The contradictions of democracy

ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. I'm David Mar, host of Late Night Live on ABC Radio National. For nearly 40 years, the show has been asking the best writers, thinkers and provocateurs big questions about our changing world. It's a power grab in advance. But as institutions collapse, narcissists thrive. And people were willing to take risks. Four brand new episodes each week on the ABC Listen app. Hello, this is David Rutledge. Welcome to The Philosopher's Zone, where we're thinking about democracy this week. Democracy is a funny old thing, isn't it? A system of government built on radically egalitarian principles, a historic driver of social progress, but also famously according to Winston Churchill, the worst form of government, apart from all the others that have been tried. That ambivalence felt by Churchill and also by Plato, who was very skeptical about democracy, has to do with the fact that democracy can sometimes work against itself. It can give us women's suffrage and civil rights on one hand, but on the other hand, it can also enable the rise of populists and demagogues who set about undermining democratic ideals and institutions as soon as they gain power. It's often said that the government of Adolf Hitler was democratically elected in the early 1930s. And while that's a somewhat simplistic reading of the actual events that took place, it is certainly true that Hitler's rise to power was something of a masterclass in the ruthless manipulation and exploitation of democratic norms. So democracy is vulnerable. And as we look around today at the hollowing out of democratic institutions in Europe and the USA, the question is how can we preserve and encourage the progressive tendencies of democracy while protecting it from the reactionary ones? Well, that question looms large over a book that I've spent the past couple of weeks completely and grossed in. The title is "Experiments in Living Together, How Democracy Drives Social Progress." Its author is Michael Firstin, whose professor and chair in the Department of Philosophy at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. Your book makes, I think, a very persuasive argument that for democracy to flourish and work in the way that it's both to work, that we need to be willing and able to undertake what you call "experiments in Living." And I'll ask you in a minute to expand on that. But first, I'd like to talk about the things that throw obstacles in the way of experimental creativity and democratic societies. What are some of the typical speed bumps that democracy encounters on the road to progress? Well, I think that we observe about human beings through history, and we can see it now, is that we are groupish creatures by nature. And there's clearly some evolutionary hardwiring involved there. Our survival as a species is tied to our ability to thrive as a group to cooperate and to kind of repel other groups on their various circumstances. And that aspect of our psychology serves us well in many circumstances. If you're thinking about large societies with many different kinds of people trying to get along together and make decisions together in a cooperative way, you can see how that sort of tribalistic group mindedness often gets in the way. And that can take different forms. Race, class, gender, ideas about sexuality, political ideology, one of the fascinating things about human beings that you see in social psychology experiments is that we're just phenomenally creative in our ability to sort of make up reasons not to get along, you know, to find a pretense for groupishness, even where no plausible pretense exists. Like I could talk about some of those experiments if you want, but I would say that is the, if I had to pick one thing, I think it's that tendency that tends to crop up over and over again. And it causes people to distrust one another. It creates tendencies to dominate, to exclude, sometimes to violence. So here's where you draw on the pragmatist philosophical tradition, particularly the work of John Duey in developing a concept of democracy, not simply as a set of procedures and sort of institutional arrangements, but as a way of communal life. And within that communal life, we see progress through these experiments of living as the title of your book. What do you mean exactly by that phrase? You know, I should say that the phrase is a little bit peculiar to attach it to Duey because it does, it does come from John Stuart Mill, British philosopher 19th century. He's the one who introduced that and he was talking about liberalism and essentially the idea that in order for social progress to happen, individuals need to be able to try out new kinds of lifestyles, new kinds of ideas and sort of see where that takes them. And Duey never uses that phrase, but he really kind of takes up this idea that experimentation is fundamental to how we engage with the world and ultimately how we learn. And that starts in the sciences, but he also sees this as a kind of method in the case of democracy. For Duey, experience is really the sort of fundamental notion that determines how well our lives are going and whether we're flourishing as a group, how we experience the world together. And so we need to, he argues, we need to make interventions in our social life from time to time that fundamentally reconfigure, reshape that social experience, particularly at the level of interaction with other kinds of people. And this in his mind is central to the process by which we learn. Right. And this process, you say, bears witness to a special ability that democracy has, which is to, and I'll quote you here, to drive social progress by improving the background conditions of moral cognition. What exactly do you mean by that? Yeah, well, if you think about moral cognition as having two components, principally, you would, you could point to our capacity to reason, and then you could point to our capacity to feel. And if you look at experimental research over the past 50, 60 years longer, what we really see is that both the rationalists and the sentimentalists didn't quite have it right. So it's, it's not exclusively about our capacity to reason. It's not exclusively or foundationally only about our capacity to feel that our moral cognition kind of unifies these two things through our ability to think about facts, to make inferences, to think about principles, to universalize, to generalize, but also to have compassion to engage at the level of emotion. That this in particular is really important in driving our ability to represent and act on what really matters to other people. So it's those two key factors that I think underlying moral cognition and one of the central arguments in the book is that you need experimentation to kind of improve, enhance those things so that we can get along better when we are living as doing the right thing. As diverse people. And so are you saying then that moral cognition and the capacity or the willingness to respond to the grievances of marginalized groups and so on, that this is not some sort of intrinsic quality within humans, within societies that we, we just need to dig deep enough and we'll find it. It's something that needs to be shaped invented if you like rather than discovered. Yeah, that's right. One of the central examples of the book is the case of school segregation by race in the United States. And it's not hard to imagine how living under those kinds of circumstances would really poison your view. If you're a white person, how that would poison your view of black people. Right. If you're growing up around in a social environment, where an entire group of people is sort of shunted off into a separate facility. You can see how there'd be a stigma attached to that that would shape your worldview. But you can also see how just simply the failure to interact on a day to day basis to just to share a laugh to share a story just to sit in a room together and share a moment. The way that these things kind of build up that tissue of compassion, of empathy, of mutual understanding. So when that, when you don't have that, yeah, our capacity to think about what matters to other people, what hurts them, what helps them, what's good for them. All that stuff really is is impeded. By way of another case study here, you offer the example of same sex marriage and you write that the transformation of American public opinion on same sex marriage is among the most remarkable and rapid shifts in moral consciousness ever recorded as a very emphatic way of putting it. What is it about this particular transformation that puts it ahead of so many other historic shifts in moral consciousness? Right. Well, I must confess as a philosopher, I did not do a comprehensive survey of all moral transformations in history, quantify their magnitude and so on. But yeah, so. I think if you look at this case, the first thing just to talk about would be the basic polling. If you go to the late 80s and I'll just talk about the United States, which is the case that that I know best, there are parallel trends in many other parts of the world. But I'll just speak about the United States. If you go back to the late 80s, it's something like 11% approval of same-sex marriage. By 2020, we're at 70-71%. Just the sheer magnitude of that on a fundamental moral concern is amazing. It's difficult to think of other parallels. Certainly, if you think about cases like abortion and just how much can you move the needle on an issue like that even over decades, it seems not much. That's the most basic fact point of interest. This transformation in public opinion, but then also, this comprehensive transformation in the way people treated others, the way gay people came to be integrated in so many different ways to American life, not just in day-to-day institutions, but also in pop culture, television, film, and so on. Those are really the facts that need to be attended to. Yeah. Can we taste that out a little bit? I think what's really interesting is that we can see this experiment in living, playing out through the history of the gay rights movement in the USA, all the way back to the 1950s, because things were not great for sexual minorities in the mid-20th century. What were some of the significant milestones along the way to widespread public support for gay rights and eventually to same-sex marriage? Well, the movement in the US gets going, as you say, in the '50s, you have a small group of people, so people like the Madishean Society, who really start to conceptualize the plight of gay people in a way that is parallel to the kind of civil rights movement for black people. So I don't want to say that the gay rights movement at that time thought they were, in all cases, alike to black people fighting for civil rights, but they saw the parallels there. What was going on in the civil rights movement kind of awakened their own sense of indignation. And so the movement starts to coalesce around a certain set of grievances. It doesn't really go anywhere except that over time more and more people are drawn to the movement. The Stonewall protests in New York City in the late '60s were a critical moment where you essentially had a riot at a bar that was being shut down. And this brings a lot of public attention to the movement. So you have growing public attention and then you start to have things like anti-discrimination ordinances. You have some people elected to different political offices. In the '80s, the AIDS crisis was a major catalyst, I think, for a number of reasons. But one of the really crucial factors about the AIDS crisis was that it humanized gay people. So the image of gay people suffering, I think, really changed many people's perspective. Through the '90s and 2000s, there's a lot of, what I might describe as cultural normalization. So just one tidbit about that that I like is that in the '90s, IKEA furniture commercial where you had two men standing around looking at a table. And it wasn't like it said in the commercial that they were gay, but the message was implicit. And this trend continues to the point that you have Pete Buttigieg running for president in the mid-2010s. And his sexuality isn't even really an issue, although he is a gay man. And finally, of course, the Obergothel V. Hodges, Supreme Court decision in 2015, which made it legal as a matter of constitutional law. The interesting thing, I think, about this trajectory is that it goes somewhat against the grain of dominant theoretical accounts of what democracy is and how it works. If we take the familiar idea, for example, that democracy distributes power across a wide base, which makes it difficult for anyone to dominate, which encourages compromise and coalition building among various factions, how does the story of the American gay rights movement sort of reveal the limitations of this model of democracy? Yeah, that's a perfect example of when that traditional logic of democracy doesn't work. James Madison, one of the American founding fathers, wrote a lot about this idea that democracy works well by kind of, and liberal institutions in general work well by dividing powers. And so the idea is not that we can construct a republic, it doesn't depend so much on individual virtue. As long as you have power-checking power, you can create incentives to compromise. The problem is you have marginalized groups. It's not always in the interest of any given coalition to really bring them on board because sometimes the costs of doing that are greater than the benefits. And I think that's effectively what you have. You have rampant anti-gay sentiment, and you have a relatively small minority that's interested in this cause. There's really very little impetus to get uptake in democracy, in political power. So what you need to do is to create a transformation that actually changes the way people think and feel to set the stage for a later time when you can create a coalition that has some political power. On ABC Radio National and ABC Listen, I'm David Rutledge and this is the Philosopher's Zone. My guess this week is Michael Firstin, and we're talking about his most recent book, "Experiments in Living Together, How Democracy Drives Social Progress." Another long-standing buttress of liberal political philosophy is the concept of what's called "Deliberative Democracy." Tell me, first of all, what is "Deliberative Democracy?" And how does the same sex marriage case reveal its limitations as a model of how democracy works? Deliberative democracy is currently the most popular theoretical model of democracy among people like me who do this for a living. It goes back at least to the 90s, the German philosopher, Jürgen Habermost, and many others who developed the idea. And put simply the ideas that in the ideal democracy involves decision-making that's made through free, equal, and open deliberation. That's the essence of the idea. And I would say that the main way to think about it is in contrast to a traditional model that sees democracy as more analogous to war, or you're just sort of teaming up with others to get more power, and it's just this kind of constant power conflict that's playing out. The virtue of democracy is dividing that up. Deliberative democracy is about the idea that we need to give reasons when we use power. We need to be able to justify it, and we need a process that creates that kind of justification. That's how you respect people, not just by giving them the right to gang up on each other. It's interesting because I guess the deliberative democracy ideal presents a picture of democracy working like some sort of ancient Athenian Senate, like people getting together and making arguments to each other, and then each argument is weighed on the strength of its merits and the unforced force of the better argument to quote Habermas, "carries the day." But that's the ideal. How close is it to actual democracy in practice, or perhaps how far from it? Okay, so I should say about the deliberative democratic ideal. There's actually been a lot of really good interesting work at trying to implement this. There's actually a center for deliberative governance at the University of Canberra. There's a lot of good work going on in Australia among other places. It's unlike many academic ideas, it's been put to use in the real world. The model of citizens assemblies, which is a particular version of this, has been used in France, for example, a number of other places in Europe and around the world. It's quite impressive. If you can create a curated environment where you can foster this kind of egalitarian informed exchange, you can get quite impressive results. The obvious worry when you look at the real world is that the real world is not curated, like that, or at least most of the. You can do it in little bits, but if you look at democracy at scale, you don't get that kind of curated environment. You can just think about the arguments you've had with family members about this or that political issue, and then you imagine scaling that up, and you can sort of see why deliberative democracy is not always going to be such a great idea. That's one thing. It's hard to scale in the sort of jungle of the real world. The other problem that I really focus on in the book is that, as much as deliberation is important, deliberation really recruits our rational capacities more than anything else. There's a lot of psychological research that shows that how we use reason. Who are inclined to see as persuasive? what kinds of arguments we put more weight on than others and so on, depends on things like compassion, empathy, our sense of social identity, who's in the in group, who's in the out group, and so on. So the deliberative democratic ideal is great, but it's missing some of these other aspects of our moral cognition. That's one of these central arguments of the book. One of the things I like to think about, or really I don't like to think about it, but I can't help it, is the way that when we look at the United States at the moment, we see what looks like the dethroning of reason as the primary driver of everything good that's supposed to happen in a democracy. We've seen QAnon, we've seen the explosion of conspiratorial fantasy among the public. We see a lot of violence. There's this sense that things are really starting to wobble out of control. A lot of philosophers have looked at this over the past few years and decided that what we need to fix this is more reason, more critical thinking. And while I don't think those are bad things to want, it's still the case that a lot of the unreason is being driven by deliberate strategies and actions of very rational, critically minded, well educated people. And so the answer to the problem has to be something other than just better arguments, more critical thinking, right? Yeah, I think that's right. There's some really great research on this. One experiment I really like involves opinions about climate change. And what these experimenters did was they took people with different levels of scientific education. And they categorized them by their level of partisanship, either right or left. And what they found was that, in effect, if you have higher levels of education, it actually makes you more inclined to doubt the scientific consensus on climate change if you are a right-leaning partisan. So basically, as you're saying, reason is a tricky thing because we're all motivated reasoners. And our reasoning is driven by our background ideological presumptions, but also as speaking earlier about this kind of emotional fabric of our minds, often in ways it's not available to us. And so reasoning plus partisanship can often make things worse, not better. And so as you say, there's got to be something else. And I think that if you look at what's happened in the United States, it would be hard to diagnose the problem in terms of people just becoming less rational. And the question is, well, why are they becoming less rational? And there I think you get into a complicated confluence of things. You've got the internet, social media, whatever that's doing to our partisan brain. But then you've just got really kind of skyrocketing social inequality and a lot of the kind of problems that have been widely documented surrounding that. And these two things I think are pulling at community, not our rationality. Well Plato, of course, was famously skeptical about democracy. He thought it was unstable, prone to chaos. And he believed that ruling a populace requires specialized skills that most people lack. And when we look around at the various elite hierarchies that exist within democracies, the world's a policy and the law and the economy and urban planning and all the rest of it, you can see what Plato means, like not just anybody can do these things. But you make the point that when it comes to morality and moral insight, that we're looking at something that lies outside the realm of specialist hierarchy. It's very interesting. And tell me more about that. Right. This is the epistemological argument for democracy as we call it among the academics. Pistomologically, just meaning related to knowledge. So there might be a number of different reasons. You could think democracy is good. It's fair. It promotes freedom, et cetera. But you also might think democracy is good because it tends to pool widely distributed knowledge about shared public problems. And the moral dimensions of decision making are a good example of this. And the thought here is that if you take something like urban planning, there's probably a pretty reliable way of credentialing people, kind of picking out people who are good at that. If you're talking about moral expertise, it's not totally clear even what we mean by that. But B, it's such a heterogeneous body of knowledge. It involves so many different kinds of problems, many of which we haven't even identified yet, that there isn't any particularly appropriate filtering mechanism for figuring out who's an expert. And so if we want to avoid moral catastrophe, if we want to maximize the prospects of improving things, we're just kind of stuck in the situation of letting everyone into the conversation. And I think the importance of that is borne out just by the history of social movements, where you have people like Martin Luther King or people that had the gay rights movement. These are the most marginalized people who never would have been accepted via the traditional hierarchies, just by leaving the door open that you create that prospect for improving our moral perspective. You mentioned Martin Luther King there, and I'm always reminded having these conversations of the phrase that he's so often quoted, which is that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. We still have this problem though, identified by Plato, that people are people that they can be selfish and ignorant and reactionary, and the democratic government proceeding according to the will of the people can sometimes come to reflect these same negative qualities. And of course in the USA today we have open culture war against immigrants and trans people and other minorities, and all of this with the apparent approval of the 77 million people who voted for Donald Trump. And do you think is this just one of those kinks in the arc of the moral universe? Or is it more that sometimes democracy delivers progress, sometimes it delivers injustice and oppression, and we just go round and round? Yeah, that line, it's such a nice line. I played around with using it in the book in different ways. The way I was going to use it was going to be something like, if the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, it's because we're going to be leaning on it or something like that. I mean MLK was a religious man, and I'm sure that informed his perspective on this as it did many other things. I'm not. But in any case, I do think it requires something proactive from us. I don't see it as some kind of inevitable tendency of things. And you see that now where you have major setbacks in American democracy, but also in many other democracies around the world, it's actually quite fascinating. Why is it such a kind of international phenomenon? It doesn't seem to be tether to any particular culture. And what I would say is that I think democracy does have a tendency to promote progress, but only under certain kinds of conditions. And those conditions can unfortunately be undermined by democracy itself. People, as we discussed earlier, are groupish. They are often irrational. They're often poorly informed and subject to manipulation, misinformation. These are old problems. And sometimes those dynamics went out. I don't think there's anything inevitable about democracy that kind of corrects for that. So I do think it gives us better chances for course correction than alternatives. The final chapter of your book is titled, "What is the lesson of Donald Trump for democracy?" And what you've just been saying, I think, goes some distance towards answering that question. But what else is there? I mean, there's more to talk about there. What else are you looking at Trump, looking at the Trump administration and how is that causing you to reflect on the weaknesses, the vulnerabilities, the potential of democracy? Yeah, well, it is worth saying that I started thinking about some of the ideas in this book around 2008, 2009. Right after Obama was elected, I started writing the book in September 2016 at a time when it seemed really just crazy that Donald Trump would be elected. He thought Clinton would be elected. Then Trump gets elected. Then we have Biden. I had some intervening years. I couldn't work on the book, etc. I finished it in 2023, takes forever to come out. Now here we are. And so my head is spinning. I think like everybody else, and I think many of us just never could have imagined actually the phenomenon of Donald Trump succeeding on such a scale in the United States. And I'm still trying to come to terms with what that says about human beings, what that says about the United States. But it is clear that these forces that he's churned up of intergroup, animus, of resentment, anger, these are very powerful emotions. And we have certainly seen other people in history who's capable of stoking those emotions and using them. And in a democracy, you're not immune to that. I guess what I would say is that for trying to think about remedies, improvements, I do think that we need to be thinking more about this question of community. How are we bringing people together so that they have the capacity to feel sympathetically about one another's problems to seriously, not just to treat each other as cartoons? Can we reinvest in public spaces, public schools, which is another kind of struggling institution in the US? So I do think, as you say, there's a tendency to think, oh, it's like, well, people need more civic education. And I'm all for civic education, but I do think we need some kind of deeper reinvestment in a sense of community and mutual sympathy. The follow-up question to that, I guess, and I'll make this my last question, is sort of how do we do that? I mean, if we bring it back to same-sex marriage, there hasn't been any widespread movement looking to push back same-sex marriage rights yet, but we are seeing the rise of ultra-conservative groups speaking out against the perversions of the modern world, as they see it. And while it's true that gay rights have strong public support, it's also true that abortion rights have strong public support, and that hasn't stopped the overturning of Roe v. Wade. So when we talk about developing new habits of moral cognition, taking fresh leaps of the moral imagination and so on, how can these inclinations be not just encouraged and nurtured, but really sort of strengthened against the threat of well-organized and deeply committed reactionary forces? Yeah, well, I just want to see something about the cases. Right, take on the more general question. Same-sex marriage, abortion, as you say. So in the case of same-sex marriage, public approval is pretty much rock solid at 70%. This is a slight dip, maybe, but nothing meaningful. So if that gets overturned, it's not going to be because-- it's not going to be because public opinion has changed. It's going to be because the US has its own distinctive set of legal institutions and the Supreme Court is weird, et cetera, et cetera. And I think we could say similar things about the abortion case. So it's unclear to me that those issues generalize well to questions about regression in general. Every country has these kind of institutions that can be manipulated in one way or another, or that have certain-- we can call them anti-democratic tendencies, anyway. Let me take on your broader question. So people will disagree about this, but to me in looking at what's going on, and like the international scale of authoritarian populism, you say, well, what's changed? I think that economic inequality has gotten worse in a lot of places. I mean, it's gotten especially bad in the US. I think that investing in greater levels of shared prosperity-- we don't have to talk about Marxism here-- but just a society where everybody is benefiting from the riches. Right now, that's not really happening. In the US, overwhelmingly, the growth, the massive growth that we've seen over the past 50 years or so, has mostly gone to the 20%, top 20% with large degrees. I think that's got to have something to do with it. The other thing I'll say is if you're thinking about a cultural crossroads, places where people have a chance to be with different kinds of people, to learn how to feel sympathetically, think sympathetically about many different kinds of people, could use a massive reinvestment in public schools. I recognize these are complicated issues. I don't see those as silver bullets by any means. But to me, those are-- we're talking about practical measures. Those are a couple things that stand out. Michael Firste, professor of philosophy and chair in the Department of Philosophy at St. His book is "Experiments in Living Together, How Democracy Drives Social Progress," published by Oxford University Press. And we'll put a link to that and some other info on the Philosopher's Zone website. And don't forget, you can listen to this episode again or catch up with past episodes via ABC Listen. The Philosopher's Zone is produced on Bungalung Land by me, David Rutledge. And it's been great to have you along this week. Hope you can join me next time. Bye for now. [MUSIC PLAYING]