SMART ENOUGH FOR DEMOCRACY

BUT TOO DUMB FOR THIS ONE

Do you detect any irony in my title? I hope not. There isn’t any.

My position is simple and straightforward: Our American democratic system does not demand enough from our electorate. As a result, our system permits voters to be lazy, uninformed, indifferent, easily bamboozled by 30-second sound bites, and seduced by lies that have no evidence behind them.

I was intentionally provocative in my subtitle. I used “dumb” because it’s direct and startling. I used it as a synonym not for “stupid” but for “ignorant.”

When people attending a rally against government programs intruding into their lives carry signs like “Keep gov’t hands off my Medicare!” do you think that they are too dumb to see the irony? They could see it, but they haven’t taken the time to think it through.

Our citizens have the capacity to learn, to think it through; they aren’t stupid. But they too often fail to exercise that capacity to any extent, let alone the fullest extent. Thus, they remain, willfully or inadvertently, ignorant.

So, American voters DO have the ability to pay attention to facts and make judgments on the basis of evidence. What they don’t have, with the exception of jury duty, is the setting that demands attention and deliberation.

The evidence from jury deliberations and decisions makes my point.

As part of the Chicago Jury Project, scholars Harry Kalven and Hans Zeisel undertook a comprehensive study comparing judges’ decisions with decisions by juries. Their results were published in their book, The American Jury.

Kalven and Zeisel wanted to test how well juries performed. Based on a sample of 3,376 jury trials and a survey of 555 judges, the scholars found that, whether the trial was criminal or civil, judges agreed with the jury decisions 76 percent of the time. In the 962 cases where there was disagreement, they found that 54 percent were the result of disagreements about issues of evidence or because the judge had information not available to the jury. So, when setting aside disagreements about evidence, the judge and jury agreed 88 percent of the time. Subsequent studies support these original findings.

Indeed, juries do a very good job, because jurors can and do deliberate. But as voters our citizens aren’t asked to do much, if anything, that requires actual deliberation on issues, policies, or candidates’ character. We have nothing like that in our democracy.

From the founding, our democracy was built to downplay the democratic part and play up decisions made by prosperous white men whose paternalistic outlook would steer the new nation toward stability and success. That is why our Constitution watered down democracy. Let the people spend their time and energy on commerce and leisure time. Make political participation as painless as possible and limit it to electing directly only members of the House of Representatives.

Painlessness has continued. Now the electorate needs to know little, if anything, about the candidates running for office. Under this circumstance, what is the predictable outcome? Candidates too often speak in sound-bites; they eschew any detailed plans or policies; they fake a folksy appeal; and they rest their candidacy on looks, charm, celebrity, or playing at being “plain spoken.”

The only requirement for voting is the need to read at an elementary level. Sometimes this requirement is reduced to needing only to identify the letters “R” or “D.” The next step in this downward spiral is simply placing pictures of the candidates next to R or D.

Even these developments in our dumb-downed democracy aren’t sufficient for bringing voters to the polls. In 2020, with Trump the authoritarian running to be president-for-life, 80 million eligible voters stayed home.

In such deplorable conditions, am I actually proposing more democracy?

I am actually proposing a different democracy, and this brings us back to Aristotle.

As I discussed in the part one of this article, Aristotle promotes the form of ruling he calls “polity.” Here the rich and poor rule jointly by combining, as Aristotle says, the wealth of the rich with the freedom of the poor [Politics, 1293a15–16].

But this “fusion,” as he calls it, cannot happen without a third element added to wealth and freedom. That element is “excellence,” which is another way of describing virtue. The virtue central to this ruling scheme is friendship, which brings forth and expresses the virtues of temperance (moderation) and liberality (generosity).

The lack of emphasis in our constitutional structures of the element of excellence or virtue was, from the outset, intentional. It isn’t that the founders were unaware of the necessity of virtue. They thought that our democratic republic could rely upon “men of fit character,” a phrased used in various ways in The Federalist Papers by Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay to describe those who would be elected to federal offices. As Madison wrote in Federalist 10: “[T]he suffrages of the people…will be more likely to center on men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters.” In Federalist 64, Jay echoes this remark: Those elected to the Senate especially will be “men only who have become the most distinguished by their abilities and virtue…”

So, “fit character” meant virtue or excellence of character. With such men in charge, the people could be relieved of political concerns and get on with their private lives. Unfortunately, as we can see from the actions of even the first Congress, the founders got that wrong, as men in office too often pursued self-interest. Add vast mountains of money into the mix, as we have today, and the patterns of self-interest have not only continued, but have also intensified.

We have seen throughout our history bipartisan bills and policies coming out of our governing bodies at all levels. So we know that our elected representatives can deliberate to reach agreement, if not consensus. Today, in our hyper-polarized political world, they rarely do.

Meanwhile, citizens never deliberate in our democracy. They are never asked to and thus lack the experience and political judgment to do so. We can look to Aristotle to understand why relying on persons of “fit character” is insufficient for ruling a democratic republic, let alone a democracy: The populace, a significant resource, is left behind.

Aristotle is clear: The many are better judges than the few. Even when “each individual is not a good man,” acting together they are often better judges than the few virtuous men, “just as a feast to which many contribute is better than a dinner provided out of a single purse” [Politics, 1281a39–1281b3].

This can be so, claims Aristotle, if each individual has some share of reasoned judgment and virtue. Then working together, they can understand the whole. Working together means deliberating together and thus combining their insights. This reasoned judgment Aristotle calls “practical wisdom” or phronesis.

On the other hand, if the many are simply “brutes” — the profligate self-interested, the greedy, and the unvirtuous — and are entrusted with democratic power, then “their folly will lead them into error, and their dishonesty into crime” [Politics, 1281b25–28]. Can we deny that many in positions today with democratic power are such brutes?

Aristotle provides the remedy to which I have been pointing: “The only way to escape putting brutes into office is to assign [citizens] some deliberate and judicial functions” [Politics, 1281b30–32]. That is, have citizens participate in institutions and procedures that demand deliberation among participants. However brutish those participants may be, in deliberations where evidence and reason predominate, as with juries, decisions will be thoughtful and judicious.

Deliberative bodies are how we develop and exercise our practical wisdom — that combination of experience and reasoned or critical judgment needed today in our democracy.

Citizens need opportunities to exercise that wisdom in civic settings structured around deliberation. In Melbourne, Australia, Porto Alegre, Brazil, New York City, and locales around the globe citizens have played crucial roles in “participatory budgeting” to determine how public funds are to be spent in those cities. In Ireland in 2017 a Citizens’ Assembly of randomly selected citizens met for five weekends to deliberate on whether and how to legalize abortion. Sixty-six percent of Irish voters approved the referendum presented by the Citizens’ Assembly. There are now permanent Citizens’ Councils in Paris, London, and Ostbelgien (Belgium), as well as a movement in Scotland to create a House of Citizens as a second governmental chamber. I have written previously about the importance for our democracy of sortition, the random selection of citizens for deliberation on important social and political issues. More direct is “legislative juries” where citizens deliberate to create initiatives that are then turned into laws when decided deliberatively by the people themselves.

If Citizens’ Assemblies and the like meet citizens where they are, education can prepare future participants by providing the skills and habits that they will need in deliberation. Legislators, Aristotle argued, “should direct their attention above all to the education of youth, for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution” [Politics, 1337110–11]. Control of education, he argues further, is the control of virtues, for there lies the cultivation of “the power of forming right judgments” [1340a17].

Of course, this is not education as currently constituted in our country, which too often focuses on teaching to standardized tests, where politicians in some states seek to ban books and foist on students a sanitized version of our nation’s history. Needed, instead, are educational programs to develop reasoned or critical judgment, programs that engage a student’s curiosity and that are based on open inquiry.

In addition, schools are real environments and communities, or can be. Students can affect those communities by using those skills and habits in deliberative decision-making that controls some aspects of their classroom or school. Elementary-school students can create deliberative democratic discussions in their classrooms; middle-school students can participate in creating rules and procedures for democratic classrooms; and high-school students can participate with faculty and staff in democratic assemblies that address actual problems affecting school life.

Democracy requires, then, venues at the top of the system in which citizens can participate in making deliberative decisions. Democracy also requires preparatory education within democratic schools to develop the virtue of practical wisdom required in democracy.

“Man,” claims Aristotle, “is born for citizenship” [Ethics, 1097a34-b25]. And what is the end or purpose of that citizenship? It is the exercise of the rational part of the soul in accordance with virtue or practical wisdom in joint action with others to guide the city in noble directions — that is, for the good of all [Ethics,1097a34–1098a20]. The ancient Greek tongue-twister for this is sumbouleuesthai, taking counsel together.

The two key virtues in ruling the city, as I discussed in part one, are the moral virtues of temperance (moderation) and liberality (generosity). Both are expressions of friendship. In addition, Aristotle requires the development and use of the intellectual virtue of reasoned judgment. Only through deliberation, whether alone or in a group, can we find the mean or intermediate position in the circumstances facing us.

The virtuous action or outcome is that mean relative to the extremes of the situation. Because circumstances change, so too does the intermediate position between, say, rashness and cowardice. Legislating to confiscate all guns after a mass shooting, for example, might be rash; failure to pass any gun regulation at all might be cowardice. The intermediate position might be banning all assault weapons. Deliberations would determine the resulting action.

What are the citizens looking for in their deliberations? They are looking for the best response by taking into account the times, the people, the motives, the particulars, and the options involved in the topic or situation [Ethics, 1106b29–35]. As Aristotle says, judging the right action to take is not easy. To do so, one must “hold the ship out beyond surf and spray” [Ethics, 1109a30-b18]. In other words, seek waters that are calm and where we are not rocked by impulse or carried away by emotion. This is why civil discourse and deliberation with others are important.

Our democratic republic places the emphasis on “republic” or representation rather than on “democratic.” This was a constitution designed to minimize the responsibilities of the people, but to give them some small voice in our politics.

Unfortunately, this is dumb-downed democracy. Despite what they might have said, the founders knew that our democratic republic did not require an informed and virtuous citizenry, as long as citizens could identify men of fit character, which meant high reputation.

Little has changed today, except that now celebrity and even notoriety, with entertainment thrown in, too often constitute high reputation, so much so that a con-man, a serial liar, a rapist, a business failure, a fraudster, and a wannabe dictator who is as fake as his spray tan can lead one of our major parties.

Democracy is difficult because it requires time, effort, and judgment. Yet citizens can rule and, I think, want to rule to control their individual and collective lives. What they lack are the venues that require citizens to join together to deliberate to make real political decisions. What they need is an educational system that focuses on inquiry, curiosity, and critical thinking, With those in place we could have a true democracy.

But distracted by endless avenues of dazzling entertainment, seduced by consumerism, and simultaneously living in a deeply partisan and hyper-individualized world, do our citizens want it?