# Self-interest, knowledge and democratic decisions.

# Self-interest, knowledge and democratic decisions.

“According to our system of government, the people are interested in everything and can be trusted to decide everything.”
--William Jennings Bryan (Wills 1990 p. 111)

It’s no coincidence that Bryan became the stalwart defender of folk religion against the scoffers and missionaries of the new-fangled science of evolution. He had a deep, well-founded distrust of elites, including knowledge elites, whose skills were so often hired out by the militarists and robber barons.

The question of who's affected most by a problem often raises another: who knows the most about it? Policies are grounded in assumptions or explicit claims about the world that may or may not be true, and it's those claims and assumptions folks have to challenge when our communities are under assault. Whether you're trying to bulldoze a neighborhood for a shopping mall, jack up health care costs, ghettoize gay people or use the local creek to solve your toxic waste storage problem, it's relatively cheap to hire some Institute somewhere (or set up your own, for not much more than the cost of a copier and a fax machine) to generate the numbers your hired politicians will need to cover their crimes. It's harder for local folks to establish their credentials and assemble their knowledge in a form official decision-makers will accept.

In the community education workshops I'm familiar with we regularly had to deal with the question of how we know and who are the experts-- often posed simply as who to believe, the mom with a sick kid or the guy with all the letters from some corporate laboratory? In that setting it was pretty easy to agree that we could trust the mom more than the hired gun. I recall vividly the bitterness folks expressed when some consulting epidemiologist dismissed all the miscarriages, kidney failures and leukemia at Yellow Creek, KY because the community was too small to show "statistically significant" effects.

It's not that local residents usually claim to know more than the specialists about, say, the chemistry of pesticides, the treatment of cancer, or the intricacies of commercial law (though the level of grassroots technical expertise can be very high). Rather, they most certainly know much more about the effects of a problem and often about the causes, as well, because it's part of their daily experience. For sure no one else has the right to decide what kind of solution would be best for the community affected. At the same time, the fact that some groups are in a better position to know the truth doesn’t mean that all members do know it, simply by virtue of belonging to the group, and don’t have to struggle for it.

It would be nice to think that, once they come up with a set of goals, local folks should simply treat outside specialists as they would individually a mechanic or dentist or any other technician-- hirelings to provide very specific services at the direction of their employers. Dewey wrote, "it is not necessary that the many should have the knowledge and skill to carry on the needed investigations; what is required is that they have the ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns” (The Public and its Problems p. 365). This can be hard for community groups to do in practice. There is a pool of experts available to community groups through unions, national advocacy organizations, universities and liberal foundations, much smaller than that available to the corporations.

Even where good intentions prevail on all sides, however, community members and outside experts still have very different interests in an issue. It's not usually the consulting chemist whose kid's lungs are scarred by pesticides. Rather, she faces quite a different schedule of risks and rewards for her work, likely framed by a set of professional standards and values she's acquired, oriented to data rather than long-term interdependency with clients. Some specialists understand their tasks so narrowly that they never do grapple with the core issues; they may be too unsure of themselves to stray far from their narrow expertise, or too discouraged by the magnitude of problems to which they have no handy solution. So it's easy for mistrust to develop among community members and allied experts. That can be true even for "softer" kinds of expertise-- see Hinsdale & Lewis' It Comes from the People about the conflict between community folks and visiting artists in a small Appalachian town, as they tried to develop a historical pageant.

Moreover, since goal-setting is constrained by the options available, and the experts have such a strong say in presenting the options, it's not accurate to say that the community will always be in the driver's seat in terms of policy. If you know as little about cars as I do, for example, you may sometimes feel you're at the mercy of the mechanic. Sick people who don't know how to find or evaluate medical information may likewise not know all the options for their treatment. We can say the same about embattled community groups. One common disruption occurs when lawyers weigh in on political strategy because it will affect lawsuits; and often the best legal strategy does not suit the best political strategy. I seem to recall that CCHW (Citizens' Clearinghouse on Hazardous Waste) used to train grassroots groups how to manage hired experts.

Occasionally the critique of experts extends to grander claims, such as the untrustworthiness of all outside expertise, or even a radical relativism like that of Tarule's Subjective Knower: the notion that we can't really know anything outside of our own preferences and prejudices, that we can only have opinions, and that every honest opinion is equally valid. Many feminist writers have weighed in on this and related issues of knowledge and authority, more thoroughly and originally than I can do.

We should, however, keep in mind that it's one thing --and very healthy-- to distrust the experts when their corporate and career interests differ so greatly from ours. It's a much more dangerous proposition to dismiss specialized knowledge across the board, or the process by which we develop it. For one thing, Halliburton and the preachers are already heavily engaged in corrupting and silencing research on all the issues that affect us, from climate change to counter-insurgency strategy (see Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science).

When reality conflicts with their political goals, some activists have tried to simply wish it away. Preachers and pseudo-scientists compiled mountains of lies about men and women. In the last century many white guys made quite a nice living by "proving" the inferiority of Black people, Jews, and women, while in Black Athena Martin Bernal claimed that the Greeks stole the best features of their civilization from a black Egypt. Nazis rejected "Jewish physics" (that is, physics), and with it their best chance to develop the atom bomb. Stalin imposed on Soviet science Lysenko's idea an organism’s life experience could be passed on genetically; if revolutionaries can overturn empires, might they not also be able to overturn nature? Rightists insist that climate change is a hoax, denying the evidence of their own eyes, because capitalism requires world-killing consumption. Some anti-Zionists deny that Nazis murdered millions of Jews. There is no lack of examples.

Even legitimate work on a small scale can add up to grand delusion. We have developed new technology at such a rate that politicians rely on technical fixes for profound political problems. Thus the faith that we can “recover” ecosystems that have been mined out, polluted and paved over; safely store nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years; halt climate change by shooting a million tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere; solve the major health problems with new treatments; stop terrorism with walls and surveillance; and on and on.

Our political work can indeed change the future. We know that research responds to political priority, whether it be energy efficiency or cancer treatment. We know that certain political arrangements require fewer luxuries and fewer wars. But passing our time in fantasy is no substitute for doing the work to realize these possibilities.

The opposite approach is just as harmful: the suggestion that every belief is equally valid and acceptable. That can only be true if the world is no more than a figment of our respective imaginations; then, everyone can be equally right. But most people reckon there is a world outside our minds, that it doesn’t let us fly like a bird just because we we'd like to, that it doesn’t cease to exist when we’re sleeping or dead. I know the world is more than what I imagine because I’ve seen things I could not have imagined. As biologist J.B.S. Haldane put it, “The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose” (Schopf 271). To tell the truth, I’m very happy to know that the universe is bigger than my puny brain.

More commonly, people who have been tricked and trained all their lives don’t have a good handle on how to tell good information from bad. “Trust me on this,” politicians and preachers tell us, “there are some things you just can’t understand.” Anyway, they assure us, knowledge is over-rated; trusting authority is the sign of a true patriot or saint. We know that some ideas must be truer than others; we just don’t know how to tell them apart. We want to trust our own understanding, but don’t know how to defend it against the fathers, husbands, teachers, and TV experts who ridicule our knowledge.

I was very distressed to talk to some fellow teachers a few weeks before the 2008 elections. They’d watched every debate, studied the websites, followed every twist in the campaigns-- and still they couldn’t decide. We can’t believe all the claims the candidates are making, they told me. That was it. These teachers honestly felt they couldn’t trust all the information they’d gathered, didn’t know what to do with it. Well, of course they were making use of it, unconsciously, to fit the perspectives and prejudices they denied having. They did talk a lot about character; they felt comfortable with that as a criterion of leadership. One candidate was “firm,” another “diplomatic,” and they imagined how that might play out under various worst-case scenarios. They were trying to be fair.

But some ideas are just wrong. The perspectives of Dick Cheney and a Baghdad shopkeeper are not equally valid. None of our ideas are completely true-- the whole truth would have to be as big as the universe, plus a mind to perceive it-- but some come closer to the truth than others. And we can test them to find out.

The ideal of one absolute truth has given way to the idea that different spheres of life and different communities can base their understandings and explanations of things on different ‘stories’ that give coherence to their experience. But coherence is not the only necessity of a system of thought. At some point we need to be able to select from alternative stories, stories that --as far as we can tell-- correspond to realities we have no part in creating. Call them ‘facts,’ call them ‘universal realities,’ call them ‘truth,’ call them what you like, but some realities exist outside subjective experience and some stories are truer than others. We have no way of separating those independent realities upon which we can base public actions from private intuitions other than by a system of collective critical and public evaluation of all claims on our belief (O’Hara 158).

The existence of truth that we can share (not the same as complete, absolute truth) is a keystone of democracy. Otherwise, how could we ever agree on anything?

For centuries, the scriptures of the big religions served as frames for community Stories-- ongoing narratives in which core themes are reworked throughout communities and across generations. Members don’t have to start every discussion from scratch, make explicit every aim and assumption, or define basic terms, because scripture offers a shared vocabulary and process of interpretation that allow many people to address key issues and make themselves understood. They can tap into a big reservoir of ideas to help solve current problems. Look at the vast commentaries that explain and elaborate the sacred texts, and the many sects and schools of thought derived from them. Religious stories evolve to meet the changing needs of the community.

The god-centered religions, however, are authoritarian by definition. As vehicles of the unchanging truth, the eternal solution, rather than truth-seeking, problem-solving enterprises, it takes them a long time to move beyond the original positions*. Their exclude and silence many people, institutionally and as a matter of doctrine. They offer no grounds for debate and compromise with non-believers who do not accept their Authority. Except within a narrow range, competing ideas become not matters for discussion and research, but challenges to be suppressed. All this limits religious leaders' ability to meet the challenges we face. Religious governments are no more elitist, brutal, corrupt and incompetent than any other authoritarian regime; really, they are all about the same.

In a democratic society the people are supposed to be the final authority. We have no king, no high priest. We do have many different interests and points of view. While we have a substantial shared set of ideas and vocabulary about rights and the constitution, in the U.S. our democratic tradition is still quite slender compared to those of the big religions. So how can we possibly resolve disagreements?

Reality is what holds us together. We share a real world and we can see it and touch it and try to figure it out. If that's not the foundation of our understanding, then we're thrown back on the ideologies of competing authorities, whose own self-interest is holding on their their authority, whatever the cost to our communities. Their power and privilege derive from perpetuating problems for the rest of us, rather than developing solutions. (Rash assertions, you think? I will go out on a limb and declare that the sun is hot, which you can prove to yourself at your leisure.) And once we decide our world is either too corrupt to pay attention, or unknowable except through authority, then we lose all basis for reconciling differences-- we lose the very basis for democracy.

Some readers will protest, we're not like that! We listen to our consciences, not the words of kings and princes-- or such latter-day tyrants as the U.N., Hollywood, and Big Labor. In response to an email about legislation the teachers' association was fighting, a colleague wrote, " I am getting weary of having other people, and organizations such as KCEA, TEA, and NEA tell me what I should think about specific issues." Wrote another, "I'm tired of getting all these 'informative and earth shattering' emails-- Let us be adults and make up our own minds." I'd feel more encouraged by that formula had it been directed at the incessant unlabelled messages from unelected know-it-alls telling us what men or Muslims are like, how much friends cost, and how patriotism requires nothing more than shopping and killing; if I hadn't heard how often that tiny internal voice turns out to sound just like Rupert Murdoch's.

On the other hand, when we turn to our real-life experience, no matter how differently we might interpret it, we have something we share and can explore and explain together. Of course many of us have concluded that our experience validates our trust in various authorities. That’s why it’s not enough to have only one set of folks in the conversation, or to cherish our ideas in secret. We have to share them and compare them with others. We can usefully debate our conclusions because we have common experience to refer back to, and we can understand our differences in terms of our different locations in social space*. My ideas about and attention to gender issues will be different from those of a mom in Cairo, but we both have to struggle with these issues. We don’t have separate realities. Rather, we may see separate bits of the same reality. And reality includes our current places in the class, race, and gender structures, among others.

Democratic decisions are not better because everyone’s opinion is equally valid, nor even because the majority knows better than the minority. Neither of these must be true. Rather, democratic decisions are better first, because they take into account everyone’s needs and concerns. Second, the information that many people bring is better than information from a few sources, when we take the time to sort it out, evaluate it, and weave it back into the shared Story. We have to pool our understandings, identify the holes and contradictions, and explain how the parts fit together. We’re back to Dewey’s “deliberative democracy.” We have gathered the tools. Now we are ready to deal with our problems.

* Democracies move mighty slowly too, for a different reason: it’s such a laborious process to cobble together a coalition for action, participants have a strong interest in letting decisions stand, once made.
* sometimes called “standpoint theory”.