A Note on the Consilience Project PSA Video “Democracy and the Epistemic Commons”

Before reading any further, take six and a half minutes and watch the Consilience PSA on democracy and social epistemics:

Overall, I like and endorse the Consilience Project. I encourage you to read the longer form article the video is based on. I think Consilience is making a laudable effort to raise journalistic standards and I’ve really enjoyed the articles they’ve produced thus far.

But I want to take a few lines to point out some problems that this video helps to illustrate. To me, Consilience represents a fairly common, rather liberalistic view on what democracy is and what democracy requires to function well. Noting where this view falls short will make it easier to see why this kind of liberal stance is inadequate to meet the challenges it correctly, though partially, diagnoses. 

The Consilience PSA is on solid ground when it assumes that, for modern democracies to work, the people need to meet certain levels of universal education. I don’t know an American who wouldn’t agree to some version of this claim. And the video is right that this view has a deep pedigree in American political thought.

Consilience says that democratic education has to do primarily with “civic virtue,” by which they mean, not only studying the parts of government, “how a bill becomes a law,” etc., but boosting participation in the political process. Education needs to be a corrective to apathy. Here, the video makes reference to the Founding Fathers, as if the Founding Fathers meant the same thing by “civic virtue.” This is the first mistake worth emphasizing. Yes, the Founders wanted the people to be engaged and virtuous, but they did not simply equate the two.

To glimpse what the Founders might have meant by civic virtue, read a little more adventurously in the writings of the era. Personally, I think it is indisputable that many of the Founders believed that virtue almost surely included virtues of character, by which they meant the “traditional virtues” or “the cardinal virtues,” even if in some popularized or diluted form. Moreover, many leading founders worried much less about popular engagement per se and much more about the moral standing of the people – it seemed to them a very real danger that the people might simply lack the moral fiber for self-governance, especially with the rising fortunes of a commercial republic. In this context, virtue would be the moral conditions of self-rule or “liberty” and not the etiquette involved with tolerating “license.”

By narrowing civic virtue to mean something like “informed, tolerant political engagement,” Consilience avoids confronting the true proportions of today’s moral deficit. Now, even by their own thinned out standard, civic virtue is not in great shape. How much worse, then, would the diagnosis be if they more accurately reflected the Founding view? I don’t mean to suggest that the Founders’ ideas need to be taken as an absolute measure of political success. But I think it is important for the American regime to be clear with itself about how it has and has not realized the minimum conditions for political stability as understood by its political architects. (I actually think that clarity here should start with the fact that the United States of America is not really a democracy, but that is for another time). 

The next problem worth noting is related to the first. Like many liberal Americans, Consilience assumes that it is vital for a functional democracy to protect free speech and the concomitant “market-place of ideas.” The assumption is that an “open society” only works if ideas can check ideas, freely and with minimal factional interference. The invisible hand of the idea market will, in virtue of these dynamics, assure that the best ideas prevail and that society will, thereby, update itself according to the latest version of the true and the good. 

As far as I can tell, this is a Millian imposition on American political thought. I don’t think that the defenders of the first amendment – even the defenders of journalism as some sort of Fourth Estate – believed in this purified picture of “democratic discourse.” The Millian or more libertarian view distorts or ignores the extent to which the rights to speech and to assembly were bound up with religious concerns, specifically protections against religious persecution. That is, they were protections for various groups that thought of themselves as prescriptively “closed,” not as participants in an “open” society.

Now, in a regime that has long since abandoned or jettisoned older notions of virtue and public decorum, it is not surprising that today’s liberals find their way to Mill’s vision. It holds out the hope that public debate can function like enlightenment machinery, that somehow the selection dynamics of discourse providentially guarantee the best results – that somehow our sorting system still works (don’t worry, guys!), even despite the rising and disconcerting levels of noise it is making. But even Mill would concede that meaningful discourse can only happen in an arena protected by guardrails, that for public speech to generate pro-social results, there has to be a prior commitment to things like decorum, order, and decency. The “open” society can’t be open to all and sundry.  

The failure to take this aspect of Mill into consideration, along with the failure to think through the Founders’ ideas about speech and decency contributes to Consilience underdiagnosing the problems it seeks to solve. Most importantly, from my perspective, the messaging here on democratic discourse completely fails to consider how normative moral ideals might actually help promote and preserve the cogency of an epistemic commons. Consilience concedes that our information landscape contains much more “info-data” than can be meaningfully synthesized by one “culture,” let alone by one individual. Wouldn’t a regime with more clearly stated prescriptive norms have a less noisy, less anarchic epistemic commons? In all honesty, how should we think about the “coherence settings” of the political cave? The video claims that it is something like a civic duty to tolerate dissenting views – that we shouldn’t expect agreement in a free society and that we should approach rational discussion with the appropriate patience and civility. Fine. But then the video makes it seem like pluralistic dissent won’t be an encumbrance to the idea market; yes, we have to be patient and courteous, but not to worry, what seems bug-like is actually a feature. But is this really an adequate analysis of what the trade-offs are here on the relation between open discourse and functional sense-making? I think the serious reader deserves a more rigorous reckoning.

In a recent appreciative review of Julia Galef’s book The Scout Mindset, Freddie de Boer makes a point that I think helps capture my frustrations and some of what’s at stake in the problem. He says that Galef and others who make it their business to teach “rationalism” assume that they can make progress even despite their awareness of the pervasiveness of our cognitive deficiencies. There is a charm to this view. But is it really adequate to the task it sets for itself? More precisely, is it adequate in the light of its own analysis? I have no doubt that the motivated reader can profit from Galef, just like he or she can profit from the Consilience Project. But the idea that we can improve our cultural intelligence or our democratic discourse by learning en masse the art of reason from Galef and others strikes me as, at best, naïve, at worst, delusional, especially when, as de Boer notes, “we live in a world where many millions of people genuinely believe that (inaccurate) estimates of where various heavenly bodies were in relation to each other at the time of their birth influences the events of their life” (and much worse, besides, I might add).

It seems to me that our expectations for the stability and efficacy of the epistemic commons ought to be set, not by the hopes of the merchants of enlightenment, but by a close analysis of their own insights into the limits of reason. What Consilience has to offer here threatens to become unserious because it is guided by the wrong constraints.