We all have our ideas about the world and our place in it. Some of these ideas we keep to ourselves. Others we try to communicate to others.
When I act alone, my ideas don't have to mesh with yours. But when we act together, some common ground is necessary.
When we act voluntarily, the common ground between us can contribute to our decision to work together. In America, we choose our churches. We do so in most cases at least partly on the basis of shared beliefs. This makes it easier for our churches to engage in charitable work, for instance, that their members deem important and appropriate.
But every society operates in part by compulsion. Sometimes the compulsion involves formal politics. What distinguishes government is its legitimate ability to coerce.
Sometimes the compulsion is informal. All of us are influenced by the opinions of family, friends and neighbors. All but misanthropes prefer the approbation of others to condemnation.
When monarchy was the dominant form of government, opinions of ordinary people didn't matter much. Authority was exercised from the top down. The peons didn't have to agree with the princes but only to obey them.
The emergence of democracy put popular opinions front and center. The opinions didn't have to be the same, but ground rules for deciding between different opinions were necessary. The basic ground rule in democracy is that the majority gets its way. Perhaps not in everything — liberal democracies carve out space for religion, for example, beyond the reach of majority rule.
Other ground rules were more nebulous and contested. When we debate a matter of public policy, what standards of evidence do we apply to competing arguments? Modern democracies typically fund public schools. What shall be taught in the schools? If I believe the biblical account of creation and you prefer the version of science, how do we decide what the curriculum will be? The basis of my belief is what I consider divine revelation. God said, through Moses, that creation took six days. The basis of your belief is physics, geology, chemistry, and biology. How do we resolve the difference?
By a majority vote on the school board? In the state legislature? By a panel of experts? Whose experts?
How about a question more basic to the operation of a democracy: who won an election? Nobody appeals to divine revelation on this one. Each side has access to the evidence available to the other.
Until recently in American history, this was not a problem. There were close elections. There were elections where results from some precincts were dubious. One presidential election, in 1876, was decided only by a grand political bargain. But before Donald Trump, there was never a presidential election in which the loser persisted in claiming he had won. There certainly was no instance of such an election-denialist being subsequently returned to office.
That the election of 2020 was stolen remains an article of faith among Trump followers. It has to be faith-based because it is not evidence-based. Which puts it in the same category as the biblical version of creation. It may or may not be significant that the state of Oklahoma recently required two changes in its public schools: first, students must be instructed in the “discrepancies" of the 2020 election, and second, Bibles must be placed in each classroom.
Oklahomans have every right, acting through the political process, to mandate how their public schools should operate. But they and other Americans ought to consider where their approach leads.
Legislating beliefs undermines a principle of self-government even more fundamental than counting votes: that we humans can resolve our differences and address our common problems by reason rather than compulsion. It's no historical accident that the age of democracy followed the age of the Enlightenment. The latter displaced faith with reason as the instrument of human progress. To legislate belief — to let evidence-free claims become the basis of law — is to reject the historical framework of progress.
We today are freer, richer and healthier than our forebears because they proposed hypotheses and tested them against evidence. They retained the ones that passed the test and discarded the failures. They repeated the process.
It wasn't perfect. Nothing is. But it beats the alternatives.
As always, a great piece.
If democracy depends on public opinion, and public opinion depends on the sources of information people tune into, and sources of information are of uncertain validity, then public opinion is inherently suspect, and democracy is based on suspect and potentially false information. Which means public opinion might be mistaken. That is one reason why democracy is vulnerable to challenges from forms of government that are not democratic.