Democracy for Who?
A postscript was added on March 7th, 2021.
Why should a country's ruling class care much about those at the bottom of the economic ladder? Isn't survival of the fittest what Darwin taught us? Don't we see examples of survival of the fittest on nature shows? The weak animals get eaten on those shows. Some would claim that a less lethal version of that competition is what God intended for all of us.
Those who have money and privilege can easily rationalize something similar to this point of view. But even the very wealthy do not escape needing cooperation from less privileged essential workers. This was never more apparent than during the recent Covid-19 pandemic.
In the U.S. the idea of economic survival of the fittest is an acceptable point of view. Even those who suffer from this point of view often accept it because they, like almost everybody else, believe that they could do much better for themselves if only they worked harder and smarter. This belief is consistent with numerous academic studies that have shown our brains naturally think of ourselves as better than average.
The human mind with its quirks was shaped by eons of evolution. Our understanding of evolution comes from Darwin. He explained that living entities, animals and plants, competed for the ability to reproduce and that those better at this competition would pass their abilities on to their progeny. Darwin knew this explanation wasn’t entirely right because it didn’t explain altruism. However decades were to pass before a fix was found. The fix, adopted around 1970, is to look at genes rather than at living entities.
According to the fix an animal may improve the chances for its gene pool if it sacrifices itself in a way that it gives that gene pool a chance to grow. This variation of Darwin’s theory is called “kin selection”. Kin selection explains why we make sacrifices for siblings as well as children. We make them for anyone in our gene pool, that is to say for any of our kin.
But that explanation applies to all animals and we Homo Sapiens seem to have evolved something else: the ability to cooperate on a large scale with strangers. This ability probably came from Homo Sapiens superior linguistic abilities. Linguistic ability evolved because those hunter/gatherer tribes who could cooperate better reproduced their genetic pool better. In the graphic edition of "Sapiens", Yuval Harari explains this very well.
Language has given us a flexible way of gaining cooperation, one that can evolve. This evolution happens through the ideas we pass from generation to generation. These ideas are called “memes”. (This is the original meaning of that word as coined by Richard Dawkins.) Early ideas for obtaining cooperation from less well off individuals involved slavery.
But slavery requires hiring thugs to enforce it and is sometimes dangerous for the masters. Unlike what we were told in “Gone with the Wind”, slaves aren’t always fully cooperating. There are better ways for the haves to get cooperation from the have nots. Better for both sides as it turns out.
Although inconsistently accepting slavery, the American founding fathers turned to a meme they called “consent of the governed”. Today we believe that consent comes from a system of voting wherein the majority rules. Said another way: we Americans tend to believe that if the majority votes for something then we all should go along with it. For example if the majority votes against health care for the have nots then the meme encourages the have nots to go along with that decision. Their cooperation is not lost.
There are flaws with this meme. The vote can be, and is, manipulated by good story telling. Since it is the haves who have access to the good story tellers, it is the haves who tend to control the vote. Manipulation is possible because voters have lives to lead and little time to understand issues or investigate candidates.
Making decisions with whatever evidence our brains have is what we do. A good story will plant evidence in our brains and encourage our cooperation. A story that contradicts what is already planted is difficult to evaluate. Reconsideration takes brain power and a willingness to look around for more evidence.
Although the story that the American people will consent to the will of the majority has been firmly implanted in American brains, the conviction that the majority will always make the right decision has not. Most of us believe that to get the right decision from a vote, the voters have to think the way we do. The alt-right seem to believe that white people with home addresses and drivers licenses will do that. Liberals seem to believe that anybody will do that--if properly educated.
Here is the way the Brennan Center for Justice puts it: "The franchise has always been a part of the American system, but who can enjoy that right has been ferociously debated since the founding of the nation. And the fight goes on." The fight is misplaced.
Ethnicity, relative wealth, education. None of these things is enough to enable a person to make complex decisions based on very limited information. That's why majority rule by voting leads to a kind of aristocracy—voters are heavily influenced by stories coming from those who have the power to promote them. Many political philosophers from Athens to the present day have recognized this. They have tended to prefer a government that mixes voting with choosing by lot. Choosing by lot is called “sortition”. Deliberative bodies chosen by sortition are more difficult for the elite to influence. Here is the way Athens mixed voting with sortition:
You can see that Ekklesia was chosen though a direct vote by all citizens. The Ekklesia could pass laws but the could not make laws. That was left to the Council which was chosen by lot from the Ekklesia.
I am about to suggest that the next steps in the evolution of the American political memes should include sortition. Voting as we have seen is often controlled by the haves or by competing factions among the haves. Today sortition is done by identifying groups of people who must be represented and then randomly choosing a couple individuals from each group. This kind of sortition is more democratic than voting because the decisions it generates come from the needs and thoughts of the people and not from hired story tellers.
There is another way of asking for the public’s opinion, ask them to respond to questionnaires. What questionnaires have in common with sortition is only the desire to find out what the public thinks. Sortition provides important things that questionnaires lack: a way of teasing out opinions unexpected by questionnaire designers and a way of avoiding public ignorance when obtaining opinions. Unexpected opinions are teased out when everybody is required to speak. Unclear utterances can be rephrased with question of whether the rephrasing is accurate. Ignorance is combatted with interactive presentations, that is to say presentations in which questions can be asked, even questions that require the presenters to do further research. Questionnaires cannot do all of this.
Realizing the limits of questionnaires, several democratic governments have experimented with deliberative councils. The idea is that if you can get a representative group of randomly chosen citizens together and give them professional resources you will get a report that is largely untainted by those in power. The resources include help structuring the deliberations so everybody is heard, help accessing information, and help producing a report Deliberative councils are a way of getting closer to what the population as a whole would choose if they had time to inform their opinions.
Exactly how to fit deliberative councils into modern democracies is not yet clear but efforts are being made. British Columbia, for example, set up a deliberative council to determine how voting should be done. We are seeing the same kind of issue in the U.S. with proposals for rank voting. The council in British Columbia worked in three phases: training, consultation, and decision making. They recommended a voting system and that recommendation was submitted to the electorate as a referendum. The referendum was voted down.
Although not generated by a deliberative council we had a similar referendum in Massachusetts this year. Our referendum also was voted down. Voters are not being unreasonable when they vote down changes they do not understand.
You might ask "why bother with a deliberative council when the problem is explaining the issue to the public?" The answer is that explaining the issue is only part of the problem. The goal of learning what informed citizens would decide is important. The process of obtaining that information can also show how to convince otherwise uninformed citizens.
A deliberative council in Iceland accomplished both these things. It produced a new constitution in a way that was properly explained to the electorate. That proposal was passed in a referendum. Then another obstacle was reached, the professional politicians. The referendum was not binding and the parliament quashed the change.
Recall that in Athens the Council had the power to create laws that the Ekklesia voted on. Athens had a separation of powers that might be useful today. Or maybe not. Either way today’s legislative bodies are not ready for considering such things. More understanding of deliberative councils is what we need. We are getting that experience albeit slowly from other democracies.
So here is one way we could experiment in the U.S. without risk. Our Congress could set up deliberative councils with specific mandates and professional support. As with a jury, those chosen would have to serve unless they had a reasonable excuse. This to make sure we also hear from those who do not put themselves forward. Unlike a jury, random selection would be done within various categories. These categories would be chosen to make sure all major interest groups are represented. The process would not end with a report but also with a public relations effort. After that public relations campaign has had some time to do what it can, the Congress would be free to do its thing but with an eye on public opinion as affected by the deliberative council.
Making use of deliberative councils this way would not require any change to the Constitution. The councils would lead us to a better understanding of our body politic. Experience with the councils could lead to an understanding of how we can can generate consent of the governed in a better way than we are doing now.
I will end this little essay with an idea of my own. (Ok, I’m not claiming nobody else has thought of this.) This idea may be overly ambitious. It would require a change to our Constitution. Give it some thought anyway. I have wondered if trying a president on impeachment charges would be better done by a jury chosen from the general population than by a Senate full of people with conflicts of interest. The actual trial would be much the same as now. Prosecution would be by House membors. Defense would be mounted by a team chosen by the president. The Chief Justice would preside. Of course, in spite of this legalistic format such proceedings would not be a court of law. It would only be a jury process for deciding if someone should be fired.
Postscript
It seems I got the Icelandic story a bit wrong as I have received this correction from a resident of Iceland. Notice that it supports the use of sortition over voting as a way of drawing out public opinion.
Just a nitpick about your Icelandic example. The draft constitution was not created by a deliberative council selected by lot. There was a deliberative council like that but it was a meeting for one day that was only meant to gauge the broad priorities of the public for a new constitution. Then there was a separate specially elected council that worked for months to create the draft constitution which would then go to a referendum.
Edit: As an aside, the election for this special constitutional council sort of soured my attitude to elections in general. Unlike parliamentary elections, there were no political parties running for the constitutional council. Every candidate was running in an individual capacity using a single transferrable vote method. The end result was that only people with existing name recognition got elected, most of them with very limited and uninteresting ideas about constitutional matters. It made me realize how elections really are at least 90% theater.
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References
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/
“Sapiens, A Graphic History”, Yuval Noah Harari with David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave, Volume One, (2020 English Edition)
“The Meme Machine”, Susan Blackmore, 1999
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/right-vote-dont-count-it
“Gone with the Wind”, Margaret Mitchel, 1936
“Against Elections”, David VAn Reybrouck, 2016
“Empowering Public Wisdom”, Tom Atlee, 2012