Essay Assignment
Support, refute, or complicate Jason Brennan’s argument that American democracy is too dominated by hooligans and trolls to achieve positive outcomes, and therefore democracy should be replaced by an epistocracy in which greater political powers are granted to the vulcan class. Be sure to include a counterargument section in your essay unless your essay conforms to a refutation structure, in which case your entire essay is a series of counterarguments. You must have a minimum of 3 credible sources for your Works Cited page.
One. Why does Brennan question democracy in the context of other forms of government such as oligarchy, monarchy, and aristocracy?
He wants us to question with critical thinking the assumptions we have about democracy being the best form of government, the type of government that encourages the “sharpest of minds” opposed to dull passivity.
He explains this in the context of John Adams who was obsessed with a populace that was passionate about pursuing education and critical thinking.
John Stuart Mill envisioned a voting populace that was involved with the process. Mill wanted more than privileged white men to vote. He wanted everyone to vote, and he believed or hoped that this privilege would make everyone thirst for knowledge and create a society of people with advanced critical thinking skills.
150 years later, we read in Brennan’s book, the results are in, and they’re not pretty. Mill’s hopes for an educated voting populace that is involved in democracy have fallen flat on their butt. Let’s look at some data:
In the 2016 Election, 55% of qualified Americans voted, the lowest percentage in 20 years. Local elections are far worse with less than 10%
In contrast, in the 1800s, 70-80% of populace voted for national elections.
A literate voting populace is important to democracy, but that is not promising.
We read in the Huffington Post:
According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.
Lack of critical thinking skills leaves too many Americans ill equipped to detect fake news such as the Pizzagate atrocity, as reported in The Washington Post.
We read about a study in which millennials score an F in critical thinking.
Two. According to Brennan, what has America’s democratic experiment shown us?
That we have not smartened up; rather, we have dumbed down. Brennan makes his point by quoting economist Joseph Schumpeter:
“Thus the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests.”
In other words, the typical voter becomes a primitive again. His tribalistic self-interests contaminate his ability to think dispassionately, clearly, and fairly.
As voters, most of us are not fair. We vote in self-interest, and we use cognitive bias, cherry picking information that conforms to our preconceived notions while dismissing opposing views, to reinforce our biased beliefs.
This human tendency toward tribalistic self-interest and cognitive bias makes democracy, as presented as the ultimate ideal of a human society and part of America’s exceptionalism, a fantasy, not a reality.
Brennan is arguing that human nature, selfish and prejudiced, is too corrupt for democracy, and he is aware that his claim is in opposition to a beloved American belief, which has been held high like a great religious principle. To speak against democracy is to be guilty of being a heartless monster.
Brennan says, let’s hold our emotions for a while. Let’s step back and look objectively at America’s grand democratic experiment. How has this experiment fared? The results are ugly, disturbing, and frightening.
A second point that Brennan makes that he knows will get him into trouble is his belief that if a person lacks critical thinking and appropriate knowledge, that person should not be allowed to vote.
These two points: That democracy may not be compatible with human nature, and that we should not automatically give everyone, regardless of their ignorance or misinformation, the right to vote, make Brennan’s book controversial and iconoclastic. The word iconoclastic means shooting down society’s sacred cows. Democracy is one of those sacred cows.
Three. Why does Brennan want less, not more, citizens to vote?
He writes: “We should hope for even less participation, not more. Ideally, politics would occupy only a small portion of the average person’s attention. Ideally, most people would fill their days with painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain, or perhaps football, NASCAR, tractor pulls, celebrity gossip, and trips to Applebee’s. Most people, ideally, would not worry about politics at all.”
At first, I thought Brennan was being facetious, but in the context of his book, he seems to be saying that the majority of people are simply unqualified to vote and they should be left to their own devices, that ideally that should be absorbed by their trivial entertainments and distractions, and leave voting to the deep thinkers and “heavy hitters,” people with the intellectual muster to make the right decisions.
Additionally, Brennan’s point is that a life occupied by politics does not make us better people; it simply makes us more tribalistic as we dig our heels into our own self-interests.
Getting involved with politics doesn’t make us better people, according to Brennan; it makes us more prejudiced, biased, tribalistic people.
Four. According to Brennan, what are the three species of democratic citizens?
Hobbits: apathetic and ignorant about politics. They like to be consumers of everything, but the hell with politics.
On the critical thinking scale of 0-10, they score between a 1 and 2.
Hooligans: They are passionate about politics. They are the “sports fans” of politics. But they have horrible sources of information and no critical thinking skills. They consume fake news (Pizzagate), Alex Jones, and the works of other public trolls. In fact, hooligans are a form of trolls in their own right.
Hooligans are proudly biased in their views and ignorant of opposing views. They would never dare test their ideas by entertaining opposition. They are rabid Kool-Aid drinkers of their political ideology and live in a bubble with their fellow Kool-Aid drinkers.
On the critical thinking scale, they score a big fat ZERO. Or perhaps a negative TEN.
Vulcans: They use critical thinking, credible evidence, and science to reach their views. They are dispassionate and constantly checking their own biases at the door. They welcome doubt and opposition so they can wrestle with their ideas, and they are open to evolving their beliefs and opinions based on new questions, new evidence, and opposing views.
Vulcans avoid reaching political conclusions based on self-interests; rather, they try to be dispassionate and fair-minded.
Vulcans score high in their levels of metacognition and self-awareness. They thirst for knowledge.
On the critical thinking scale, they score at least a 7.
It was John Stuart Mill’s belief that getting everyone involved with politics would create a nation of Vulcans, which for him was a desirable outcome.
However, Brennan is making the case that Mill was wrong on a grand scale. Vulcans have not flourished. Their numbers have diminished.
Brennan’s book could have been titled Demise of the Vulcans.
Brennan’s claim is radical: Politics turns us into hooligans. We should stay out of politics.
This is problematic of course because if we should stay out of politics, WHO should be involved and at what cost to the rest of us?
Brennan had better answer these questions to our satisfaction, or his book is dead on arrival. We must hold Brennan to these questions as we continue reading.
Five. What is democratic triumphalism?
Most academics, Brennan points out, glory in democratic triumphalism, the belief that widespread involvement in politics makes all of us better citizens, better critical thinkers, and more highly evolved Vulcans.
Going against the grain of his colleagues, Brennan, a professor of philosophy and political science, argues that democratic involvement causes us to devolve or degenerate into a nasty primitive state of hooliganism.
He is saying we should give up on the democratic experiment; the results are in, and we failed.
Six. What questions do we have after reading the first chapter?
I have three concerns about Brennan’s thesis.
One, is he preaching rule by Vulcans? If so, who determines who gets to be a Vulcan and who is excluded?
Two, is he preaching nihilism and majority misanthropy? Most people are too dumb for democracy, so we should abandon ship.
We must surrender to this form of nihilism (no hope in a better future and a better populace) and find some patch-work political substitute for democracy.
Three, Is Brennan guilty of either/or fallacy: Either the masses are smart enough for a healthy democracy or we should terminate the democratic experiment right now.
What if there’s a middle-ground? What if we should fight for education, critical thinking, and a better voting populace, and we don’t solve the problem on an absolute level, but we manage it? We take the edge off mass stupidity by fighting for democracy and its close relative education, which become like Prozac: They don’t cure the woes of ignorance and hooliganism on an absolute level, but they take the edge off those societal ills.
In other words, Brennan is saying democracy has created a dystopia so we should abandon democracy.
Some could argue that democracy creates a dystopia, but we can use education to make our society a dystopia light, which is a preferred outcome to Brennan’s elitism in which only the self-appointed Vulcans rule.
Four, what if Brennan is only partly right. The voting process does corrupt us, but not voting corrupts us even more?
Seven. How does an individual’s freedom to vote hurt everyone?
Brennan uses the example of a self-destructive Izzy character whose wanton lifestyle of junk food hurts only him. However, when the voting equivalent of an Izzy votes, the destruction is spread to everyone.
This is why the Izzy people shouldn’t be able to vote. This example is used as a case against democracy.
Izzy refutes the idea of proceduralism, the idea that democracy is intrinsically good.
The quality of democracy is dependent on the quality of its voters. A preponderance of Izzy voters makes for a hideous democracy.
Majority rule can be bad. In times of slavery, the majority of whites in the South believed slavery was a good, Christian institution. They were evil, delusional, or both. Evil, delusional majorities should not determine political outcomes.
Eight. What claim does Brennan make about an epistocracy?
An epistocracy is rule of the knowledgeable, or rule of the Vulcans.
In an epistocracy, citizens have to study and prove a baseline of intelligence, expertise, and competence to be qualified one vote. Greater qualifications can grant a citizen even more than one vote.
An epistocratic committee exists to veto stupid or bad or unjust laws.
Brennan does not have absolute faith in the epistocracy. Rather, he claims that if an epistocracy can show a better result than our current democracy, we may want to embrace some variation of it in spite of its “realistic flaws.”
Brennan does not want Vulcans to have authority over non-Vulcans; however, positing the anti-authority tenet, he claims we must deny authority of the ignorant and ill-informed by taking away their right to vote.
As a champion of some form of an epistocracy, Brennan rejects the notion that political inequality is unjust.
Book Reviews of Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy:
“Bleeding Heart Bullshit” by Jonah Walters
Rosyln Fuller’s review in LA Review of Books
“Democracy Vs Epistocracy” by Ilya Somin
“The Case Against Democracy” in The New Yorker, writer Caleb Crain
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews article by Thomas Christiano
Dickie Bellringer review
Stumbling and Mumbling review
Boston Review article
“The Smartest Person in the Voting Booth”
Nine. What are the 3 levels of political knowledge?
Some know a lot; some know nothing; others know less than nothing, meaning they have wrong information.
35% of voters are “know-nothings.”
American voters are not stupid; they “just don’t care.” The issue is apathy or people are too busy making a living or too distracted by cat videos.
In fact, most of us engage in rational ignorance, not bothering with political information that has a direct effect on our lives. In other words, the expected costs of political information exceed the expected benefits.
If you’re poor, disenfranchised, and living on the margins, do you really feel there are high stakes in voting? Your life is a struggle regardless of the policies or who is in office.
If you are in the middle class or higher and you feel there are stakes, you may learn a modicum of politics.
There is knowledge stratification with infovores and political nerds hanging out with their own kind and the politically apathetic hanging out with theirs. With a shrinking middle class and with structural inequality, the stratification is going to get worse.
Also tribalistic stratification doesn’t create objective knowledge; rather, it creates bias.
In contrast, a vulcan is free of cognitive bias. The vulcan is free of “motivated reasoning,” developing thoughts to feel good about himself, to feel belonging, and to feel vindicated. These are not dispassionate thoughts.
Non-vulcans reason to win arguments, not to find the truth.
Ten. What is political tribalism?
We are drawn to belong in groups, and we share our tribe’s biases and hostilities to outside tribes.
People don’t really study politics. They are more like fans rooting for their team.
Eleven. What is confirmation and disconfirmation bias?
We search for evidence (we cherry pick evidence) that supports our pre-existing views.
They will disconfirm or criticize views that don’t match their own.
Availability bias means we blow up shark attacks and other lurid sensations in news because their high ratings makes them visible. We ignore global warming because it’s not exciting and reported with same vigor as kidnapping or shark attack.
Twelve. Why do low levels of information matter in voting?
Studies show low-information voters support policies that impose prejudice, intolerance, and discrimination against those who are different than they are. They also want harsher legal penalties and a more aggressive foreign policy.
Thirteen. American academe is in love with John Stuart Mill’s education theory:
Citizens need a foundation of humanities, writing, literacy, logic, history, philosophy, and civics to develop a larger view of world, one that is bigger than their self-interests.
This education results in all of us fighting for a common good and makes us stick together. This will encourage civic and political involvement.
Civic and political involvement will increase virtue.
Brennan refutes the above. He argues that political engagement makes a hobbit into a hooligan or at best a fanboy, not a vulcan.
He argues we do not know how to make a society of vulcans. As proof, they remain a tiny minority.
What about marriage? Many say that most marriages are unhappy. Should we eliminate marriage? Only a tiny minority of marriages are healthy and happy.
According to Sturgeon’s Law, 90% of everything is ****. Should be ditch democracy because of Sturgeon’s Law? What if it’s the lesser of all available evils?
If Sturgeon is correct, then the education principle works 10% of the time.
If Sturgeon is correct, then only 10% of the epistocracy will be of high quality. Can we trust such a small percentage of the epistocracy to be gatekeepers of a healthy society?
Brennan is making a big deal that education and political engagement fail most of the time. He should also, then, consider that the making of an epistocracy, his claim for a better society, can be subject to the same rate of failure.
Fourteen. How might Brennan’s opponents accuse his book of championing elitism?
Over and over Brennan rejects that education can be the cause of higher intelligence. Rather, he says explicitly in Chapter 3, that people of higher intelligence are drawn to education in the first place.
Going to college and being smarter is not a matter of causation but of correlation.
We can infer from his argument that only a very few people have the hard-wired smarts to be members of the epistocracy. The rest of society should be content being happy hobbits, shopping, online grazing, and the like, and leave government to the minority vulcans.
That, according to many, is elitism.
Elitism tends to be a dirty word, suggestive of autocracy, despotism, and other anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian forces.
We’ll have to see if Brennan addresses these concerns.
Fifteen. How might Brennan defend accusations of elitism?
Brennan makes the case that thoughtful political participation, “deliberative democracy,” does not happen because people’s egos and tribalistic self-interests turns them into competitive hooligans who don’t want the truth. They want to dominate the discussion and assert their dominance politically.
Brennan is arguing that whatever elitism he is pushing, it is preferable to giving hooligans power in the political marketplace.
Brennan seems to be saying: Either take my softened variation of elitism in the form of an epistocracy or take our current democracy in which hooligans exercise way too much power, to the detriment of society.
Look at the rise of Alex Jones and his fellow trolls and hooligans and ask yourself if this is the direction you’d like to see your society follow.
In other words, there is a breed of people who are passionate about politics. Their identity is built on their political passion and identity. Most of us are not like this. We cannot compete with the political fanboys. These fanboys become hooligans and compromise the democratic ideal.
The above is Brennan’s argument in a nutshell.
I think it is one of his strongest arguments. I’m not sure I buy his epistocracy, but I’ll give him credit of his hooligan theory of democracy.
“Are American Voters Actually Just Stupid?”
“We Must Weed Out Ignorant Voters from the Electorate”
Sixteen. What is perhaps a weak premise that Brennan uses to support his claim that democracy does not work?
In opening of Chapter 4, he assumes that he has proven that political participation has a corrupting effect. I’m not sure this is as true as he assumes, but to defend Brennan, it could be that people who are already corrupt and unsavory are drawn intensely to political participation, and this premise would support his claim as much as any other premise, perhaps more so.
Seventeen. Is comparing the believe that political participation is a form of empowerment the same kind of “delusion” that can be compared to Brennan’s college roommate who believed she was a supernatural witch who could use her “special powers” over others?
This strikes me as a faulty comparison to make an argument.
