David Crisp has a long post looking at some books I haven't read, highly critical of the ignorance of Americans. While Crisp is (smartly, I think) a critic of the books, he writes this paragraph:Whatever her book's failings, Jacoby is on solid ground when she raises concerns that Americans are becoming too plain ignorant to govern themselves wisely. After all, we are five years and counting into a war in Iraq, and most Americans still can't find the country on a map. What's worse, many Americans don't think it's important to be able to find Iraq on a map.
Similarly, most Americans can't name a single Supreme Court justice, and most don't know that the court's job is to settle constitutional questions. Pretty scary. These sorts of paragraphs remind me of a useful lesson. Humans tend to order animals by greatness in terms of intelligence. But that's a pretty dead giveaway. We value intelligence in large part because it is our competitive advantage. A group of dogs creating a hierarchy of animals may well value smelling ability as the key criterion of an animal's worth.
The particular wisdom of democracy is recognizing that others' concerns may not be our own (this is also the wisdom of markets). So while I like to know who is on the Supreme Court and take no small amount of pride in my ability to find Iraq on a map, those are not necessarily highly relevant issues for a lot of voters (and should we be surprised that people who can't find Iraq on a map think it is unimportant to be able to find it?).
All of which is my way of saying, should you be voting if you don't even know who Mos Def is?
On a completely different note, Crisp notes the reason why frequently complaints about "unreason" are frustrating: I was a tad disappointed, in part for reasons that appear to be built into this sort of book: the inevitable tone of a nanny, and the sense that what she considers to be "unreason" is really just believing something that she doesn't. One of the smarter things I read in one of Amartya Sen's books (Rationality and Freedom ) a while back was that the entire concept of freedom relies upon the notion of individual choice playing into goals. In some realms we refer to these as tastes (which explain why markets for food exist -- we don't all always want to eat the same thing).
In politics, though, I'm often struck by the concept that people are seeking the same things but by different means. As Sen points out, that means one of two things -- either evidence is currently insufficient for us to determine whose means are better OR someone is being really stupid.
In reality, I think conservatives and liberals truly value different things. Like a lot of contemporary progressives, I'm fairly sold on traditionally conservative mechanisms like markets as devices for solving problems. But unlike modern conservatives, I think things like education and health care for all are ideas worth advancing.
People disagree. That's fine. In fact, much of our political disagreement may be better if we just accepted that fact. We can't "put politics aside" because politics is the decision-making process for determining whose priorities we're adopting. |
