From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Aug 23 2003 - 21:30:23 MDT
At 08:49 PM 8/23/03 +0200, Anders wrote:
>Another factor worth taking into account is that a lot gets done despite
>people being lazy, stupid and misguided. It is easy to fall into the
>trap of assuming that everybody ought to be as smart and reasonable as
>oneself. But it is also easy to think that everybody is an idiot - it is
>mostly a matter of current mood and personality. In reality there is an
>even mix of people, and no futuristic project based on assuming that
>people are homogeneous has any real chance of working.
>...The best we can do is to show the
>way, make people interested, help to make it politically possible and
>acceptable and formulate overarching visions that hopefully provide a
>framework on which to build. But we should not be surprised or dismayed
>that people build what *they* want, not what *we* want.
Yes. In this context, I'll post below (for discussion) a very slightly
modified version of an essay on the feasibility and desirability of direct
democracy, written in 1966 when I was more an elitist than I am today. I've
modified it slightly to take account of the reality of the Internet, which
I invoked as a futuristic possibility (`the Zeitgeist machine'), and some
other small details. My neuroscience was sketchy nearly 40 years ago, but I
believe still stands up in general terms. I start the piece with a long
quote from a Heinlein novella that I found creepy but compelling, and still
do.
This must be regarded as an unfinished project. I no longer subscribe to
the flourishing 1966 ending, where I said (smartarse that I was, and
quoting a friend's quip) that perhaps Plato was right in supposing that
what the people wanted was `a fuck, a feed, and a Fuehrer'.
Damien Broderick
===========================
I
`We defined thinking as the ability to recognize data, store them,
integrate them, evaluate correctly the result and arrive at a correct
answer. Look around you. Most people do that stunt just well enough to get
to the corner store and back without breaking a leg. If the average man
thinks at all, he does silly things like generalizing from a single datum.
He uses one--valued logics. If he is exceptionally bright, he may use
two-valued, `either--or' logic to arrive at his wrong answers. If he is
hungry, hurt, or personally interested in the answer, he can't use any sort
of logic and will discard an observed fact as blithely as he will stake his
life on a piece of wishful thinking. He uses the technical miracles created
by superior men without wonder or surprise, as a kitten accepts a bowl of
milk. Far from aspiring to higher reasoning he is not even aware that
higher reasoning exists. He classes his own mental process as being of the
same sort as the genius of an Einstein. Man is not a rational animal; he is
a rationalizing animal.
`For explanations of a universe that confuses him he seizes onto
numerology, astrology, hysterical religions, and other fancy ways to go
crazy. Having accepted such glorified nonsense, facts make no impression on
him, even if at the cost of his own life. Joe, one of the hardest things to
believe is the abysmal depth of human stupidity.'
`The idea is to skim the cream of the race's germ plasm and keep it
biologically separate until the two races are permanently distinct? You
chaps sound like a bunch of stinkers, Baldwin!'
`Monkey talk.'
`Perhaps. The new race would necessarily run things-'
`Do you expect New Man to decide grave matters by counting common man's
runny noses?'
`No, that was my point. Postulating such a new race, the result is
inevitable. Baldwin, I confess to a monkey prejudice in favor of democracy,
human dignity, and freedom. It goes beyond logic; it is the kind of a world
I like. In my job I have mingled with the outcasts of society, shared their
slum-gullion. Stupid they may be, bad they are not-I have no wish to see
them become domestic animals.'
For the first time the big man showed concern. His persona slipped away;
he sat in brooding majesty, a lonely and unhappy figure. `I know, Joe. They
are of us; their little dignities, their nobilities, are not lessened by
their sorry state. Yet it must be...
`I confess to that same affection for democracy, Joe. But it's like
yearning for the Santa Claus you believed in as a child. For a hundred and
fifty years or so democracy, or something like it, could flourish safely.
The issues were such as could be settled without disaster by the votes of
common men, befogged and ignorant as they were. But now, if the race is
simply to stay alive, political decisions depend on real knowledge of such
things as nuclear physics, planetary ecology, genetic theory, even system
mechanics. They aren't up to it, Joe. With goodness and more will than they
possess less than one in a thousand could stay awake over one page of
nuclear physics; they can't learn what they must know.'
Gilead brushed it aside. `It's up to us to brief them. Their hearts are
all right; tell them the score-they'll come down with the right answers.'
`No, Joe. We've tried it; it does not work. As you say, most of them are
good. Yet there are bad ones. Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the
yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men. The
little man has no way to judge and the shoddy lies are packaged more
attractively. There is no way to offer color to a colorblind man, nor is
there any way for us to give the man of imperfect brain the canny skill to
distinguish a lie from a truth.'
Gilead's brain followed Baldwin's argument and assured him that it was
true; his inclinations fought it. He was confronted with the sharpest of
all tragedy: two equally noble and valid rights, bitterly opposed...
Gulf, Robert A. Hein1ein
II
Government is one of the primary operational meta-structures of a complex
community. By `structure' I mean the network of roles that determine and
circumscribe the activities and relationships of individuals who comprise
the community.
In simple societies, structure is generally derived from kinship and the
specialized kinds of craft skills and secret traditional knowledge that
people pass down from father or uncle to son, mother or aunt to daughter.
Structure is all; there is no need for meta-structure. In modern societies,
such simple structures become disrupted by mobility. Custom loses its
invariance. Anomie replaces order and expectation. Systems of communication
and control must be devised instead of found in some natural, traditional
order of things. Painfully, meta-structure comes into being. `Trouble
starts (governments). Their existence testifies to the fact that the
elementary and almost instinctive ways in which men ordinarily arrange
their joint affairs have broken down.'1
So government is the mechanism through which conscious adaptive control
and co-ordination can be exercised in a de-tribalised community. Democracy
is the species of that genus `founded in the free responsiveness of the
state to the community'.2 Democratic institutions provide direct feedback
between the controlled and the controllers, ultimately and importantly
exemplified in the communal option to elect or depose the governmental
executives.
Direct democracy is the actual legislative formulation by the full body
of the citizenry, which decides by referendum what, when and how measures
shall be put into practice. James Madison, in the Federalist, used
`democracy' in this way, distinguishing it from `republic' or popular
representative government. It has been distinguished from `psephocracy'3
(rule via the ballot box), a synonym for republicanism which emphasizes the
wide gap separating contemporary `democracy' from direct, hands-on democracy.
Psephocracy is a retreat from decision, from responsibility, from debate,
from self-direction. It boasts the forms of republicanism but, lacking the
substance, rarely employs them. Oligopolistic mass-media emasculate the
habit of free discussion not merely by censoring information but by
providing a simulacrum of open debate. Inflated xenophobia and patriotism
can swamp the educated habit-of-truth by presenting dissent as dangerously
close to treason.
`In fact, the accepted view is that those who try, by pressure and
agitation, to prevent the government from taking actions which they
consider wrong are infringing the rules of the system and going back on an
implicit bargain. Their proper course is to keep quiet and vote the other
way when the chance comes round.'4 And the same pressures act, very
often-even in polities where elections do provide a real alternative-to
render the citizenry psychologically incapable of making that real choice.
Procedurally, direct democracy differs from psephocracy in its frequent
consultation with the voters; psychologically, elitist objections to rule
by the people applies even more strongly. One would expect that at least
some decisions made by referendum would not be identical with those reached
after a debate of `representatives'. Nonetheless, there is no reason to
suspect that a vote decided by a majority of media--befogged citizens of
average intelligence would be more rational than one decided by
(presumably) more intelligent, party-bound `representatives' reflecting
sectional interests. It might be more popular, but so was bread and circus.
Is rationality a desideratum? If government is the mechanism of control and
co-ordination, it must primarily be a rational process; otherwise,
democracy becomes the apotheosis of the majority's whim-more properly,
ochlocracy, or mob rule.
It has been urged that, it is futile discussing such a system in the
modern context, whatever the merits or demerits of direct democracy.5
Granted, the Swiss Confederation allows veto of constitutional proposals,
laws and treaties, and permits by popular resort to the initiative the
introduction and approval of constitutional amendments. Yet, `whatever
value we may set on the unique Swiss system, it is certainly far removed
from the turbulent direct democracy of the Ancient Greeks.'6 Moreover, it
is often declared, such a procedure would be cumbersome and slow,
impossible in a dispersed technological society.
The Internet and mass communications are now sufficiently advanced,
however, to solve the technical aspects of such difficulties. What is of
greater concern than its empirical feasibility are the implications for the
human condition if computerized direct democracy were introduced.
Intelligence, sheer neuralogical capacity to assimilate and order data, and
creativity, the blend of brain and environmental which generates new
hypotheses, important as they are in this context, are by no means the
whole reason why direct democracy does not yet seem a terribly good idea.
III
Laid down by John Stuart Mill, the ethical foundations of democratic
theory, are predicated on the moral dignity of humans as rational and
volitional beings. Mill's wonderful statement on tolerance7 leads directly
to the view which `defines liberty as an attribute of societies which
tolerate and facilitate peaceful reassessments and reforms.'8 In Ernest
Gellner's words: `Certainty enters only as a negative epistemological
thesis.'9
Mill's faith `in the moral value of democracy was combined, however with
an acute awareness of the practical dangers implicit in mass action... His
great fear of the masses was that they would use their power to discourage
or prohibit uncommon lines of thought and action, forcing everyone to
conform to a common standard of popular mediocrity.'10 To avoid imposed
conformity, he proposed that democracy be postponed while `under the
tutelage of a liberal-minded minority, the masses could slowly acquire the
various skills needed for effective citizenship. As their education
progressed, their political responsibilities would increase in like
proportion.'11 Yet Mill felt that even when this had been achieved, the
best form of democracy would be represent-ative government.
He would have agreed that democracy was the system of rule founded in the
free responsiveness of the state to the community-but only if that
community was educated and liberal, which on the whole would elect able and
rational representatives. Has that been the experience of the past century
and a half? One might doubt it, by and large.
The bright, brave dreams even of sober optimists like Mill lie often
flayed and broken on the threshing-floor of history.
IV
Perhaps a valediction to democracy is premature. Perhaps the dubious
triumph of psephocracy is merely a phase in the education to democracy, an
affluent adolescent extravaganza of complacency, as the Soviets use to
suggest the harsh communism of Stalin was in the long road to the withering
of the state. I'll tell you why I don't think so.
Jacob Bronowski, in Science and Human Values, brilliantly and plausibly
demonstrated how the liberal, humane values of truthfulness, justice,
respect, independence, tolerance are generated as the necessary conditions
for the practise of science or any form of creative endeavor. When the
Hobbesian seeks to justify these virtues, it must be for their expedience
in the general self-interest. It is possible to do this-indeed, A. S.
Neill's remarkable successes in rehabilitating delinquents at Summerhill
showed how other-regarding values can be learned pragmatically-but these
are not the only values expedience can find. History is largely the record
of how human beings discovered the value of deceit, obsequience, brutality
and contempt. Laziness prospers well in psephocracy, and psephocrats
prosper because of it, as tyrants once prospered because of terror and in
some places still do.
This is not a moral evaluation. Liberal (pluralist) values, on which
democracy of any kind and direct democracy in particular must rest, are an
interior necessity only to certain people. The politician whose
temperamental bent and inner drives are to power and its indulgence-rather
than to scientific, creative, philosophic curiosity and its indulgence-may
subscribe to liberal values only so long as they do not interfere with his
will-to-power. Humanist values are not necessary to the exercise of power,
as they are to curious and invention-or if they are, it is not obviously
so. Similarly, a neurotic introvert may prefer the values of
self-abasement, masochism and treachery to a truth-seeker's sine qua non
moral values.
The human organism can be described as an input-processing-output system,
incorporating a hierarchy of cortical feedback loops that largely accounts
for reflectivity and thence self-conscious identity. Data input
(exteroceptive, proprioceptive and cognitive) is mapped on to associational
matrices or attractors. These matrices are largely phylogenetic, inherited
in prer-shaped form fro our evolutionary ancestors. However, there is
comparatively great flexibility in the higher morphogenetic frameworks
(perceptual abstractions such as the visual constancies are innate, but can
be interfered with, `from above', by verbal suggestion), and the
cognitive/emotive matrices are enormously variable. These latter `human'
nets of data-response patterns are roughly what we call concepts. And the
larger matrix which subsumes an individual's concepts we might term his or
her `phenomenological mode'.
All autonomic modes and, less directly, all phenomenological modes stem
from the individual's unique neurobiochemical organization. At its
simplest, think of somatotype, a classification of body shape introduced by
William Sheldon in 1940: thin nervy ectomorphs, muscular confident
mesomorphs, corpulent endomorphs. More significant, and not unrelated to
somatotypy, is the degree of inhibition or facilitation of afferent
impulses by the nervous system's ascending reticular formation. Evidence
suggests that this inhibition or facilitation is closely connected to the
individual's position in the behavioral continuum from extravert to
introvert. The extreme extravert is typically muscular, with high
inhibition of afferent or incoming nervous impulses, hence stimulus hungry.
The extreme introvert is thin, cerebrotonic, with high facilitation of
input, hence stimulus sensitive. The population mean, in America, is
shifted well towards the former classification.12
Behaviorally, a culture's tempo takes a mean or average value, at neither
one extreme nor the other. Consequently, extraverts tend to experience
`stimulus starvation', so they act more boistrously to drive up the volume.
Moreover, central inhibition impedes conditioning; since social mores are
in large part culturally conditioned, extraverts can satisfy their stimulus
hunger with less concern than average for the law. Extreme extraverts do
seem to make up a large percentage of the prison-populations in Australia
and America.13 Introverts, on the other hand, receive a stimulus battering
in the normal context; they may respond by withdrawal and some can become
neurotic and even suicidal. Being readily conditioned, they are likely to
be `moral', although extreme introverts, being especially sensitive to
their deviation from the norm, are prone to alien-ation.
We might divide contemporary phenomenological modality, very roughly, into
three very broad categories. Two of these were made famous in the middle of
the 20th century by sociologist David Riesman, in his surprisingly
bestselling The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character
(Yale University Press, 1950), which added a `tradition-directed' mode
typical of pre-industrial cultures.
(A) The `other-directed' or conformist mode: `I am in that others respond
to me, recognize me, approve of me'.
(B) The `inner-directed' self-driven mode: `I am in that I recognize
myself'-identity is mediated less directly than in (A), via an internalized
other-directed structure: the second `I' or the inner-directed paradigm
being the Word, the a priori, the Imposed Conscience or superego.
(C) The `scientific' mode, not described by Riesman. This is less
precarious and more independent than `other-directedness', for here what is
given is the scientific methodology and its canon; or in the case of some
artists, the relevant artistic tradition and command of expertise. It is
also more flexible than pure `inner-directedness', with constant reference
to an other, the empirical facts. Nor does it closely resemble
pre-industrial `tradition-centredness', since its traditions and framing
theories continually modify any provisional constructs and certainties.
(A) seems congenial to, and perhaps somewhat predicated upon, extraversion
morphology, (B) to introversion, while (C) would seem to be more common
among less-extreme intro-verts, and perhaps approximates to the INTJ and
ENTJ temperaments on the Myers-Briggs scale. A study now half a century old
`has indeed shown that, as a profession, science attracts men whose
temperament is grave, awkward, and absorbed.'14 `There is one vital field
where scientists have made hardly any contribution,' Physics Nobel laureate
I. I. Rabi remarked decades ago, `and that is to politics-politics in its
practical sense of standing for office. Somehow the scientific education
diminishes the ambition for power and worldly influence.'15 I think it much
more likely that the motivational drives of the scientific modality make
the enterprise of personal satisfaction of curiosity far more appealing
than public affairs.
If then, as Bronowski suggested, many key humane values are generated out
of the scientific mode as a necessary condition for its operation, what of
democracy? Ironically, democratic theorists have tended to share this
phenomenological mode with scientists, so the values they found
self-evident by introspection were quite naturally assumed to be latent in
everyone, hidden by a condition nasty, brutish and short. If this analysis
has any validity, we must recognize that the larger part of contemporary
western communities is morphogenetically other-directed, compliant and
complacently hedonistic. It might seem, then, that the immense task of
developing a truly humane, open and tolerant society cannot be entrusted to
most people's innate rationality and good will. Will-to-rationality and
open-minded tolerance might be nearly as rare (INTJs comprise perhaps 5
percent of the population) as superior intelligence (the top few
percentiles of IQ measures).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Aug 23 2003 - 21:44:05 MDT