The Party Machine
Policy is being written according to prejudice.
Policy is being written according to prejudice.
I started philosophy with the question; what is knowledge, and how do we get at it? Whether we believe there are objective facts, or all knowledge is culturally dependent, we are all (apparently) attempting to grasp at the truth like a cat batting at a light bulb. Truth is commonly perceived as one of the universal goods; truth, justice and the American way, and so on, and much like the words freedom and democracy, and like a slackened drum it’s lost a lot of its potency and meaning through use and abuse, and can now be seen to mean or be interpreted as anything, including where power is applied, in the political arena.
To my ears, not a day goes by where a politician of some sort makes a statement in courageous defiance of the best objective knowledge humanity has, the past, to cling to their own prejudice. Whether they are being “tough on drugs” despite the complete failure of Prohibition in the 20’s; doing “what needs to be done” about the economy in wilful ignorance of everything that happened in the 30’s, or beating the drum for war with Iran forgetting that there is a rather prescient comparative case in our more recent history. Occupying a space in which their importance and position guarantees them credibility enough to shroud their numerous irrationality.
Such is the way statesmen have been separated from the people since the very inception of politics. If you watch the world’s most successful reality TV show, or The News, one can barely imagine that these people are actually anything other than semi-fictional characters, and when they are encouraged to become more relatable, it just seems unbecoming, weird and out of character; almost a different category of human whose concerns are completely divorced from the mainstream. I imagine being a politician must be like living in a bunker, or a very well heeled commune, who somehow have to guess what the people on the outside want them to do. So having little to no idea what that is, the gap is filled by the conventional discourse du jour, one that reads: Austerity is Expansionary; Iran has the bomb and Drugs are bad, mm’kay, no matter the evidence to the contrary, which will never get through to them anyway.
Though we may all have been guilty of this sort of thing before. The argumentative theory of reasoning, if I may go back to the original question of “what is knowledge and how do we get to it?” has it that we can’t really find an answer. This is because, according to the argumentative theory of reasoning, we didn’t start asking questions and looking for answers to gain knowledge and find universal truths, we did so to gain authority and superiority over others. If this holds, then everything that has ever been said about reason and rational thinking by Plato or Descartes was actually an elaborate trolling manoeuvre by evolution. After thousands of years sitting around campfires arguing about various things, our tendency toward great logical fallacies regardless of verisimilitude has worked arm in arm with our other powerful drive, to triumph, thus keeping it firmly ingrained into our minds.
The architects of this theory are two academics of philosophy, called Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier. The arguments they present for this theory are that we are good at arguing, and reason helps us argue; reasoning evolved so we could argue collectively, and we are good at that; and that since reasoning evolved so we could argue with others, we are biased in our search for arguments and have little interest in arguments that advance our opponents views of the world, or those that refute our own. We’re all guilty of advancing our own points of view regardless of any other evidence, and so are our politicians.
This raises many questions. If we all hold a confirmation bias toward our own side, does that explain why democracy is so widespread? Could it be because there are enough people to argue for it regardless of any objective faults it may have? Will socialists or conservatives eventually go extinct by simply being less numerous or less forceful? What else might we have dismissed simply because it conflicted with our own dearly held beliefs? Was somebody, somewhere once in possession of the perfect form of government, only to have the idea trampled on by mass thinking, or by those who simply presented their argument better; a perfect physical form, adorned with a burlap sack?
This confirmation bias makes itself all the more plausible when, for example U.S Senator Marco Rubio and Former Governor Mitt Romney say on the record that Barack Obama is making the economy worse when there are signs of recovery that is if not stellar then at least steady. So, finally resorting to the question I can already telegraph is coming through this page or screen, “What Are We To Do?” Well, If in a democracy all we can do is elect people who will only govern toward their own prejudices then we could simply replace our politicians with a gaggle of bureaucrats who would simply preside over the day to day running of the nation a la Belgium, but that would be boring, so here’s another idea.
Replace the floor of the House of Commons with a giant super computer with access to all the objective knowledge humanity has in its fleeting disposal. Then replace all politicians with professional actors, whose scripts are written by the finest up and coming writers in the land. They would do all the things politicians normally do, such as making public speeches, getting embroiled in scandals, and going on Question Time. The omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent House of Commons super computer would write policy based on the facts, resulting in legislation that genuinely reflects the way the world is, and while it’s plugging away tirelessly on behalf the good people of Britain, elections continue as normal. That way we are able to root for our favourite characters, follow their intermittent rising and falling, cheer their triumphs and obsess over their failures, revel in electoral victory for our side and swear in defeat, with no real accountability and thus, no responsibility. Plus ça change.
By Ed Hobson
