Our democracy needs reason, but too few have it
Watching the meaningless primaries in South Carolina and Nevada; trying to sort the various Trump legal dramas; and trying to fathom hatred toward Joe Biden, both in readers and friends, one sentence keeps running through my mind: “We aren’t very good at this.”
By “this,” I mean understanding the news; I mean curating the news (so “us” is both citizens and journalists), and I mean employing the power of reason together.
So, I am really saying: We don’t seem to be very good at this democracy thing these days.
We need reason
Sen. Eugene McCarthy used to say in his speeches, especially in his 1968 presidential campaign, that reason is truly the only tool we have, both to guide us in living together as free people and in dealing with life and its difficulties.
I take “reason” to mean: Thinking things through with some care and calm; interest in data and evidence; a capacity to weigh that evidence; and a capacity to recalibrate and reorient.
Plus one other practice — the ability to listen and converse. That is part of gathering information and of recalibration.
I see little use of reason in our politics, our common culture, or our common life today. This is perhaps most pronounced in our inability to make distinctions and appreciate nuance.
“One of these things is not like the other,” they used to sing on a children’s program. Making distinctions is an act of reason. Is there a difference between a president overusing executive orders and a president, bound by oath to uphold the law, breaking the law?
Is there a difference between the Spanish soccer exec kissing the female soccer player, unbidden, and a sexual predator? Is there a difference between the kids on campus who are pro-Palestinian and the ones who shout antiSemitic epithets?
Or the university administrator who is merely hapless and the one who fails to uphold free thought and speech?
I know that democracy is inherently
messy and fragile and I know Churchill’s one liner. Consider the quality of discussion, debate, and information.We swim in a sea of blather, innuendo, gossip, and repetition.
The press is partly to blame. We don’t go deep. We don’t dig. There are many fewer of us and our professional standards have slipped dramatically.
Wallace Carroll, a great old New York Times journalist and later a southern publisher, who covered the build-up to World War II in Europe and risked his physical well being during the civil rights movement, said “The purpose of journalism is to help our fellow citizens better understand the world.”
Is this how American journalists cover American politics today? Or do we cover it like a football game?
We need democratic reason
Democracy depends on three things: Quality information; some residual capacity for critical thought; and some sense of public duty — the country has to matter
more than the individual or group grievance.
Again, I am describing the habits, and the culture, of reason. They are at a low ebb.
The country chugs along. People are mostly civil and good neighbors in person.
The economy, too.
But our politics is in the grip of a dysfunctional unreason. Reason counts in American science, medicine, the courts, and invention. Politics? Not so much.
I have no answer; no map for the way back. But I know we must face this: Citizenship is failing. And I think there are things that will help:
• Better leaders. Obvious and easy to say. But we need people in politics who are pragmatists, who listen, and who do not make a life of public office.
• Any gathering or movement that builds public happiness and patriotic spirit. Worse than bowling alone is blogging alone.
For example: Neighborhood groups and watches; discussion groups based in churches and civic clubs; any organization dedicated to community betterment — like saving Lake Erie or planting trees; Boy and Girl Scouts.
• Journalistic innovation, in both new media and old. With podcasts and greater coverage of ideas and human relations, there has been much good work done in recent years. Now we must cover what is really going on in state Capitol buildings and the presidency as well as presidential politics.
• Finally, we need to do a better job of teaching government and critical thinking in schools and colleges. Many of our high schools are caught in the culture wars, while the universities are caught in trendiness and theory.
Start with teaching
Perhaps this could be a starting point: For left and right to agree on teaching citizenship and reasoning, both of which are anti-ideological.
No easy answers. No panacea. But we aren’t very good at democracy right now. And we must do better.