Waldemar:
Thanks. Since you are in the habit of asking people what they mean by
the terms they use, I'll return the favor: Precipice . . . ??
We all live in a constant state-of-war. "We have always been at war
with Eastasia." This is, however, a psychological war and, as Orwell
suggested, the resulting and unrelenting *fear* is the basis of our
"1984."
But who is fighting whom? And for what? "Hearts and minds" are at stake.
Here is a post from my Center's mailing list that might point to some
answers --
We have all lived our lives under conditions of non-stop
*psychological* warfare, to which we've been forced to comply. That's
what "Cold War" means.
When Imagination is overplayed, it becomes Fantasy. When people
"learn to stop worrying and love the bomb," as Dr. Strangelove put it,
our souls have become deeply disordered. "Mad Men" produce a "mad"
population -- which, of course, also became the acronym, Mutually
Assured Destruction (with all it connections to RAND, from which we
[i.e. the Center] were also spawned.)
I've always wondered how Steven Pinker &al get away with *not*
considering "advertising" -- which was a focus-of-study for McLuhan --
as violence. It is interesting that we have adopted "kinetic" as a
better term for *efficient* cause and that the military refers to
actually going in and killing people as "kinetic warfare," qualifying
the larger framework, and that now we are being told that the Russians
are responsible for "information warfare."
Why not Ford and Chevy . . . ??
The whole "Humane Technology" theme (backed by my old "student" Roger
McNamee), along with all the examination of how our emotions are
manipulated by Facebook &al -- Area 8 in the Omidyar "Ethical OS"
danger-wheel -- cannot end well for the advertising world. What
happens when advertising is *removed* as a viable option for funding
businesses? What happens when people just "turn it off"?
Efforts to somehow carve-off "direct-mail" as the culprit, instead of
directly targeting *memes* and all other forms of manipulation (or
"persuasion") will fail. We are heading into a situation where
"promotion" is viewed as criminal activity . . . !!
What will the world look like when "make love not war" means that
*all* advertising is considered to be a "war crime"?
Mark
P.S. The typical (superficial) description of the *war* we are all
fighting is "culture-war" or "counter-culture." Gregg's usage of the
term "Culture" will need to offer an explanation of how this happens
to us. Jordan Peterson is successful because there is a population
who want to "fight back" (which, based on his audience, is clearly
young white males) in that "war." But the fight against "identity
politics" is the *old* war -- given to us by TELEVISION (which carves
up the population into "psycho-graphics," so that the right people can
be "targeted") -- and, as we know, that's what the "generals" always
tend to fight.
The *new* "culture-war" is quite different. It is between the robots
and the humans. This is the culture-war given to us by DIGITAL.
Precipice? The new precipice is now described as the "Singularity" --
defined as the cross-over when machines become more "intelligent" than
humans and we have figured out how to "upload" our personalities (aka
"souls") into them so that we can become "immortal." This is the
culture-war in which the next Jordan Peterson will fight and, yes,
"Skynet" is the enemy (which is to say, those people who are trying to
build it, disguised as "colonies on Mars" &c.) But, will we step back
from this precipice?
Quoting [log in to unmask]:
> Cogent thoughts for our present dilemma, Mark.
> But, if “we” step back from the precipice, will “others” do so, as well?
> And, what will we be stepping back towards or for?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Waldemar
>
> Waldemar A Schmidt, PhD, MD
> (Perseveret et Percipiunt)
> 503.631.8044
>
> Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. (A Einstein)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> On Aug 11, 2018, at 2:25 PM, Mark Stahlman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> ToKers:
>>
>> My girlfriend Debbie just sent me the article below, sent to her by
>> her brother in Israel. It retreives the Walter Lippmann/John Dewey
>> "debates" (and more), as initiated by LIppmann's 1922 "Public
>> Opinion." Lippmann had been a part of the WW I "propaganda"
>> efforts (i.e. early psychological warfare), the experience of which
>> he turns into the statement that voter preferences are based “not
>> on direct and certain knowledge but on pictures” given to us.
>>
>> Nowadays, the more common name for these pictures are "memes" and I
>> would suggest that "democracy" (as most people think of it today)
>> cannot exist without them. In fact, it is one itself. This is
>> the "anthropomorphic rats in a maze with the illusion of free-will"
>> situation that Gregory Bateson talked about in 1941. This is the
>> rejection of the "authoritarian personality" written about by T.
>> Adorno at the root of Social Psychology (as it was launched after
>> WW II, based on an enhanced version of pscyhological warfare.)
>>
>> While Lippmann [1889-1974] was brought up in an earlier ELECTRIC
>> environment, he would live to see the advent of TELEVISION --
>> which, in many ways, is the "perfect" environment to deliver these
>> "pictures" to the population. While "mind control" and
>> "brainwashing" are themselves memes which reflect people's concerns
>> under *television* conditions, they mostly obscure what is going on
>> and the actual psychological "mechanisms" involved are generally
>> unknown to (or unspecified by) most who comment on these matters.
>>
>> In particular, focusing on the "message" is a fundamental mistake.
>> I first got into this "debate" when I met Doug Rushkoff in 1995 and
>> invited him to come to a monthly event I organized called
>> "Cybersalon," where I wanted him to discuss his then-new book
>> "Media Virus." LIke Adam Westoby and many others, Doug was
>> convinced that "good memes" could change society for the better.
>> Eventually, he came to understand that this surely *cannot* work
>> and that, instead, it is the process of meme-generation/propagation
>> that really matters.
>>
>> In fact, it is the *medium* that "shapes our behaviors and
>> attitudes" -- not the specific "advertisements/jingles." What
>> seems to always be left out when these topics come up is a detailed
>> grasp of *formal* causes (i.e. psycho-technolgical environments)
>> and their relationship to our "senses" in the process of how we
>> form our "perception" of the world. For that, McLuhan is required.
>>
>> The further problem -- touched on by Lippmann but largely ignored
>> by others -- is that taking *responsiblity* is fundamental in terms
>> of what we are *willing* to understand about the world. Outside of
>> our personal lives, few people have any wider responsiblities --
>> which is the basic flaw in the "democracy myth." Not only do
>> people have no clue what to do, they honestly don't care (thus
>> elections that are driven by <50% voter turnout.)
>>
>> Convincing people that they should care about something they really
>> have no connection with -- North Korea. Supreme Court picks,
>> Russian election interference &c (i.e. everything on CNN) -- is
>> completely outside of people's immendiate lives and, therefore, not
>> something that (under usual conditions) that people would know
>> anything about. However, if they are told that they need to "save
>> the world" -- which, of course, they couldn't do even if they tried
>> all day long -- only forces people to rely on "pictures" (aka
>> memes) all the more.
>>
>> Democracy is *not* the "form" of the US government -- quite on
>> purpose. Those who wrote the Constitution (and particularly the
>> "Federalist Papers") were quite clear about this. Democracy is a
>> "degenerate" form of constitutional government to be aggressively
>> avoided -- as Aristotle made clear in his "Politics" and as
>> everyone who has carefully considered these matters has known for
>> the past two+ millenia.
>>
>> Aristotle knew all this quite personally. Athens and its democracy
>> was, by today's standards (and even known by many others at that
>> time) a seriously "crazy" place. It actually voted to kill
>> Socrates. It regularly banned people from Athens (including
>> Aristotle, who left twice, and then his school was kicked out after
>> he died.)
>>
>> In our lives, Democracy = TELEVISION and, I'm quite confident, our
>> memetic enthusiasm for democracy today will decline dramatically
>> over the next 10+ years, as we retrieve our memories under DIGITAL
>> conditions . . . !!
>>
>> Mark
>>
>> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.vox.com_2018_8_9_17540448_walter-2Dlippmann-2Ddemocracy-2Dtrump-2Dbrexit&d=DwIFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=aCzASjeVXbREiZ3ekcU6oIuCtu9WXwwDjtdnrs4f4Gk&s=bxE4u50AKfbuGoRwuqTJtmATi9bSIo2h9n_nRhLlOsQ&e=
>>
>>
>> Intellectuals have said democracy is failing for a century. They were wrong.
>>
>> Walter Lippmann’s famous critique of democracy revisited.
>>
>> By Sean Illing
>> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.vox.com_authors_sean-2Dilling&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=_Hr_KxLeTQwKuvccXZI66WOLJGjan8mX5QYhLIuwOm4&e=>@seanilling <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.twitter.com_seanilling&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=fq5PLfG6JoB7C5iXJKtzoNncMy10JDI1j_FuHsfrDxc&e=>[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> Aug 9, 2018, 8:10am
>> EDT
>>
>>
>> Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion
>> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__go.redirectingat.com-3Fid-3D66960X1516588-26xs-3D1-26url-3Dhttps-253A-252F-252Fwww.amazon.com-252FPublic-2DOpinion-2DWalter-2DLippmann-252Fdp-252F0684833271&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=EGnjE-dQU2_Gj7Bcfa8fP6vIs1FiB89FVGy-HpW5nvQ&e=>, published in 1922, is the most persuasive critique of democracy I’ve ever read. Shortly after it was published, John Dewey, the great defender of democracy and the most important American philosopher of the era, called Lippmann’s book “the most effective indictment of democracy as currently
>> conceived.”
>>
>> Lippmann poses a straightforward question: can citizens achieve a
>> basic knowledge of public affairs and then make reasonable choices
>> about what to do? His answer is no, and the whole point of the book
>> is to expose the gap between what we say democracy is and what we
>> know about how human beings actually behave.
>>
>>
>> Most democratic theorists in the 20th century believed that more
>> information would produce a more informed citizenry, and a more
>> informed citizenry would make good on the core promise of
>> democracy. They were wrong. More information doesn’t necessarily
>> lead to more enlightened civic participation — it is just as likely
>> to lead to more noise, more partisanship, and more ignorance (click
>> here
>> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__go.redirectingat.com-3Fid-3D66960X1516588-26xs-3D1-26url-3Dhttps-253A-252F-252Fwww.amazon.com-252FDemocracy-2DRealists-2DElections-2DResponsive-2DGovernment-252Fdp-252F0691178240-253Fsa-2Dno-2Dredirect-253D1-2526pldnSite-253D1&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=R95PI654cZkYIRidTdPo4jAF8s4YWUjmSJlpu5bZ0cM&e=> and here <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__go.redirectingat.com-3Fid-3D66960X1516588-26xs-3D1-26url-3Dhttps-253A-252F-252Fwww.amazon.com-252FStealth-2DDemocracy-2DAmericans-2DGovernment-2DPsychology-252Fdp-252F0521009863-253Fsa-2Dno-2Dredirect-253D1-2526pldnSite-253D1&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=q30a-qmyar0tr35THuuf_jAkAxgqBnaQ_jOBBwrwwB8&e=> and here <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__go.redirectingat.com-3Fid-3D66960X1516588-26xs-3D1-26url-3Dhttps-253A-252F-252Fwww.amazon.com-252FNeither-2DLiberal-2Dnor-2DConservative-2DIdeological-252Fdp-252F022645245X-252F-253FpldnSite-253D1&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=eLhbDVp54FZBs8udkh-PJCJcVxv22QeaNQM9_DDaj8A&e=> for research backing this up). Indeed, more informed voters practice more partisan
>> self-deception.
>>
>> The second half of the book attempts to solve all the problems the
>> first part unearths. Here Lippmann fails spectacularly, and he
>> fails because his solution to the problems of democracy is to
>> abandon everything that makes democracy worthwhile. He couldn’t
>> figure out how to intelligently guide public opinion, so he sought
>> to transcend it altogether by creating a “bureau of experts” that
>> would decide public policy on behalf of the public. But that isn’t
>> a democracy at all; it’s a technocracy at best, an oligarchy at
>> worst.
>>
>> Today, Lippmann’s pessimism is fashionable. After Brexit
>> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.vox.com_2016_6_24_12024560_brexit-2Da-2Dshort-2Dsimple-2Dexplanation&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=6L5LTzOuOEEazURcQFofS-49XxvqdPKM3LLXEl5UOdk&e=> and the election of Donald Trump, a whole genre of nonfiction literature has emerged, seeking to explain how democracies die <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__go.redirectingat.com_-3Fid-3D66960X1516588-26xs-3D1-26url-3Dhttps-253A-252F-252Fwww.amazon.com-252FHow-2DDemocracies-2DDie-2DSteven-2DLevitsky-252Fdp-252F1524762938&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=IvOIan_hlIqAT6112EguT9STYy4pwVqvzp00Dpd4q7g&e=>, or why Western liberalism is in retreat <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__go.redirectingat.com_-3Fid-3D66960X1516588-26xs-3D1-26url-3Dhttps-253A-252F-252Fwww.amazon.com-252FRetreat-2DWestern-2DLiberalism-2DEdward-2DLuce-252Fdp-252F0802127398&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=XJImMcmdXyztJWOYS2Qlui-up8Q7lD8s-YWh5orHnAw&e=>. Pundits and analysts have argued that democracy is “decaying” <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.washingtonpost.com_opinions_democracy-2Dis-2Ddecaying-2Dworldwide-2Damerica-2Disnt-2Dimmune_2018_02_22_ff670f88-2D1813-2D11e8-2D92c9-2D376b4fe57ff7-5Fstory.html-3Futm-5Fterm-3D.94e5e69b819b&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=09K2ly_zcBZevV6rUWwLRdSsSwhIKCGSe3y86xW_laU&e=> worldwide, and that America is morphing into an authoritarian
>> state.
>>
>> Which is why it’s important to note that as powerful as Lippmann’s
>> diagnosis of democracy’s flaws is, it seems to have missed
>> something essential about the elasticity of democratic systems.
>> After all, here we are, almost a century later, and America has
>> become more powerful, more tolerant, more wealthy, and even more
>> democratic. Perhaps that divergence contains lessons for our
>> present moment of panic, too.
>>
>> The myth of democracy
>>
>> Lippmann begins his critique by exploding the romanticized vision
>> of democracy espoused by the American Founders.
>>
>>
>> They imagined that citizens, no matter how sprawling the state
>> became, would still function much as they did in the small,
>> self-contained communities that existed in the 18th century. Which
>> is to say, they would be asked to make decisions about issues with
>> which they had direct experience. They were thinking of white,
>> male, property-owning farmers who understood their local
>> environment, knew their neighbors, and didn’t live in a highly
>> industrialized society.
>>
>> As Lippmann put it, “The democratic ideal, as Jefferson moulded it,
>> consisted of an ideal environment and a selected class.” The racism
>> and sexism notwithstanding, that environment looks nothing like
>> ours, and the range of issues voters are expected to know something
>> about today vastly exceeds the demands at the time of the founding.
>>
>> The question for Lippmann, then, wasn’t whether the average person
>> was intelligent enough to make decisions about public policy; it
>> was whether the average person could ever know enough to choose
>> intelligently. And he made the point using himself as an example:
>>
>> My sympathies are with [the citizen], for I believe that he has
>> been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to
>> practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although
>> public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to
>> watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the
>> theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have
>> an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a
>> self-governing community.
>>
>> You might read this and think, “Citizens don’t have to have an
>> intelligent opinion on every issue confronting the community.
>> Instead, they choose the party they trust to serve their
>> interests.” On this view, citizens don’t need to be
>> “omnicompetent,” to borrow Lippmann’s term, they just have to know
>> enough to pick the team that represents their interests. But to do
>> that, voters have to know what their interests are, and which party
>> actually represents them.
>>
>> There’s no vision of democracy worth defending that doesn’t assume
>> a minimum level of competence from a majority of voters. Lippmann
>> doubted this level of mastery was possible because citizens are too
>> removed from the world to form concrete judgments. Consequently,
>> they’re forced to live in “pseudo-environments,” in which they
>> reduce the world to stereotypes in order to render it intelligible.
>>
>>
>> Lippmann was an integral part of the Committee on Public
>> Information, the agency tasked with creating propaganda to gin up
>> support for World War I. That experience taught him how manipulable
>> the public was, how easily people surrender to compelling
>> narratives. We’re told about the world before we see it, we imagine
>> things before we experience them, and we become hostages to these
>> preconceptions.
>>
>> These narratives are a defense against uncertainty. They present us
>> with an ordered picture of the world, to which our tastes and
>> stereotypes and values are anchored. Which is why it’s so hard to
>> separate people from their dogmas. “Any disturbance of the
>> stereotypes,” Lippmann says, “seems like an attack upon the
>> foundations of the universe ... It is an attack upon the
>> foundations of our universe.”
>>
>> Lippmann’s point is that voter preferences are based “not on direct
>> and certain knowledge but on pictures” given to us. The question is
>> then, where do we get our pictures? The most obvious answer is the
>> media. If the media can provide accurate pictures of the world,
>> citizens ought to have the information they need to perform their
>> democratic duties. Lippmann says this works in theory but not in
>> practice. The world, he argues, is big and it moves fast and the
>> speed of communication in the age of mass media forces journalists
>> to speak through slogans and simplified interpretations. (And this
>> doesn’t even touch the problem of partisanship in a commercialized
>> media landscape.)
>>
>> Somewhere early in the book, Lippmann cites a famous passage from
>> Plato’s Republic that describes human beings as cave-dwellers who
>> spend their lives watching shadows on a wall and take that to be
>> their true reality. Our present condition is scarcely different,
>> Lippmann implies. We’re locked in a cave of media
>> misrepresentations and we take our caricatured pictures of the
>> world to be an accurate reflection of what’s actually happening.
>>
>> “News and truth are not the same thing”
>>
>> If Lippmann is right, more and better information won’t save us,
>> because the problem isn’t access to facts; it’s flaws in human
>> cognition. But even if he’s wrong about this, and I think he might
>> be, we’re still screwed because of certain constraints imposed on
>> the press.
>>
>> Lippmann says the press is like a roaming spotlight, bouncing from
>> topic to topic, story to story, illuminating things but never fully
>> explaining them. “The function of news,” he writes, “is to
>> signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the
>> hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a
>> picture of reality on which men can act.”
>>
>> This is a strange way of making a simple point: in the world of
>> news, there is often no objective test for what’s true. If we’re
>> reporting sports statistics or poll numbers or stock futures, then
>> objectivity is easy. But when it comes to analyzing economic
>> conditions or the value of labor unions or the merits of universal
>> health care or the limits of state power, there is no such test.
>> What we’re doing isn’t uncovering truth so much as constructing
>> narratives, and those narratives reflect our biases, our
>> experience, our ignorance, our hopes, our confusion. We see reality
>> through a glass darkly.
>>
>> But even if we set aside this question of whether the press can
>> reliably tell the truth, there remains an intractable demand-side
>> problem: readers, for the most part, aren’t paying for news, so
>> publications need advertisers; to get advertisers, you must attract
>> readers; and to attract readers, you must pander to the audience’s
>> biases. Here’s how Lippmann sums it up:
>>
>> This is the plight of the reader of the general news. If he is to
>> read it at all he must be interested, that is to say, he must enter
>> into the situation and care about the outcome ... The more
>> passionately involved he becomes, the more he will tend to resent
>> not only a different view, but a disturbing bit of news. That is
>> why many a newspaper finds that, having honestly evoked the
>> partisanship of its readers, it can not easily, supposing the
>> editor believes the facts warrant it, change position.
>>
>> Lippmann’s point was true enough in 1922 — today it is
>> indisputable. The media is more fragmented, more competitive, more
>> profit-driven. Consequently, news consumption is like shopping: you
>> find the source of information that most reflects your point of
>> view, and you signal your preference with your loyalty.
>>
>> Here again Lippmann is undermining an assumption baked into most
>> democratic theories: we expect the press to “carry the whole burden
>> of popular sovereignty” by supplying citizens with the truth even
>> though it’s not at all clear most people are interested in truth.
>> Is it not obvious, Lippmann asks, that people prefer the
>> entertaining and the trivial over the dull and the important, or
>> the flattering and the convenient over the honest and the difficult?
>>
>> It’s hard to look at our current moment and conclude that
>> Lippmann’s pessimism was misplaced. Truth is as variable as it’s
>> ever been, and public trust in the press is at an all-time low
>> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__knightfoundation.org_reports_american-2Dviews-2Dtrust-2Dmedia-2Dand-2Ddemocracy&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=OVH6n6yq61MuVOPIXd33qaWTFc-mcvW1d-i7ufhc5hQ&e=>. That stereotypical thinking Lippmann worried about is amplified by a media environment far more commercialized and partisan than he ever imagined. Indeed, public opinion is now so hopelessly cocooned that the president is under investigation <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.vox.com_policy-2Dand-2Dpolitics_2018_2_20_17031772_mueller-2Dindictments-2Dgrand-2Djury&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=_p6_hmIpS3wP-ypnQMFprKtctd4SWu_GnqOWxH2ARDA&e=> for colluding with our primary geopolitical foe and more than half the country doesn’t give a damn
>> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.cbsnews.com_news_more-2Damericans-2Dnow-2Dsay-2Drussia-2Dinvestigation-2Dis-2Dpolitically-2Dmotivated-2Dcbs-2Dnews-2Dpoll_&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=WJ2wP6H5_DYLGYhxwDOrpZfyCssML8seu6xgVnQ7EHE&e=>.
>>
>> Lippmann anticipated many of these problems, and yet you can’t
>> engage his critique without asking what comes next. Sadly, the
>> alternative vision of democracy isn’t actually a vision of
>> democracy at all.
>>
>>
>> The best he can do is call for a “specialized class” of social
>> scientific experts who operate beyond the voters and the
>> politicians. In theory, there would be a crop of experts for each
>> area of government, and these experts would competently examine the
>> facts and then advise government officials. Lippmann believed such
>> a system would divorce the “assembling of knowledge” from “the
>> control of policy.” And, even more crucially, it would ensure that
>> the experts remained independently funded and thus free from
>> corrupt motives.
>>
>> Dewey probably said it best: “No government by experts in which the
>> masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their
>> needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of
>> the few.” If Lippmann had his way, the public would be liberated
>> from its oppressive fictions, but at the price of everything just
>> about democracy.
>>
>> Dewey’s rejoinder
>>
>> After Public Opinion was released, Lippmann and Dewey entered into
>> a long, informal debate about how to fix democracy. Dewey was
>> forced to concede Lippmann’s basic point about the folly of public
>> opinion. “As matters now stand,” he wrote, “every issue is
>> hopelessly entangled in a snarl of emotions, stereotypes and
>> irrelevant memories and associations.” Still, he rejected
>> Lippmann’s call for a technocratic elite.
>>
>> For Dewey, everything reduced to a simple question: who is most in
>> need of enlightenment, citizens or administrators? What Lippmann
>> wanted, whether he realized it or not, was to permanently turn
>> citizens into spectators. He assumed that public opinion was about
>> the mass of individuals possessing a correct representation of the
>> world, and since they could never do this, they had to be locked
>> out of the decision-making process.
>>
>> But Dewey insisted that political knowledge, in a democracy, could
>> only come about through conversation among and between citizens.
>> The only reality that matters is the reality that citizens
>> collectively construct. If you accept, as Lippmann does, that the
>> public is atomized and permanently cut off from the conversation
>> about public affairs, then you’ve undercut the very possibility of
>> democracy. Again, Dewey put it well:
>>
>> There is no limit to the intellectual endowment which may proceed
>> from the flow of social intelligence when that circulates by word
>> of mouth from one to another in the communications of the local
>> community. That and that only gives reality to public opinion. We
>> lie, as Emerson, said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But
>> that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken,
>> inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as
>> its medium.
>>
>> I think Dewey is right here, but Lippmann’s point about people
>> effectively living in separate worlds still holds. Since Robert
>> Putnam’s famous 2000 book Bowling Alone
>> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__go.redirectingat.com-3Fid-3D66960X1516588-26xs-3D1-26url-3Dhttps-253A-252F-252Fwww.amazon.com-252FBowling-2DAlone-2DCollapse-2DAmerican-2DCommunity-252Fdp-252F0743203046&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=AFbiaaXcN0jaDRfY0Le-pTEv1DTJri1GIEKRF7CRQGU&e=>, scholars have lamented the loss of civic bonds in America. At the same time, local newspapers are dying out <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.bbc.com_news_world-2Dus-2Dcanada-2D44688274&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=ZHTgD_JJAzWa5T-3h2TQv13YIjmpMVMBPKddkmaJXf8&e=> and political discourse is becoming increasingly nationalized, which means most issues are abstract and dominated by tribal allegiance and caricatured right-left
>> narratives.
>>
>> Lippmann feared that the citizenry would abandon the public square
>> and give themselves over to propaganda. That’s exactly what
>> happened, and yet American democracy has done remarkably well over
>> the last century.
>>
>> How do we make sense of that?
>>
>> Things are bad, but they’ve always been bad, which means they’re
>> not as bad as we think
>>
>> It’s tempting, from our perch in 2018, to conclude that democracy
>> is broken beyond repair. The world seems to be careening into more
>> and more disorder, and American politics in particular is
>> hopelessly ensnarled in partisan dysfunction.
>>
>> But perhaps the Lippmann-Dewey debate offers another perspective:
>> democracy has always been clumsy, has never really lived up to its
>> ideals, and yet we’re all still alive. Given how prophetic
>> Lippmann’s critique was, you’d expect American democracy to have
>> collapsed under the weight of its own incoherence by now. But here
>> we are, in 2018, still humming along, still the most influential
>> country in the world, still the richest and the most dynamic
>> economy on the planet.
>>
>> For all its problems (and there are many), democracy has managed to
>> thrive. And the democratic world, over time, has gotten more
>> stable, more wealthy, and more tolerant. Maybe the point is that
>> democracy doesn’t have to work the way it was conceived in order to
>> be successful. Maybe the myth of democracy is just that — a myth.
>>
>> If there’s a lesson in all this for today, it’s that we should be
>> careful not to define democracy by its worst attribute. Lippmann
>> was so obsessed with the problem of public opinion that he failed
>> to notice that the problem wasn’t new, that democracy wasn’t
>> malfunctioning. The practice of democracy has always been messy and
>> chaotic, and mass ignorance wasn’t the exception but the rule.
>>
>> Voters will often make egregious choices, and sometimes those
>> choices produce horrifying outcomes. Still, the system, as a whole,
>> has proven incredibly resilient, and a far better alternative to
>> non-democratic systems, which lead invariably to corruption and
>> oppression. If democracy works, it’s not because the people are
>> reliably wise; it’s because the system offers a layer of
>> accountability that, more often than not, supports a stable and
>> just society. Democracies are also prone to disorder and
>> corruption, but these are ineluctable features of any political
>> system comprised of selfish and flawed human beings.
>>
>>
>> The current wave of pessimism is a reminder that there’s a
>> recurring tendency on the part of intellectuals to abandon
>> democracy when it veers off course. It’s a reactionary move that
>> typically overstates the nature of the threat. Lippmann was shaken
>> by the insanity of World War I, and so he thought something —
>> anything — had to be done to keep the democratic world from
>> descending into another war. The shock of Brexit and a Trump
>> presidency has sent many observers (myself included) into a panic.
>> Just a couple weeks ago, in fact, I interviewed Jason Brennan
>> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.vox.com_2018_7_23_17581394_against-2Ddemocracy-2Dbook-2Depistocracy-2Djason-2Dbrennan&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=tmVNgJdlbrf6XPR_8xuRbCi2vI5OD-3-pSPZ5MO2WV4&s=dorbzMRq8Vkq-WA8eAXSBPdBYCwGMWxniAHWcCDOFrw&e=>, a Georgetown political theorist, who argued for a Lippmann-esque epistocracy to replace traditional
>> democracy.
>>
>> But I could just as easily argue that Brennan, like Lippmann, has
>> it precisely backwards. Instead of abandoning democracy, maybe what
>> we need is more and better democracy. Maybe, as Dewey taught, we
>> need to educate and empower more citizens. Maybe the crisis we’re
>> facing now, in the age of Trump, is just the latest manifestation
>> of a problem that has always plagued democratic societies, and
>> always will. Maybe we should pause, take a deep breath, and step
>> back from the precipice.
>>
>> Democracy has survived far worse than Trump and Brexit.
>>
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