systems.

From this, I find that theorists such as Lippmann are right: if we want a political system which most fairly distributes resources, which is just and thoughtful in its approach, the broad and unfiltered inclusion of the mass of public voices is not the best way to accomplish that goal.

But such a concern overlooks a critical point: is that indeed our goal?

If instead we want a political system which empowers every person to participate; which truly believes that all people – all people – have a right and responsibility to engage in public work; if we want a society that truly values the input, insights, and voice of every single member – that is a different goal to work for.

And, indeed, such an educational approach is not the best way to achieve immediate political goals.

If you want to change policy, engage the people; if you want to change systemic structures, educate the people.

Of course, all this hardly settles the debate: if no amount of education and preparation could prepare ‘the people’ to govern, such efforts would find long-term as well as short-term failure.

As a matter of practicality, one can argue this course without degrading the people too much. That is, to say that ‘the people’ are unalterably unfit for the lofty task we set them to is not intrinsically to claim that commoners are too stupid, lazy, or uncaring for this task.

The world is a complicated place. With the constant influx of information and the deep histories that have brought us to the societies we have today, no individual person could hardly be expected to have all the knowledge and expertise needed to justly rule.

Considering that this task would be deeply challenging for even an idealized world leader, whose sole task is to consider such issues and whose efforts are supported by a staff of experts – you can hardly expect an average person, whose time and worries are reasonably devoted to other matters, to be up to the task.

Arguing this path isn’t an insult to the common man; it is rather a recognition of impossible goal society’s ideals have set for them.

The challenge that I see is that we find ourselves caught between these two paths. It is a sort of pseudo-democracy, in which we comfort ourselves that we, the people, are the ones to govern, but in which we each deem the majority of our peers as unfit for the task.

In this way, we can always blame the “them”: if political engagement were only restricted to those who are correct (like us), than we could have the ideal government we long for. Such disenfranchisement would be the most efficient way to achieve our ends, but – knowing how unjust it would be if “they” were to disenfranchise “us” – we instead settle into a deep melancholia for the world.

And, if one thing is certain, such political ennui fulfills its own unfortunate goal – to maintain the status quo and cement the standing of those with the most power; effectively disenfranchising both the “us” and the “them.”

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Populism and Democracy

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Yesterday, I discussed some of the concerns Walter Lippmann raised about entrusting too much power to “the people” at large.

Such concerns are near blasphemy in a democratically-spiritual society, yet I consistently find myself turning towards Lippmann as a theorist who eloquently raises critical issues which, in my view, have yet to be sufficiently addressed.

At their worst, Lippmann’s arguments are interpreted as rash calls for technocracy: if “the people” cannot be trusted, only those who are educated, thoughtful, and qualified should be permitted to voice public opinions. In short, political power should rightly remain with the elites.

I find that to be a misreading of Lippmann and a disservice to the importance of the issues he raises.

In fact, Lippmann’s primary concern was technocracy – the governing of an elite caring solely  for their own interests and whose power ensured their continued dominion. Calling such a system “democracy” merely creates an illusion of the public’s autonomy, thereby only serving to cement elites’ power.

I do not dispute that Lippmann finds “the public” wanting. He clearly believes that the population at large is not up to the serious tasks of democracy.

But his charges are not spurious. The popularity of certain Republican candidates and similarly fear-mongering politicians around the world should be enough to give us pause. The ideals of democracy are rarely achieved; what is popular is not intrinsically synonymous with what is Good.

This idea is distressing, no doubt, but it is worth spending time considering the possible causes of the public failures.

One account puts this blame on the people themselves: people, generally speaking, are too lazy, stupid, or short sighted to properly execute the duties of a citizen. This would be a call for some form of technocratic or meritocratic governance – perhaps those who don’t put in the effort to be good citizens should be plainly denied a voice in governance.

Robert Heinlein, for example, suggests in his fiction that only those who serve in the military should be granted the full voting rights of citizenship. “Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part…and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.”

Similarly, people regularly float the idea of a basic civics test to qualify for voting. You aren’t permitted to drive a car without proving you know the rules of the road; you shouldn’t be allowed to vote unless you can name the branches of government.

Such a plan may seem reasonable on the surface, but it quickly introduces serious challenges. For generations in this country, literacy tests have been used to disenfranchise poor voters, immigrants, and people of color. And even if such disenfranchisement weren’t the result of intentional discrimination – as it often was – the existence of any such test would be biased in favor of those with better access to knowledge.

That is – those with power and privilege would have no problems passing such a test while our most vulnerable citizens would face a significant barrier. To make matters worse, these patterns of power and privilege run deeply through time – a civics test for voting quickly goes from a tool to encourage people to work for their citizenship to a barrier that does little but reinforce the divide between an elite class and non-elites.

And this gives a glimpse towards another explanation for the public’s failure: perhaps the problem lies not with “the people” but with the systems. Perhaps people are unengaged or ill-informed not because of their own faults, but because the structures of civic engagement don’t permit their full participation.

Lippmann, for example, documented how even the best news agencies fail in their duty to inform the public. But the structural challenges for engagement run deeper.

In Power and Powerlessness, John Gaventa documents how poor, white coal miners regularly voted in local elections – and consistently voted for those candidates supported by coal mine owners. These were often candidates who actively sought to crush unions and worked against workers rights. Any fool could see they did not have the interest of the people at heart…but the people voted for them anyway, often in near-unamous elections.

To the outsider, these people seem stupid or lazy – the type whose vote should be taken away for their own good. But, Gaventa argues, to interpret that is to miss what’s really going on:

Continual defeat gives rise not only to the conscious deferral of action but also to a sense of defeat, or a sense of powerlessness, that may affect the consciousness of potential challengers about grievances, strategies or possibilities for change….From this perspective, the total impact of a power relationship is more than the sum of its parts. Power serves to create power. Powerlessness serves to re-enforce powerlessness.

In the community Gaventa studied, past attempts to exercise political voice dissenting from the elite had lead to people loosing their jobs and livelihoods. If I remember correctly, some had their homes burned and some had been shot.

It had been some time since such retribution had been taken, but Gaventa’s point is that it didn’t need to be. Elites had established their control so thoroughly, so completely, that poor residents did what was expected of them without hardly a thought. They didn’t need to be threatened so rudely; their submission was complete.

Arguably, theorists like Lippmann see a similar phenomenon happening more broadly.

If you are deeply skeptical of the system, you might believe it to be set up intentionally to minimize the will of the people. In the States at least, our founding fathers were notoriously scared of giving “the people” too much power. They liked the idea of democracy, but also saw the flaws and dangers of pure democracy.

In Federalist 10, James Madison argued:

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

To give equal power to all the people is to set yourself up for failure; to leave nothing to check “an obnoxious individual.”

Again, there is something very reasonable in this argument. I’ve read enough stories about people being killed in Black Friday stampedes to know that crowds don’t always act with wisdom. And yet, from Gaventa’s argument I wonder – do the systems intended to check the madness of the crowd rather work to re-inforce power and inequity; making the nameless crowd just that more wild when an elite chooses to whip them into a frenzy?

Perhaps this system – democracy but not democracy – populism but not populism – is self-reinforcing; a poison that encourages the public – essentially powerless – to use what power they have to support those crudest of elites who prey on fear hatred to advance their own power.

As Lippmann writes in The Phantom Public, “the private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row …In the cold light of experience he knows that his sovereignty is a fiction. He reigns in theory, but in fact he does not govern…”

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On Public Opinion

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Walter Lippmann was notoriously skeptical of “the people.”

The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist was all too familiar with the art of propaganda, with the ease with which elites could shape so-called “public opinion.”

In 1920, Lippmann – who had worked for the “intelligence section” of the U.S. government during the first World War – published a 42-page study on “A Test of the News” with collaborator Charles Merz.

“A sound public opinion cannot exist without access to the news,” they argued, and yet there is “a widespread and a growing doubt whether there exists such an access to the news about contentious affairs.”

That doubt doesn’t seem to have diminished any in the last hundred years.

Civic theory generally imagines an ideal citizen to be one who actively seeks out the news and possesses the sophistication to stay non-biasedly informed of current events. But debate over the practically of that ideal is moot if even such an ideal citizen cannot gain access to accurate and unbiased news.

Lippmann and Merz sought to empirically measure the quality of the news by examining over three thousand articles published the esteemed New York Times during the Russian Revolution (1917-1920).

What they found was disheartening:

From the point of view of professional journalism the reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster. On the essential questions the net effect was almost always misleading, and misleading news is worse than none at all. Yet on the face of the evidence there is no reason to charge a conspiracy by Americans. They can fairly be charged with boundless credulity, and an untiring readiness to be gulled, and on many occasions with a downright lack of common sense.

Whether they were “giving the public what it wants” or creating a public that took what it got, is beside the point. They were performing the supreme duty in a democracy of supplying the information on which public opinion feeds, and they were derelict in that duty. Their motives may have been excellent. They wanted to win the war; they wanted to save the world. They were nervously excited by exciting events. They were baffled by the complexity of affairs, and the obstacles created by war. But whatever the excuses, the apologies, and the extenuation, the fact remains that a great people in a supreme crisis could not secure the minimum of necessary information on a supremely important event.

And lest we think such failures are relegated to history, consider the U.S. media’s coverage leading up to the Iraq War. Here, too, it seems fair to say that whatever the motives of media, they were indeed derelict in their duty.

Such findings gave Lippmann a deep sense of unease for “popular opinion.”

“The public,” he writes in The Phantom Public (1925), “will arrive in the middle of the third act and will leave before the last curtain, having stayed just long enough perhaps to decide who is the hero and who the villain of the piece.”

The public makes its judgements on gut instinct and imperfect knowledge. Most do not understand a situation in full detail – they know neither the history nor the possible implications of their views. They are consumed with the details of their own daily lives, raising their eyes to politics just long enough to briefly consider what might be best for them in that moment.

Such a system is sure to end in disaster – with public opinion little more than a tool manipulated by elites.

As Sheldon Wolin describes in Political Theory as Vocation, such a system would be ‘democracy’ in name but not in deed:

The mass of the population is periodically doused with the rhetoric of democracy and assured that it lives in a democratic society and that democracy is the condition to which all progressive-minded societies should aspire. Yet that democracy is not meant to realize the demos but to constrain and neutralize it by the arts of electoral engineering and opinion management. It is, necessarily, regressive. Democracy is embalmed in public rhetoric precisely in order to memorialize its loss of substance. Substantive democracy—equalizing, participatory, commonalizing—is antithetical to everything that a high-reward, meritocratic society stands for.

This is the nightmare Lippmann sought to avoid – but it also the undeniable reality he saw around him.

In elevating “the voice of the people” to “the voice of god,” our founders not only made a claim Lippmann considers absurd, but paved the way for a government of elites, by elites, and for elites – all in the hollow, but zealously endorsed, name of “the people.”

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