In recent weeks I’ve argued in this space that the current political order—here and in most of the rest of the world—has the following features:
(1) It is egalitarian: The interests of each member of the polity are supposed to count equally.
(2) It is nationalistic: Its egalitarianism stops at the borders of each nation-state.
(3) It is democratic: Within those borders, not only are each person’s interests supposed to count equally, but each person is supposed to have an equal share of political power.
Each of these three components of the status quo is unremarkable on its own. Combined, however, they may shed new light on our present predicament.
Combining features (1) and (2), I’ve argued, produces “sociotropic nationalism.” (Sociotropic means “dedicated to the common good.”) A sociotropic nationalist aims to elect officials who will use public policy to further the common good. More specifically, the sociotropic nationalist tries to elect officials who will use public policy to solve the social and economic problems besetting the people of the country.
Combining sociotropic nationalism with feature (3) produces the sociotropic nationalist citizen. The sociotropic nationalist citizen participates in politics to advance the interests of his or her conationals. But that raises a problem: How can citizens know which policies, or parties, or politicians will advance their conationals’ interests? The task of sociotropic nationalist citizens brings with it tremendous epistemic demands, which may lead citizens to make grave mistakes.
The Complexity of Social and Economic Problems
Consider the types of knowledge a sociotropic-nationalist voter would need if he or she were to avoid mistakes. (This is not intended as a complete list.)
- Knowledge of which purported social and economic problems are real and actionable at a given time, and which real, actionable problems are likely to crop up during the tenure of a potential office holder.
- Knowledge of which real, actionable problems are or will be significant enough to have a claim on scarce public resources.
- Knowledge of the sources of the significant, real, actionable problems. Arguably, at least, this requires the citizen to know what causes what in a modern society. The wider the relationship of societal causes and social and economic problems, the wider the citizen’s causal knowledge will have to be.
- Knowledge of which policies will address the causes of real, actionable, significant social problems without imposing costs—anticipated and unanticipated—that outweigh the policies’ benefits. This type of knowledge is particularly important. It’s not enough to have a reliable causal diagnosis of real, significant, actionable social problems, or even a reliably proven treatment; one also needs to know that the treatment will not cause worse side effects than the disease. Thus, the citizen needs to know about unintended costs, not just costs that are budgeted or forecast.
- Knowledge of which politicians or parties have the ability to push through net-beneficial policies to address the causes of significant, actionable social and economic problems.
Now on any given policy issue, full-time, life-long experts in economics, social theory, and political science may find themselves divided over what constitutes each of the five types of “knowledge.” Is a claimed social problem real? Is it significant? Is it actionable? What is its cause? Will the benefits of action outweigh the costs? Will this or that party or politician take the needed action? Typically, each of these topics is the subject of heated debate among experts.
When experts disagree with each other, it follows that the experts on one or the other side (or on both sides) must lack the necessary knowledge. (Even if the experts agree, of course, they may still lack the necessary knowledge; an expert consensus can be wrong.) If even experts can lack the necessary knowledge, should we really expect ordinary citizens with limited time to have it?
Logically speaking, we shouldn’t. Yet we do.
We’re taught to vote, and we’re taught that each vote counts. It follows that we should exercise our right to vote responsibly, by making ourselves “well informed.” Obviously, though, we aren’t expected to master the five types of knowledge listed above. That would be unreasonable.
So in practice, being “well informed” means, roughly speaking, that one has a passing familiarity with political controversies that are prominent in the news media at a given time. If you watch a half hour of news a day, you are, by most accounts, “moderately” informed. If you read a good newspaper, you are “well” informed. Yet the best newspaper in the world doesn’t convey a fraction of the knowledge listed above.
Ignoring Complexity
Democratic, sociotropic nationalism asks the impossible of us. It asks us, in effect, to stand above debates among technocratic experts and discern which of them are right. This would require that we-the-people adjudicate the substance of policy and political debate, which in turn would require that we-the-people become omnicompetent (omniscient?) super-technocrats ourselves.
“Democratic sociotropic nationalism” can therefore be abbreviated as citizen technocracy: a polity that puts each of us in the untenable position of being a citizen-technocrat. A citizen-technocrat must be wiser, somehow, than technocrats of the usual sort—the experts whom political theorists call “epistocrats.”
If we wanted to question the legitimacy of citizen technocracy, we might begin with the gap between the epistemic demands placed on citizen-technocrats and their limited capacity to meet these demands. [1] But if we want to understand how citizen technocracy works in practice, we need to begin with a slightly different point: the fact that, as a rule, citizen-technocrats aren’t aware of this gap. To the extent that we, the people, hold opinions about technocratic policies (policies designed to address our conationals’ social and economic problems), and to the extent that we vote on the basis of those opinions, we cannot be fully aware of the unreliability of our opinions and our votes. If we gained this awareness, we would lose the confidence needed to hold the opinions and cast the votes. We would start answering survey questions “Don’t Know” and would withdraw from political participation. As Walter Lippmann wrote in Public Opinion,
There are two kinds of uninstructed voter. There is the man who does not know and knows that he does not know. He is generally an enlightened person. He is the man who waives his right to vote. But there is also the man who is uninstructed and does not know that he is, or care. [2]
To function as citizen technocrats, we have to be like the second man. To carry out our political responsibilities (no matter how well or badly we carry them out), we must fail to recognize the extent of the knowledge we’d need if we were to carry them out well. That is, we must be “radically ignorant” of the knowledge we would need—unaware not only that we lack it, but that we need it. [3] The inadequacy of our knowledge must be an unknown unknown to us. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to form political opinions or vote, let alone engage in more intensive forms of political action.
The Other Kind of Technocracy
Lippmann published Public Opinion in 1922, when the Progressive Era had peaked. He had been an ardent Progressive himself: a believer in citizen-technocracy. A socialist in college, Lippmann was hailed by his classmate John Reed (later the semi-official chronicler of the Russian Revolution) as the “all-unchallenged Chief” of the Harvard radicals. Later he helped to found The New Republic. But World War I gave many Progressives pause about the wisdom of the people. By the time Public Opinion appeared, Lippmann had come to think that we should substitute, for a technocracy run by citizen-technocrats, a technocracy in its ordinary usage: one run by epistocrats.
Yet in order to go along with epistocracy, we’d have to believe that experts, unlike the rest of us, have reliable access to the five types of knowledge. What could justify this conclusion?
If “experts” are defined as those who are “knowledgeable” in an absolute sense, then by definition, epistocrats would have whatever knowledge they need. [4] But this definition complacently begs the real-world question of how epistocrats could acquire the needed knowledge; and the question of why, if acquiring this knowledge is feasible, they disagree with one other about what constitutes true knowledge about a given topic of controversy. [5]
Consider the fourth type of knowledge—knowledge of the intended and unintended effects that policies will have. We can’t just assume that some identifiable class of people will reliably know what the intended and unintended effects of policies will be, merely because we label them “experts.” Experts know more than non-experts. But that doesn’t entail that they know what they need to know if they are to make competent technocratic decisions.
The Self-Evidence Assumption
The need for the five types of knowledge suggests that social and economic problem solving is complex. Lippmann’s growing awareness of this complexity drove him away from the Progressive populism of his youth: the desire to place democratic “weapons in the hands of the people,” the better to force the government to solve the people’s problems. By 1922, he was advising withdrawal from what we would now call citizen activism, which he saw as epistemologically naïve.
The activist, however—even the “activist” whose sole political action is to vote—has to assume, in practice, that the world is simple. In fact, the activist tends to assume that the relevant truths about the world are self-evident. This assumption enables the activist to act in the face of what would otherwise be overwhelming uncertainty. A citizen-technocrat who truly understands the difficulties in obtaining the five types of knowledge will have no choice but to select him- or herself out of the electorate. The citizen-technocrats who remain in the electorate will be those who are insensible to these difficulties.
Take Donald Trump. As a candidate, he routinely treated his opinions as indisputable—even though they were based on such slender evidence that, once in office, he had to abandon them more quickly than had any president before him. After having repeatedly called Obamacare a “disaster” that he’d easily replace with something “beautiful,” he suddenly declared: “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” Likewise, “after listening [to Chinese President Xi Jinping] for 10 minutes,” he told The Wall Street Journal, “I realized that it’s not so easy. [Before,] I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power [over] North Korea. . . . But it’s not what you would think.”
Political scientists have long worried about the political ignorance of most voters. In Donald Trump, their worst nightmare has come true. The personification of political ignorance has been parachuted into the Oval Office.
From Oversimplification to Polarization
Citizen-technocracy would be impossible without the widespread assumption that the truth about public policy issues is self-evident, or close to it—at least to the reader of a good newspaper. Only this assumption makes it possible for citizen-technocrats to believe that they have reliable (if not perfect) knowledge of whom to vote for on sociotropic grounds.
But while citizen-technocrats fail to recognize the knowledge problems they face, they cannot avoid recognizing the political problem they face: their political opponents.
Like epistocrats, citizen-technocrats disagree with each other. They disagree about which social and economic problems are real, which ones are actionable, which ones are significant, what their causes are, what the effects of proposed policies will be, and who can be trusted to implement net-beneficial policies. Yet if, as each of them is inclined to think, their own views about these matters are self-evidently justified, then how is it possible for anyone to disagree with them? As Diana Mutz once put it, puzzled citizens say to themselves, “The answers are obvious and we all agree on them. So what is wrong with all of those other people?”—that is, our political opponents.
There has to be something wrong with them insofar as they disagree with the self-evident truth. Maybe they’ve got psychological problems (they’re authoritarians, xenophobes, victims of “motivated reasoning,” snowflakes). Maybe they’re self-interested (not sociotropic). Maybe they’ve been bought off by special interests. [6] Maybe they’re liars, merely pretending to disagree even though they know they’re actually wrong. Maybe they’re evil.
Of course, such dark possibilities may truly explain the existence of a political opponent in a given case. But citizen-technocrats are inclined to leap to the conclusion that such things must be true of their political opponents because they fail to acknowledge what Rawls called the “burdens of judgment”: the “hazards involved in the correct (and conscientious) exercise of our powers of reason and judgment in the ordinary course of political life.” [7] Citizen-technocracy aggravates these burdens, as it requires us to be knowledgeable about abstruse and highly contestable matters of empirical fact in the ordinary course of political life.
In Lippmann’s words, one’s political opponent
presents himself as the man who says, evil be thou my good. He is an annoyance who does not fit into the scheme of things. Nevertheless he interferes. And since that scheme is based in our minds on incontrovertible fact fortified by irresistible logic, some place has to be found for him in the scheme. . . . Thus . . . out of the opposition we make villains and conspiracies. [8]
The Paradox of Citizen-Technocracy
Citizen-technocracy is not only impossibly demanding; it is highly paradoxical.
As a citizen-technocrat, I can participate in politics, whether by voting or through more persistent activism, only if I am first convinced that I know the truth about the social and economic problems
from nicholemhearn digest https://niskanencenter.org/blog/political-ignorance-political-polarization/
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