"I Don't Know"
The most valuable but unspoken words
There are a range of topics I haven’t been able to write on yet for The Daily Inchoate — now Pose Ponder — over the last few months. For those brave souls who have read my commentaries on Hannah Arendt, John Gray, the Climate Leviathan book, and more recently the Cass vs. Slade debate, you know I’m interested in political philosophy, or how to think about underlying issues driving our current democratic woes.
We need to keep digging deep into historical and philosophical matters, but I’m also interested in what, practically, we might do now. How can we make our democracy better?
Yes, I’ve been following third parties and candidates this election year, like the Forward Party (Andrew Yang’s initiative), and now RFK Jr. and even Cornel West. I know of Cornel West because of his early writing on the philosophy of pragmatism in American thought. If you’ve ever watched him speak (he’s on YouTube), well… it’s quite the experience. We’ll have to come back to CW another day.
Democracy Next
In any case, apart from specific parties and personalities, there are a range of non-partisan movements and organizations afoot in the US to try to reform the structure of our institutions as such. Most are focused especially on election reform, with proposals like ranked choice voting, open primaries, and fixing gerrymandering. More radical are movements attempting to introduce, test, and expand direct, participatory, and deliberative democracy via citizens’ assemblies, sortition, and the like.
Democracy Next is one such organization working on citizens’ assemblies, and I like their newsletter
. This post by founder offers a compelling case for the place of citizen’s assemblies as a next stage in our democracy, for when politicians themselves can’t face complexity.
Feynmann’s Wisdom
No less a personage than the famed physicist Richard Feynmann has narrated a vivid picture of how politicians’ blunders happen (he’s quoted in the post). Politicians can’t admit they don’t know, brashly proclaim whatever solutions, over-promise, can’t deliver, and trust erodes in both public institutions and in science itself.
This is because 1) the problems are hard and complex; and 2) there’s a difference between getting the science right and debating collective values, the latter of which is not a scientific, but a moral and genuinely political concern.
Discussion and deliberation is crucial. In his lectures, Feynman also made a compelling argument for why scientific and moral arguments are independent of one another. Science helps us to understand what is likely to happen if we do something. Collective deliberation helps us to decide whether we want that to happen. In politics, we need to consider both.
There has been a breakdown in trust in science and in information quality, as well as a lack of spaces for deliberation (distinct to dialogue and debate). Deliberation meaning a collective weighing of evidence with the goal of reaching a shared decision. Dominant forces have pulled in two directions - populism on the one hand and technocracy on the other. Together they have hollowed out the space for identifying collective values and have undermined trust in science and scientists.
Information and arguments are being dismissed merely because of who is making the argument rather than as the basis of the argument itself.
The system needs to change! One possibility is to replace, or supplement, politicians who can’t admit they don’t know by a diversity of citizens in assembly, who also don’t know, BUT who can be given time to come together, learn, distinguish science from value judgments, and deliberate amongst themselves about what to do — and then advise the policy makers.
Leaning on politically incentivized “representatives” in an election-driven democracy to first understand all the relevant science and facts affecting complex issues (all the science, technology, economics, likely social-cultural impacts, etc.), then to objectively apply a representative moral lens, fails for obvious reasons.
We need people in leadership positions to be able to say “I don’t know,” and have a process that instead leverages our collective wisdom and enables us to solve problems in new ways.
So the task becomes to construct deliberative spaces to allow our society to leverage its collective wisdom.
Yes. YES. Thank You.
And not only do these spaces belong in political institutions but in many other public realms as well.
We need these deliberative spaces in our political institutions - as well as other institutions of daily life like universities and colleges, schools, workplaces, associations, and others. Spaces where people can spend time together, over lengthier periods of time. There is no magic shortcut.
It won’t be easy to construct such spaces. There’s no magic shortcut.
The Next Step
There’s also a communication problem. We the people need to hear better and be wiser about what we can expect from politicians.
Moreover, since most of us consume political news indirectly — who has time to spend all day consuming the latest tweets, press conferences, interviews, and speeches from campaigners? — that means there’s a key role for the media.
When we gain a more realistic view of what government can and can’t do — and how its operatives are incentivized not to deliberate adequately, and not to arrive at better compromises to address real problems — we will have taken the first step to moving toward necessary reforms.
We will hear many politicians argue with certainty about their solutions to the problems we face. I hope more journalists give a spotlight to those who are recognising that they don’t and never will have all the answers. That part of the solution is about changing our political processes and institutions to create deliberative spaces like Citizens’ Assemblies as essential parts of an expanded democratic architecture. (emphasis in the original)
This is an inspiring metaphor. Here’s to an expanded democratic architecture!
