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Political Science
Epistocracy Against Democracy
The ignorance of the majority of voters led Plato and Mill to propose epistocracy in place of democracy. Estlund has criticized the idea, but Brennan considers it justifiable for the public good.
Democracy does not always show us its pleasant face; it also has dark sides that worry philosophers and political scientists: the choice of an ignorant, contented majority and the discontent of a knowledgeable, competent minority. In this article, the other side of the democracy coin is revealed, and its possible alternatives, such as epistocracy, are discussed.
Nearly one-third of American voters think the Marxist slogan "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is in the Constitution. About the same number cannot even name one of the three branches of the United States government. Fewer than a quarter of people know their senator, and only half know that their state has two senators.
The ignorance of the majority has long been a source of vexation for the minority, especially the minority that considers itself intellectual. Plato was among the first to view democracy as a problem. In his view, the ordinary citizens of a democracy were incompetent and capricious individuals:
Sometimes, while listening to the sound of a flute, he overindulges in drinking; sometimes, he goes on a diet and drinks only water; at times, he turns to physical exercises; sometimes, he is idle and neglects everything; and at other times, he occupies himself with what he thinks is philosophy.
In Plato's belief, the more reliable solution was to entrust power to carefully trained guardians. Plato's proposal was to house these individuals in communities free from intellectual nuisances—such as family and money—where romantic relationships had no place and their eugenics could be supervised. This plan was so irrelevant and ludicrous that many doubt Plato was serious in his words.
John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century offered a more practical proposal: citizens with a university education or engaged in intellectual work should have extra votes. (In fact, in Mill's time, some universities had their own constituencies for centuries, and for example, a person with a degree from Oxford University could vote both in the university constituency and in their place of residence. This system lasted until 1950.) Mill's larger project—at a time when fewer than nine percent of British adults could vote—was to expand the franchise to include women as well. But he worried that the new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, which is why he intended to use extra votes to counter ignorance.
In America, elites fearful of the ignorance of poor immigrants tried to restrict elections. In 1855, the state of Connecticut administered a literacy test to American voters for the first time. Despite some protests, this test spread across almost the entire country over the next half-century. This helped racists in the Southern states disenfranchise Black people. Even in a state like New York, which was full of immigrants, a law was passed in 1921 requiring new voters to take a test if they could not prove they had an eighth-grade literacy level. Fifty percent of participants failed this test. Literacy tests for voters were not declared illegal until 1971, and it was only in the years following the Civil Rights Movement that this law was abolished.
اما نگرانی دربارهی آگاهیِ رأیدهندگان از بین نرفت. دیوید استلاند، فیلسوف و از اساتید دانشگاه براون، در کتاب خود «اقتدار دموکراتیک» (2008) تلاش دارد تا توجیهی فلسفی برای دموکراسی فراهم آورد. به باور او برای این کار باید بین دو گزاره توازن برقرار کرد: فرآیندهای دموکراتیک در اکثر موارد منجر به اتخاذ تصمیمهای سیاسی درست میشود و فرآیندهای دموکراتیک از دید ناظرانِ منطقی، منصفانه است. انصاف به تنهایی کافی به نظر نمیرسد. اگر کافی بود، استلاند مینویسد، «چرا سکه نیندازیم؟» ارزشی که دموکراسی برای ما دارد باید ناشی از آن باشد که در اکثر موارد کار درست را انجام میدهد و ظاهراً برای این کار از اطلاعاتی که در آرای ما وجود دارد استفاده میکند. به رغم دشواریهای اخیر انتخابات آمریکا، دموکراسی سابقهی نسبتاً خوبی دارد. آمارتیا سن، اقتصاددان و فیلسوف، ادعا میکند که دموکراسیها هرگز دچار قحطی نشدهاند، سایر پژوهشگران هم بر این باور اند که دموکراسیها تقریباً هرگز به جنگ یکدیگر نمیروند، به ندرت مردم خود را میکشند، تقریباً در اکثر مواقع انتقالِ قدرتِ صلحآمیزی دارند، و در رعایت حقوقبشر نسبت به سایر رژیمها قابل اطمینانتر اند.
اما دموکراسی دارای نواقصی است – به گفتهی چرچیل، دموکراسی «از تمام انواع حکومتها، به جز آنها که پیشتر گهگاه امتحان شدهاند، بدتر است». در این صورت، اگر ما قدرت دموکراسی برای اتخاذ تصمیمهای خوب را با ارزش میدانیم چرا نظامی را امتحان نکنیم که انصاف آن کمی کمتر باشد اما تعداد تصمیمهای خوب آن بیشتر؟ ایدهی «دانشسالاری»[1] پاسخی است به همین پرسش. به نظر استلاند سه ایراد میتوان به این ایده وارد کرد.
نخست، حقیقت معیار مناسبی برای سنجش داوری سیاسی نمیتواند باشد. در سال 1967 هانا آرنت اعلام کرد که حقیقت «به صورتی تحکمآمیز میخواهد که پذیرفته شود و مانع بحث میشود، در حالی که بحث، بنیان حیات سیاسی است.» استلاند نسبیگرا نبود و هرچند موافق بود که سیاستمداران نباید به حقیقت مطلق متوسل شوند اما فکر میکرد که نظریهپردازان سیاسی مجبور اند چنین کاری بکنند.
استدلال دوم علیه دانشسالاری، انکار این امر بود که بعضی از شهروندان نسبت به برخی دیگر دانش بیشتری دربارهی حکومت خوب دارند. از نظر استلاند (به عنوان یک دانشمند علوم سیاسی) این استدلال موجه نبود. استدلال سوم هم از این قرار است: دانش بیشتر موجب اقتدارِ سیاسی بیشتر نمیشود. استلاند آن را اینگونه مطرح میکند: «ممکن است حق با شما باشد، اما چه کسی به شما اجازهی تصمیمگیری داده؟»
در نهایت، از نظر استلاند دو ایراد عملی به دانشسالاری میتوان وارد کرد. نخست آن که، شیوهی پالایش رأیدهندگان در دانشسالاری میتواند دارای سوگیریای باشد که به راحتی نتوان آن را تشخیص داد و اصلاح کرد. دوم این که، حق رأی عمومی به قدری در اذهان مردم به عنوان پیشفرض تثبیت شده که قدرتدادن به افراد آگاه در برابر افراد ناآگاه حس نابرابری بیشتری بر میانگیزد تا زمانی که اکثریت در برابر اقلیت قدرت بیشتری دارد.
دفاع از دانشسالاری
Jason Brennan, a philosopher and professor at Georgetown University, in a new book titled Against Democracy, turns Estlund's argument against epistocracy on its head and defends epistocracy. Against Estlund's argument that universal suffrage is a default presumption, Brennan claims that restricting the political power of irrational, ignorant, and incompetent individuals is entirely justifiable. Against the concern Estlund has for fairness, Brennan emphasizes that the welfare of the general public is more important than individual feelings of offense; he writes, after all, disqualifying those jury members who have cognitive or moral impairments would be unfair only in the view of a few people. Brennan also considers Estlund's worry about demographic bias to be unfounded. Empirical research shows that people rarely vote in their narrow self-interest; the elderly do not pursue social security more than the young. Brennan says that since voters in an epistocracy are more knowledgeable about crime and police activities,
According to Brennan, people with higher education and higher incomes, who live in the West, belong to the Republican Party, and are in their middle age, possess more political knowledge; political knowledge is lower among Black people and women. He concedes that “often poor Black women – at least at the present time – would fail even a simple voter evaluation exam.” But he considers this a contingent matter for his epistocracy proposal, whereas the disenfranchisement of Black people in the past was deliberate.
Voting Is a Struggle
Like many of my acquaintances, in recent months I have stayed up late, reading the statistics with horror. The flawed nature of democracy has become our constant companion. But is democracy really in decline, or is it just trying to tell us something?
Political scientists have long wished to find an “invisible hand” in politics, just as Adam Smith had shown in economics. If democracy could arrive at political wisdom by aggregating individual votes – just as the market achieves a collectively beneficial allocation of resources by combining the self-interested decisions of individual actors – then voter ignorance would not matter much. But as Brennan has shown, these mathematical models only succeed if individual ignorance has no particular pattern, and unfortunately, such a pattern does exist. According to political scientists’ calculations, voters with more political knowledge are less eager to participate in war, less likely to resort to punitive measures regarding crime, more tolerant of social issues, less accepting of government oversight of the economy, and more willing to accept taxes to reduce the federal budget deficit. In contrast, a voter with less economic awareness is more pessimistic, more suspicious of market competition and productivity increases, and more skeptical of foreign trade and immigration.
Perhaps democracy is a good option, even if political scientists have failed to find an equation to explain it. Perhaps voters’ goal is simply to remove those current officeholders with whom they are dissatisfied; in political science, this is called “retrospective voting.”[2] Brennan says voters do not even have enough awareness to do this, because doing so would at least require knowing “which bastards are in power, what they have done and what they could have done, what happened because of their actions, and whether the rivals of the current bastards would perform better or not.” Although some voters have punished incumbent officials for droughts or shark attacks, or rewarded them for sports victories, retrospective voting may not be entirely useless. According to one political scientist, if a politician is smart enough to care about the future satisfaction of the voters in their constituency and their contentment at the present time, their policies for these voters will likely be better than what the voters themselves, given their own knowledge, could have asked for.
Is there a reason to vote? Do we have a duty to do it well? It is said that voting provides the opportunity for everyone to have an equal role in building the political community. For Brennan, if the value of political participation lies in the probability of influencing the election outcome, voting is worthless: there is no probability of influence here. In his view, voting is part of the larger marketplace of civic virtue, just as farming is part of the larger marketplace of food. He goes so far as to say that a shopkeeper who sells clothes and food to Martin Luther King is actually participating in civic virtue, albeit indirectly. But his argument does not seem convincing because, on the one hand, it dilutes the meaning of civic virtue excessively, and on the other hand, this argument implies that someone who sells a cheeseburger to J. Edgar Hoover (the FBI director and an opponent of Martin Luther King) commits a civic vice.
Brennan several times compares uninformed voting to air pollution. It is a persuasive comparison: in both cases, the conscientiousness of a few informed individuals cannot counteract the negligence of a large number of people: your commuting by bicycle will probably not make the city air cleaner, and even if you acquire a great deal of information about the candidates for civil court, a charlatan may still be elected to the position. Although there is no strong incentive to act on the duty, that does not mean the duty itself is lifted from our shoulders.
Perhaps voting is like a struggle, a mild struggle, of course. Instead of guns and bayonets, we express our vote merely by raising our hands. But perhaps the nature of duty is the same, because what is missing from Brennan's proposal is that in elections, democracy itself is sometimes at stake. If a soldier calculates the importance of his presence in the army's campaign, he will conclude that—even considering the probability of arrest and punishment for desertion—it is not worth being present on the front line. The issue is that one cannot know in advance which front will win in a battle, or by what margin victory will be achieved, especially when belief in the struggle itself is one of the variables. Given the lack of certainty about the future, a purely prudential calculation is useless. It is said that most soldiers are more worried about letting down their comrades than they are concerned with loyalty to an abstract entity like the nation. Perhaps voters also feel a great sense of responsibility toward their friends and relatives with whom they share views about the country's future.
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Rewritten by: Hamoun Neyshabouri
What you have read is a translation and rewriting of the following article by Caleb Crain.
Caleb Crain, The case against democracy, The New Yorker, 7 November 2016
[1] Epistocracy: a word formed from the combination of the two Greek words episteme (knowledge) and kratia (rule), meaning the rule of the knowledgeable. [Ed.]
[2] retrospective voting
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Discussion2 comments
هر چه علوم پیشرفت میکنند دلایل بهنفع دموکراسی هم زیادتر میشود. وقتی نگاهمان به جوامع، با عینک پیشگیری از مضرات بالقوه باشد آنوقت تفاوت فاحشی میان سیستم های دموکراتیک با سایر ساختارهای توتالیتریته ای پدیدار میگردد. بزبان آمار و ارقام این تفاوت همانند احتمال ۹۹ درصد در قبال ۱ درصد میباشد که اختلاف بسیار معناداری ست. و همین کافیست. اما اگر با عینک پیشرفت و رشد نگاه کنیم، شاید شتاب دموکراسی آهسته تر باشد اما در دراز مدت، جبران تاخیر ها و قصوراتش را میکند. جذابیت دموکراسی مثل بازی جمعی فوتبال در فضای باز ست که میلیونها نفر را نیز درگیر صنعت و تجارت و عقلانیت و احساسات خودش میسازد انگار روح کلی زمانه را شکل میدهد. در مقایسه با بازیهای انفرادی که فاقد چنین جذابیت و اثری ست.
قراردادن « دانش سالاری » در برابر دمکراسی ، به حاکمیت دانش ستیزان می انجامد . محدودیت حکمرانی و جابه جایی حکمرانان به انتخاب مردم ، ضامن آزادی ساخت و پخش دانش و بستر مساعد اثرگذاری فزونتر دانشوران است . در نظام های بسته ، صدای دانشیان برجسته و به ویژه نوآوران به گوش طالبان دانایی نمی رسد و راه های پرورش دانشیان بالنده ، تنگ و مسدود می گردد .