We are, each of us, born into a world of extreme vulnerability. Aside from the obvious possibility that we may be attacked by animals, other humans, and legions of various diseases, we are also ever susceptible to hardships and sufferings of war, natural disaster, criminality, and economic adversity. And beyond our physical, emotional, environmental and economic concerns, we must add to the unnerving ledgers of rueful insult and tribulation that our politics is so often grievously unsatisfying.
I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 not because I thought he was such an excellent person, but because he was in my estimation far the superior of the two choices. Obama was supportive of the death penalty, and thus he could not be counted on to achieve any real consistency in human rights advocacy – not a minor criticism! And, ironically, that candidate I voted for became president because he was ready to support the unintelligent opinion of the unenlightened “majority”. And here the point is made that our politics are ever unsatisfying.
Sometimes we conceive a particular remedy, a policy shift or priority or philosophical approach that seems like a viable solution to what we’ve apprehended as a core problem. We’ll proffer, for example, that we need to earnestly deepen institutions of democracy. And in the furtherance of such a stately and elegant value, well-intentioned, self-described “democrats” believe that since government “of the people” is best, so too, logically, must be the referendum. We need to have the values and preferences of the people themselves deeply and proactively forwarded in the halls of government, we reason, and thus most of us are agreeable to the concept of the referendum.
But we’re simpletons. Democracy was never a perfect thing, and it could only eye justice and sporadically approximate fairness, only hazard at conscientiousness in advocacy and hint at equitable representation, for people are only truly equal when they have identical understandings of things – hence the same or similar educational opportunities and inclinations and values. The referendum has taken the concept of optimum moral virtue inhering in “the will of the people” and failed to distinguish the fact that people are not very wise, and are not the greatest at apprehending what is good for them: people smoke, people drink alcohol to excess, people overeat, people can generally be expected to break laws when there is a great likelihood that they can do so without penalty, and people ignore environmental pollution until it is too late and their children are sickened, and of course it was people who went to the polls in 1933 and voted for Hitler. That they voted for Hitler in early 1933 in the minority is an idiotic carp! Firstly, Hitler grew in popularity when his cult of personality and extremism took hold, and by 1936 a definite majority of Germans supported his extremism. Secondly, people vote in the majority very often for things that turn out to be wrongheaded. A majority of the people in the seceding U.S. states in late 1860 and 1861 supported secession. It is useful to point out that Vladimir Putin currently enjoys a majority support of the Russian people. We are wrong to assume that when something reaches fifty-one percent support it has been elevated to pristine virtue, unimpugnable wisdom.
What does a mere contemporary “majority” really mean? The majority are fickle. We never stay to ask, for instance, “What happened to weed between the 1960s, when the vast majority of the American people opposed legalization, and the 2010s, when the majority clearly supported it?” Did the weed change, and not opinions? Well, yes, the weed did change. It got substantially more potent! This potency aspect should have had the opposite effect on public opinion. Were dissents in the 1960s based on the drug being insufficiently strong? Absurd! American opinions changed, and that’s all. There are countless instances where the majority opinion changed over time on a particular subject. People do not only make bad decisions individually, they make bad decisions in small and large groups – an uneasy fact that every democrat needs to forthrightly face.
We democrats intensely love both freedom and equality and we childishly fancy that we can have them both entire. We cannot! It is an absurd proposition but quite many subscribe to it. We can’t have freedom and equality at the same time because freedom necessarily allows for freedom of different people to pursue their unlike wants and values and aspirations, and at exceedingly disparate paces and in alternate ways. In the full enjoyment of our freedom, some will travel one road and others other roads. This intrinsic of freedom is inevitable and unarguable. Some will elect to go to college at age 18, while others will accede to the enormous temptation to go directly into any of the highly lucrative occupations, such as carpenter, electrician, plumber and computer programmer. Why go to college when you can be making six figures in only a year’s time? Some opt for that latter choice. This rudiment of genuine freedom makes people profoundly unequal: one person will have learned about the Agricultural Revolution of prehistoric times, the Peloponnesian War, the relationship of written language and law to changing concepts of civilization and culture, the lasting impacts of the Industrial revolution, the effects of military technologies on history, the effects of cultural liberalism on history, the influences of various religious doctrines and philosophical ideas on historical outcomes, differing concepts in criminal justice and education, the evolution of ideas of justice and rights, etc., etc., and another person will learn the important matter of what sort of sealant to use when joining two pieces of plastic piping. Both persons learn important things, but they cannot be said to enter the polling place as equals in the sense of being equally informed, equally enlightened, equally literate, equally astute in the ways, mechanisms, discourses, histories and philosophical suppositions that are necessary to discerning, judicious, informed politics. We say that they are “equal” only to mean that they enter the polling place each with the same impact with their (respective) votes, and not to mean that they are equal in ability, understanding or judgment. (The confusion of these two is common among Americans.) We delight in our freedom and our “equality” never coming to terms with severe contradictions and incompatibilities in these. Any perspicuous, astute appraisal of freedom and its deserts will reveal that equality is not a logical or even remotely possible outcome of genuine freedom, but the opposite: political freedom predicts a freedom-differentness that is definitive inequality.
We are myopic and self-serving in our analyses. In our failed astuteness, we have decided that the problem with our political institutions – in its obvious ineptitude in affording greater social and economic equality – is that it is inadequately democratic. The answer, we simplistically submit, is still greater direct input of the common people themselves; we suggest the referendum. But alas, this is unwise for the people, the voters – and a cop out for the politicians themselves. With the resort to the referendum, we have taken an awful step of essentially saying that policy issues involving human rights, fairness, compassion, rectitude, environmental responsibility, militarism, potential corruption, economic opportunity, budgetary concerns, taxation, and other issues are best addressed by the most novice and dilettante in society. No province is given to expertise or awareness or intelligence or informational acquisition, but to the dentist, the carpenter, the factory floor worker, the delivery person, the taxi driver, the cashier, the janitor, the pizza maker, the flooring installer, the shelf stocker, the shoe salesman, the painter and the plumber we extend our fullest confidence. The least informed are tasked with authoritative decision making on byzantine environmental, criminal justice, diplomacy, technology regulation, education, health care, etc. We’ve thus effectively sought to gain in a wiser and more virtuous set of political outcomes by quite dumbing down the impetus that creates policy. We’ve given the figuring out of intricacies, subtleties, long-term consequences, moral ambiguities, precedent, intent chariness, and practical feasibility to the least knowledgeable among us.
The ilk is foolishness, and we are fools.
Democracy is the best system we currently have, but the referendum is very like the athlete who reasons that he’s getting essential ‘nutrition’ from his meals and opts then for twelve of them every day; the dancer who follows the principle that practice improves performance, then practices fourteen hours each day and is injured by opening night; the motorist who appreciates the statistic that most accidents happen in the several miles nearest his/her home and tries to reduce the time in that area and drive extremely fast out of the danger zone into the safer environs beyond; the dieter who discovers that calories are a measure of heat, and “fewer calories is better for weight loss,” and “wisely” eats far more ice cream.
Democracy is a great boon to human freedom and fulfillment, but a putative greater measure of a good thing is not always better! Voting the way “tradition” seems to recommend is not always better; adherence to tradition has no ready way to objectively evaluate how the world has changed in recent decades and recent years.
Vote, yes, but vote more decidedly for mature and knowledgeable persons of integrity. Vote not to claim the vote for your novice, arrogant self, but for the person you believe will likely read substantially of the thousands of pages on that pertinent subject and related matters, and be thus best able to vote himself or herself with optimal competence.
Instead, as we all know, we who must be counted among the selfish and infantile vote for the person who is funny, charismatic, famous, wealthy, powerful, confident, or otherwise somehow more attractive, a person who shares our cultural values or our current preferences (like the death penalty), and not for somebody who is especially committed to the integrity of justice-honoring laws and in human dignity and who seems determined to keep on learning and growing throughout his or her experience in government. We vote much as the sports fan votes, with an extreme prejudice. We vote for the personally profitable, the proximal, the friendly, the familiar, the beneficent, the like-minded. We vote for the baby kisser and not the person who has studied human dignity so thoroughly and intently to deeply appreciate the dignity of all babies.
The Founders of the American republic knew how daft and benighted the average adult was. The Federalist Papers make frequent references to the need of limiting the ways in which people could and would exercise their novel franchise. The writers of the Federalist Papers, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, knew they had to be careful in the ways they referenced and included the unlearned rabble. (Indeed, cookie-cutter liberals of today – unlike this non-doctrinaire liberal writer – would never use a term like “unlearned rabble,” for it smacks of insincerity in democratic commitment, a disdain for common, suffering people, who deserve our sympathy and sincere advocacy, not our derision.) The Founders knew that it was absolute folly to give the illiterate and semi-literate full control of the reins of government, hence their allowing only property owning males over 25 to vote – which is something, however fatuous and elitist. They also knew that this enduring problem of poor education would stay with the nation and that it would be the duty of posterity to treat such an enormous political problem as illiteracy and poor understanding.
Perhaps we’ve forgotten what the framers of the United States Constitution knew only too well: there needs to be a whole job category for the republican politician. If we are to allow the common people to participate fully as citizens equal to the very wealthiest and most learned, we need to maintain the elemental wisdom to allow that these common people vote for what amounts to, plainly put, a professional representative. And this is entirely different from voting – via the referendum and its like – on individual political propositions. If the Brexit vote in 2016 has taught us anything (and maybe it hasn’t, as we are not astute!) it is that we are foolish to allow the most, selfish, ill-informed, emotion-driven, populism-exhorted, unknowing, poster board-influenced and sound bite dependent among us to have the final say in directing domestic and foreign policy.
The way out of this problem of improvident novices having a heavy influence in where the polity goes and how it proceeds in that direction is in greater and still greater commitment to genuine educational excellence, and aiming at the greatest approximation of equality in educational opportunities and outcomes – from community to community, state to state, region to region. Imagine a polity where huge financial resources were directed at the very most disadvantaged populations, and where a holistic effort looked carefully at the whole experience of young people, at why they leave school early and often never set foot on a university campus.
However, this writing would be inane if it suggested that this idea of esteeming education is a somehow new or inventive solution to the problem of unintelligence in the voting population. The problem has been known and discussed since the 1800s. The problem has not been remedied because those influential individuals who are necessary to the promotion and fulfillment of this education-first-and-equally-and-foremost agenda are the very same who are in fact content to have their own children advantaged over others. The educational equality agenda is never pursued as stridently as it needed to be because there are underlying impulses in the (inherently selfish) individual that aren’t really averse to the idea of theirs getting the advantages – however subtly, however “freedom” honoring, however clandestinely. And if you can satisfy the voter by giving her child an “education” at the local public school, and satisfy the voter by giving her a tax break, and satisfy the voter by supporting wage increases, etc., etc., you are likely to have a satisfied voter, one who does not apprehend that her child is vastly disadvantaged compared to the wealthy who will shrewdly eschew the public schools altogether.
Democracy is not so much “the answer” as it is the tactical imperative. Human beings that are the constituents of democracies need to somehow gain entirely better education, and in greatly increased numbers. Part of the problem in the promotion of this educational agenda, is the fact that historically society as a whole only needed to prepare its people to fill job roles; education was not much aimed at anything nebulously ‘uplifting’ beyond the practical matter of what one planned to do as remunerative work. If you were a bricklayer, you needed to learn how that was done. And if you were an electrician, you needed to be instructed in all that occupation required. If you were a truck driver, your literacy had little to demonstrate beyond the comprehension of road signs. But how does one weigh and quantify the occupation of enlightened citizen? What is more, how does a society adequately esteem education beyond the matter of practical employments? Ours is a society made up of selfish individuals, where even the “enlightened” among them can be counted upon to advance – however roundabout and rationalized – selfish ends. How can we who abide in such a society move toward the fulfillment of the democratic imperative – that the polity needs to continually elevate its educational quotient (among the whole, not the elite) as a core element of democratic survivability?
We have something elemental and axiomatic in basic literacy assisting the citizen in the furtherance of his competence as a voter. But where is any sort of line to be drawn in literacy? Where do we decide that Jane Q. Citizen does not really need to know something? All secure and sovereign states need to have their secrets, but that is a quibble beyond the scope of the present writing! That Jane does not have to “know” some particular is not an excuse for conceding that she should arrive at the polls undiscerning and obtuse! An honorable and decent government and society will advocate for her most excellent enlightenment. How can this be a detriment to overall national objectives? It is wisdom and thoughtfulness that steers the ship of state providently. And how can this be a negative when it is actualized in the individual? If we are better served in our democratic duties with literacy than we are with illiteracy, then it stands perfectly to reason that the well-informed person serves the democracy better than the ill-informed. This proposition is unarguable. However, its elemental sense does not translate into its practical feasibility. People function always in the cause of advantaging themselves, and the only reason this awful doberman-like predilection has been tamed to agreeable or semi-agreeable effectuality inheres in the practice of veritable democratic exercise: the dangerousness of our intrinsic selfishness has been cleverly quelled by a diminishment-drowning out in a sea of identically selfish actors. Democracy is not really so sagacious as it is strategic; democracy does not aim at wisdom and virtue per se, but the diminution of ignorance’s detrimental effects in institutional procedure. Our Hobbesian “all against all” has been tamed by direction at the ballot box. This cannot and must not be confused with actual enlightenment; we are not enlightened. We are merely beneficiaries of a political heritage that has submerged and mitigated our egoistic vices – a political reality that says self-reassuringly, ‘See? We’ve consulted you, haven’t we?’
Herein, I can submit only what I have asserted before. I can only state that we are in a quandary, and there is no workable long-term solution to this education-imperative-in-modern-democracy difficulty beyond the cultural change that is possible through the sedulous advancement of human rights concepts. Advancing human rights, conducted intelligently and toward inherently immeasurable long-term goals, will mean that the cultural and societal estimation of the value and integrity of the human person will increase. As this happens, the importance of educating everyone in society will become increasingly apparent. With the substantial advancement of human rights, it will be superiorly seen that the citizen and voter needs to be educated in ways that are not fully relevant to the performance of any occupational or remunerative task, but toward the greater realization of a human and mindful civilizational task – that of ensuring the non-circumscribed dignity and fulfillment of the human individual.
I am not stupid; these suggestions herein, inasmuch as they fall on any ears or eyes at all, will fall on deaf (selfishness serving) ears, undiscerning eyes. The same psychological dynamic that produced an in-retrospect wholly inadequate dedication to educational integrity in a self-described “democracy” of the twentieth century will produce it in the twenty-first. We are caught in a terrible and ironical vexation: political conservatives will like to think that what I propose is “radical” or “socialist” or hints at a kind of “social engineering” or suppositional “nanny state,” and they will discount it – often following an unyielding ideology, and often too following the not-imperceptible idea of advantage for the self (in unrestrained individualism and libertarianism or quasi-libertarianism), however exaggerated and unrealistic that advantage may be; and political liberals will refuse this educational agenda because it originates intellectually in the candid observation that there is a whole underclass of people who are so unenlightened that they very obviously threaten to undo the American project. (Observe the general election of 2016, where fully two-thirds of uneducated whites voted for a bombastic imbecile who was certain to divide the nation.) Liberals adamantly refuse to characterize the poor uneducated class as deficient, and hence detrimental to estimable sociological agendas. Yet, such characterization is prerequisite to an observant and forthright examination of the inequality problem in the United States, a problem that has now contributed to an increasing political polarization problem. And when we add these two ideologically-driven groups together, we have about 20% to 30% of the population remaining, at most. And this portion of the electorate is not immune to the selfish impulse to work foremost and cardinally at the benefit of its own progeny. Independents are certain to be as corrupt and inconsistent as the rest.
Here I merely report on what appears to my conscious mind, what I genuinely, candidly, palpably believe, not what I in my inescapable and condemnable childishness wish were true. We are extremely unlikely to work hard at advancing human rights because it is an inherently unselfish agenda – or, the selfishness is so well hidden that it does not appear to the immediately-and-reflexively-selfish human mind. (A person could work essentially ‘selfishly’ in the advancement of human rights, in the profound awareness that she and her children are certainly esteemed in a culture where deliberate and committed efforts at esteeming human beings is paramount.) Still, sans considerable human rights advancement, indeed without a sea change in the ways we apprehend human dignity and the role of the individual human person in an always-advancing, always-evolving civilization, in the end, not surprisingly, human selfishness, however latent, subtle, contextualized, recondite and thorny, is destined to undo the democratic American project. A writer may wish all this awfulness were not so, but he is indebted and obliged to that which has appeared to his inmost, limited intellect and understanding most compellingly logical.
We are, alas, perennially selfish creatures, and our selfishness lies at the very root of our unwholesome political outcomes.