Chapter Review: Democracy

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, 2016

This discussion reviews chapter 14 of Steven Pinker's 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard. Getting right to it, Pinker argues:

Since the first governments first appeared about 5,000 years ago, humanity has tried to steer a course between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny. In the absence of a government or powerful neighbors, tribal peoples tend to fall into cycles of raiding and feuding, with death rates exceeding those of modern societies, even including their most violent eras.

Pinker cites the necrometician (corpse counter) Matthew White as arguing: “Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these multicides result from the breakdown of authority rather than the exercise of authority.”

White claims the corpse count is millions for anarchy compared to hundreds of thousands for murdering tyrants. That seems to ignore the tens of millions that the totalitarians Stalin and Hitler amassed. As Hannah Arendt argues, mass murdering dictators are not the same thing as mega-murdering totalitarians. Presumably, White accounted for that corpse count.

Continuing, Pinker then argues:

One can think of democracy as a form of government that threads the needle, exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself. A good democratic government allows people to pursue their lives in safety, protected from the violence of anarchy, and in freedom, protected from the violence of tyranny. But it's not the only reason: democracies have higher rates of economic growth, fewer wars and genocides, healthier and better-educated citizens, and virtually no famines.

Citing various politicians and others, Pinker pointed out that prospects for democracy have appeared bleak in recent decades. One recent wave of pessimism was in the 1970's, which was immediately followed by a new wave of countries moving to democracy, including Greece, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia.

Critics of democracy argued that democratization is “a conceit of Westerners projecting their tastes onto the rest of the world, whereas authoritarianism seemed to suit most of humanity just fine.” Pinker responds: “Could recent history really imply that people are happy to be brutalized by their governments? Most obviously, in a non-democratic country, how could you tell? The pent-up demand for democracy might be enormous, but no one dares express it lest they be jailed or shot.”

Pinker has a good point there. And, he makes two more good points based on cognitive biology:

The other is the headline fallacy: crackdowns make the headlines more often than liberalizations. Availability bias could make us forget about all the countries that became democratic bit by bit. As always, the only way to know which way the world is going is to quantify. (emphasis added)

Just to flog this live horse once more, rely on facts, do not reject, deny or distort them, whether you like it or not. That requires moral courage. Political, economic, religious and philosophical ideologues generally do not have enough of it to deal with reality for what it is.

Continuing further,

Why has the tide of democratization repeatedly exceeded expectations? . . . . . The awe is reinforced by a civics class idealization of democracy in which an informed populace deliberates about the common good and carefully selects leaders who carry out their preference. By that standard, the number of democracies is zero in the past, zero in the present and almost certainly zero in the future. Political scientists are repeatedly astonished by the shallowness and incoherence of people's beliefs, and by the tenuous connections of their preferences to their votes and to the behavior of their representatives. Most voters are ignorant not of just current policy options but of basic facts . . . . . Their opinions flip depending on how a question is worded . . . . . When they do formulate a preference, they commonly vote for a candidate with the opposite one. . . . . Nor does voting even provide much of a feedback signal about a government's performance. Voters punish incumbents for recent events over which they have dubious control, such as macroeconomic swings and terrorist strikes, or no control at all, such as droughts, floods, even shark attacks [and bad outcomes of local football games].

Pinker points out that 20th century philosopher Karl Popper astutely observed that democracy is not so much an answer to the question of who should rule, but more a solution of how to “dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed.”

Pinker argues that the freedom to complain is central to democracy: “The freedom to complain rests on an assurance that the government won't punish or silence the complainer. The front line in democratization, then, is constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalize its uppity citizens.”

Uppity citizens indeed.

Pinker argues that it is easy to be deceived about a lack of progress for democracy:

But progress has a way of covering its tracks. As our moral standards rise over the years, we have become alert to harms that would have gone unnoticed in the past. . . . . the information paradox: as human rights watchdogs admirably look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse, they find more of it . . . . but if we don't compensate for their keener powers of detection, we can be misled into thinking there is more abuse to detect.

Enlightenment Now published in February of 2018. Pinker was aware of Trump, and the rise of authoritarian movements in Europe and elsewhere. The anti-democracy momentum associated with those forces has not abated and instead appears to still be gaining strength. One can begin to see in aggregated poll data that the hit Trump took to his popularity from the recent government shutdown is just beginning to fade.

Is Pinker too optimistic, naïve or otherwise off base in his vision of the future of democracy and the rule of law, as implied by its inherent constraints against silencing its complaining uppity citizens? President Trump has made it clear that he wants to silence a free press that he sees as the enemy of the people.

B&B orig: 2/6/19