When the Nunes memo came out on Friday, I took some time to read through it. Then I took some more time to read a few background stories on some of the key people: Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Rod Rosenstein, etc. It wasn't exhaustive research; all-in, I spent maybe 45 minutes. It was an important moment in the political life of the country, and I thought I should put in a minimum amount of effort to know what was what. I'd say what I did constituted about the minimum.
I then watched as one person after another posted opinions on my social media feed that showed they had done--let's say somewhat less than the minimum amount of reading.
I've been wondering a lot lately whether American democracy is a doomed project. It requires a lot of work out of its citizens, but if it forces that work out of its citizens, then democracy dies. So it relies on a personal sense of responsibility in each of us. A state founded on trust in the sense of personal responsibility of its citizens seems overly optimistic these days.
That makes the work of being an informed citizen feel hopelessly quixotic. It's rather like what writing short stories or these blog posts sometimes feels like to me. It takes a lot of work, and the whole time I'm doing that work, a voice in the back of my head is telling me that it's unlikely all that work will bear any fruit. In the case of stories, I'm up against tall odds getting them published, and even when they do get published, they aren't read by many people. In the case of this blog, it often feels like I'm shouting into the void. Other than a couple of friends, I'm not sure anyone even reads this. But I feel a compulsion and a responsibility to express my thoughts. Leaving behind the results of your own struggle to figure out the world for others is a basic human activity. Without it, I don't think we'd survive long. So I write, and try not to think too much about how little it's heeded.
For a citizen in America, there are other, competing demands on our time, and putting in the effort to know something about what's what in the world probably seems like wasted effort. What difference does it make if I spend a few minutes to learn about something? I have no influence, so the impact in the world of me knowing what I'm talking about is, on a practical level, exactly the same as if I knew nothing.
Yet here I am, writing on another Sunday morning. The world relies on individually meaningless acts of billions of people, acts that are meaningful only in an aggregate manner that we will never comprehend, one we really have to take on faith.
America might be doomed. Nobody who doesn't know me personally might ever read anything I write. I press on, not because I think my individual efforts can change either thing, but because the alternative is to quit, and that seems more frightening to me than to lose a battle slowly, contesting every inch of ground along the way.
It's not just a matter of competing time pressures - the complexity of issues has increased. Understanding government was never just as easy as reading the Constitution and the view of history shown in the typical high school textbook, but now, you practically need a PhD in international relations and finance to have any idea what's going on. You may not realize how out-of-our-depth most Americans are, because you have a more global view and a rather unusual closeness with the intricacies of government, but how-a-bill-becomes-a-law isn't what it used to be. It never was, of course, but it was close enough that we could follow the news.
ReplyDeleteYou know how many moocs I've taken, in a wide variety of fields. Right now I'm taking "History of Capitalism" not because it's an interest of mine, but because it seems important, and it's depressing as hell. Not just because it becomes clearer and clearer that we're doing everything wrong these days, but because I'm so utterly, completely lost. The course is intended to be multilevel, so while the graded stuff is very basic (epitomized by my favorite question, "What does OPEC stand for"), the roundtables and readings draw on a view of history I just don't have - IN SPITE OF HAVING LIVED THROUGH MANY OF THE EVENTS. More than any course I've taken, it's showing me how easy it is to be completely out of touch.
So we find people we trust, and listen to them. And this is the core issue with the kind of divisiveness, since we have two competing camps of trust, so to speak. But it's also necessary. I don't know how to fix a car, take out an inflamed appendix, make a sturdy desk, code a browser, do you? So we depend on people with those kinds of skills. It's become like that in citizenship; we can't know all the details, so we have to find people we trust. If we have flaws - greed, hate, fear - then we'll trust people who share those flaws, or at least play to them. And that's not a 100% bad thing; I'm one of those relics who believes both sides are necessary. A car has to be able to turn right as well as left in order to stay on the road. The problem is, we're heading into a ditch right now. But it's no better than heading into oncoming traffic.
Yeah, I fear America is doomed, because I don't see a way out of this. I've felt doomed since the first ride down the escalator (which, by the way, a lot of the people I trust found hilarious; I have not yet forgiven them for that). I think we are in the grasp of something we never anticipated, because we always relied on good will and decency, and now that those aren't guardrails any more, we are doomed.
So I bury my nose in Pushcart and moocs and am glad I'm old and will die sooner rather than later. But I still write my rep/senators, I still try to speak up, in my extremely limited way, to light my corner, small as it is, for the sake of you and especially your kids, who will never believe what America used to be by the time they're my age.
I like this notion of America as competing circles of trust, rather than competing philosophies.
DeleteYou're correct that being an informed citizen is very hard and getting harder. The scary thing to me about Trumpism is the way it seems to skirt this problem by just relying on "common sense" or intuition instead of hard-won expertise. Indeed, everything about this administration seems aimed at knocking all those self-important experts off their collective high horse.
It's not as simple as competing circles of trust; those circles are pretty fluid, can change, even reverse. Witness that phenomenon we talked about a few months ago, with the Left being all in with the Deep State (really strange to see the FBI worship going on) and the Right being all about rebellion during the Obama years (but of course now the Presidency is as infallible as the Papacy, which the Right traditionally also hated).
DeleteMaybe it's simpler: going forward, or going back. And again, I still believe both are necessary: Homer's whip and reins, Plato's chariot allegory. You trust whoever seems to be moving in the direction you want. And, as discussed below, find reasons wherever you can to justify it.
deliberation has been a noble myth, and even it has been dead for a long time.
ReplyDeleteconstant argues that the modern pact of representation as that in exchange for basically being left alone, most delegate decisions to their representatives. that implicitly means that our systems do not really rely on citizens pitching in in any serious way except, as schumpeter argues, during their periods when we're called upon to vote. otherwise, it's left to the professionals.
separately, but relevant in my view, is ortega y gasset's distinction between sociedad and conviviencia. i think that's important: that we are no longer a sociedad in the political sense, but just an agglomeration of neighbors. and i would add to that the disintermediation, exacerbated by social media, that facilitates demagoguery. you can read about this in kornhauser's politics of mass society.
You've mentioned this line of reasoning a few times lately. It's one of the reasons I wrote the line "I've been wondering a lot lately whether American democracy is a doomed project." You have an uncomfortably good point.
DeleteStill, I have to believe that a real metanoia experience is possible, even if only in a small way in some quiet, deserted corner of the world during a storm when the power's out. To acknowledge that deliberation is really dead is one of those ideas that, if true, does nobody any good, and so we have to keep acting as though it weren't true.
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Deletelet's put aside the ideal notion of what deliberation is, or those folks who proclaim that when they sit down ordinary folk and get them to talk, wonderful things emerge: i think that if one reflects on what persuasion truly is and how it actually operates, it's an inescapable conclusion that it's fundamentally unreasonable, that reason is mostly a post hoc description of a basically emotional act. this to me is the beginning and end of the myth: reason in the sense that the great philosophes imagined really does not transfer from mathematics into political questions. And whatever golden moments we discern in history are only noteworthy because they are so odd.
DeleteI have, over the past few years, come to believe more and more that "reason" is the decoration you put on it after you decide. This is also pretty depressing.
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