Look Who Knows So Much
Doing some thinking out loud that may end up as a blog post regarding a paper I’m trying to put together, about people’s capacity for deliberation in democratic societies and what kind of institutions might work and not work.
It starts with the problem of experts. As an empiricism-driven philosophy, pragmatism supports the idea of gathering information about a problem, predicting how various potential solutions might play out, and then making a decision based on what the evidence suggests is the best possible solution. But a democracy has to make a lot of decisions, so that’s a lot of empirical information to gather, process, and interpret. No elected official can do it – that’s why they have staffs, and sometimes they don’t even have time to read the text of a bill before they vote on it. So the average citizens can’t really be expected to do it either – and I don’t know about you, but I know I don’t have a staff.
Now, if we can’t have out own staffs, maybe we can at least rely on experts. We can read recommendations or endorsements and make decisions from there. But that brings in what Dewey calls the problems of experts. If you spend a lot of time researching issue X and figuring out how to solve it, talking to other people who care a lot about issue X, and putting enormous amounts of your time and energy into minute details and permutations of issue X, all of a sudden you are not thinking like the average, non-issue-X expert does. You can’t quite relate to how he or she sees the world. You can’t understand why Average Joe doesn’t care passionately about marginal tax rates and sugar tariffs.
Or, to put in other terms: every time there’s a comic book movie made, the film-makers make some small change to the comic story. The millions of filmgoers who haven’t picked up a comic book in years happily see the new movie and hopefully they enjoy it. The thousands of people who are familiar with the comic and can share details of its history with you notice the change, and it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard to them. And they can’t understand why there’s not a mass of people with torches and pitchforks at the movie studios, or at least a halfway decent boycott. They’re experts, and their concerns are very different from the average filmgoer. They see the world, and the movie, differently. So their view of what makes, say, a good Spider-Man movie is not necessarily a correct view, even though they’re the experts. As Dewey says, the experts can become their own class, their own community, far removed from the communities that their expertise is supposed to solve.
So relying on experts probably isn’t healthy for a democracy. It leads to technocratic bureaucracies, it leads to an unresponsive government, and there are a lot of reasons to worry about it. But that doesn’t mean we can expect the average democratic citizen to carry the weight on his or her own. Quite frankly, we often don’t know what we’re talking about, no matter how smart and how well-read we are. I’m wondering if the deliberative polling model we’ve talked about before might help provide a middle path through the thicket. You take a range of experts and use them to provide briefing materials on a particular subject, and then you get a representative sample of Americans to gather together and deliberate using that information as a starting point. The actual decision making rests in the hands of the average people, but they have the resources and knowledge generated by the experts. If you had a deliberative sample group meet to set out a particular policy, the citizen is freed from the burden of having to know about everything. And hopefully the process of deliberating gives the citizen confidence in the policies set by other deliberative groups and makes him or her more comfortable with a pluralistic democracy.
That’s the optimistic scenario. Some of the drawbacks that I need to think through start with the notion of getting people to trust the idea of deliberative councils in the early going. And I can see a major area of political contention shifting to the selection and preparation of the briefing materials. It’s easy to get a fairly evenhanded process for a poll that won’t have policy ramifications – but once the stakes get higher, there’ll be “experts� in deliberation trying to skew the briefing materials to favor one view or another. It’s going to take careful watchdogging and a serious commitment to deliberative ideals to keep the system moving, and to be totally honest I’m not sure right now where that support is going to come from.
I may have some more thoughts on this tomorrow. Would be nice, wouldn’t it?
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.