Democracy Beyond Deliberation?

When is government by discussion antithetical to actually governing?

A recurring theme in my writing and research is the relative rarity of persuasion, especially for high-stakes and conflict-ridden issues. Why do people embrace apocalyptic thinking about their health, flat out rejecting suggestions that may actually help them? Why do climate activists double down on cataclysmic predictions, even when it doesn’t seem to have worked? Or consider, as I had a recent class do, that we’ve seen “follow the science” rhetoric fail repeatedly over a century of conflict over vaccines, yet many doctors and public health officials defaulted to that during the pandemic. And this occurred despite no shortage of people, like myself, shouting for people to pay attention to the historical and sociological evidence. Why is it that, when it really matters, many (if not most) people can’t seem to change their mind?

No doubt that I’m far from the first person to be puzzled by our cognitive stubbornness. Though, I’ve been reluctant to think too much about it, because my academic training pushed me to see ordinary people’s reasoning about their lives as “lay expertise,” which—to be frank—tends to get treated as sacred in my field. That said, I don’t like explanations coming from people who see themselves as paragons of rational thinking, who think they can easily deduce which people are engaging in “motivated reasoning” and which are not doing so. I have yet to run many analyses of belief and wrong-headedness that doesn’t let one group or another off the hook.

A great deal of experts fall prey to naïve realism, as Jeffrey Friedman observed. Economist Bryan Caplan wrote a whole book about the irrationality of voters, but understood rationality as nothing less than wholeheartedly agreeing with the free market policy proposals that he took to be commonsensical. He argues that “basic economic truths are obvious to any adult of normal intelligence who calmly considers them,” insisting that anyone who rejects them must be indulging their emotion over rationality. One would no doubt here something similar, albeit for different policy proposals, when talking to an avowed Marxist or progressive.

Any theory of belief worth its salt would have to contend with the reality that most of us are mostly wrong about most things. The state of disagreement about most important political issues tells us as much: We can’t all be right. Even if most of us probably have something important to contribute to understand or resolving public problems (admittedly some more than others), on the whole we as individuals, even as experts, generally don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, but yet still cling to our limited arsenal of facts and beliefs. In other words, I’ve started to wonder if talk and persuasion is really what democracy is all about.

Belief or Credence?

Two years ago, I read Neil Van Leeuwen’s book Religion as Make Believe. I wasn’t sure what to make of it at the time, but I think it offers a good starting point. Van Leeuwen tries to isolate the specific features that distinguish two particular kinds of beliefs: factual ones and religious credence. Where Van Leeuwen deviates from the typical intuition about this distinction is by framing it in terms of cognitive attitude rather than the content of those beliefs per se. One can have false factual beliefs, for instance, and also by implication follow a true credence. In any case, for Van Leeuwen, it is a person’s orientation to that belief that is decisive.

Religious credence is characterized by Van Leeuwen as being voluntary, invulnerable to evidence, not used to guide practical action, and tending to be compartmentalized to specific settings. Religious people very often are aware of the empirical limitations of their credence. Indeed, voluntary belief in the absence of evidence is what many people’s understand by the word “faith.” At the same time, as much as some Christians, to take one example, might try to pray away an illness, they usually still go to the doctor. Similarly, Van Leeuwen cites how a traditional rainmaker scoffed at an anthropologist’s suggestion that a rain dance would be done any time they needed rain. He recognized that the act was a supplement, not a replacement for practical action in response to drought. Moreover, for many religious people, their credence guides their behaviors on Sunday, within a holy site, or during specific rituals, but much less reliably when doing their taxes or at work.

Factual beliefs involve taking the opposite attitude. They aren’t necessarily true, but are involuntarily updated in the face of contrary or supportive experiences or information, even if a person unaware or lack a full understanding of the relevant science. People use factual beliefs to decide which route to take home after work or to decide how make dinner or which retirement program to choose. Factual beliefs influence one’s behavior everywhere. And human beings usually can’t will themselves into not believing them. Upon recognizing the reality of something akin to gravity or the hardness of concrete, they won’t act as if a dropped object won’t fall or that running into a wall won’t hurt.

As such, Van Leeuwen sees factual beliefs and religious credence as two distinct “maps” that people use to understand the world. But the influence from one upon other works only one way. Factual beliefs can direct or supersede a credence, but not vice-versa. Someone partaking in holy communion invariably knows they are drinking wine (or grape juice) even as they simultaneously believe that they hold the blood of Christ in their hands. Likewise, Jesus walking on water serves as a credence only in light of believers’ factual belief that humans ordinarily sink in water.

Clearly Van Leeuwen sees factual beliefs as important for practical action, for navigating reality. But what are credences for if they don’t do that? Binding group identity. This is where the title of Van Leeuwen’s book comes into play. Credences are “make believe.” It isn’t that people happen to randomly share a credence and then form groups. They develop credences so as to be able to create and sustain communities. A Christian believes that they drink the blood of Christ at communion, because doing so binds them together with their fellow church members. You believe in order to belong, not the other way around.

In Van Leeuwen’s view, credences themselves are not deceptive per se, but rather equating them with factual belief, blurring together the two maps that are otherwise distinct cognitive attitudes, is what is misleading. And this is how Van Leeuwen distinguishes a “normal” religious person from a fanatic. It is only the fanatic who extends a religious credence far beyond its normal compartment to encompass the entirety of reality, who acts as if religious credence were on its own sufficient to achieve practical aims. An example would be someone who actively prevented people from going to the hospital, because they believed doing so was a rejection of God. In this case, subverting practical action is exactly the point, because its extremity is an unequivocal sign of group loyalty.

When the Two Maps Collapse

Rather than serve as a definitive model for demarcating factual belief from credence, I think Van Leeuwen’s model is more insightful when seen as presenting two ideal types. There are no doubt examples of the two maps in action, but much of reality (the parts that really matter) are less clear cut. It can be hard to know whether people’s ideas about climate change or their own health are really rooted in chains of factual belief and when/how credences insert themselves.

Consider apocalyptic environmentalism. Apocalyptic beliefs are never falsified, only revised. Apocalypticism is groupishness on overdrive. It is driven by a desire to see oneself and one’s fellow beliefs as special people, chosen in light of their ability to correctly read the signs of upcoming doom. To repeatedly cite extreme and unrealistic climate scenarios, to point to the growing cost of natural disasters, while ignoring the contribution of increasing GDP, signals membership in this chosen people. That’s why those talking points persist.

Yet, in light of Van Leeuwen’s model, you would expect climate doomists to recognize that their cataclysmic claims are (at root) credences. Apart from Genevieve Guenther’s unusually candid review of The Uninhabitable Earth, such admissions are rare. The implication, I think, is that people often believe that they are rationally updating factual beliefs without noticing how groupishness is at work in the background.

Consider the systematicity that the Salem Witch Trial judges applied to their investigation. They looked for physical manifestations or “Devil’s marks” and sought out “spectral evidence,” when witnesses saw the spirit of the accused in their dreams. They assembled what they saw as factual evidence, seemingly oblivious of the credences that held it all together.

The danger, contra Van Leeuwen, isn’t simply in fanatics that extend their credences into the world of practical action, but in situations where we struggle to know the difference at all, where credences unavoidably intervene in our effort to understand reality and discern the right practical action.

And I think that this isn’t atypical but rather normal of most contemporary challenges. One of my conclusions after having written a book about the politics of biodiversity is that I’m not sure it’s possible to have any opinion about conservation without guiding credences about nature and society. People who have faith in the resilience of nature can find plenty of supportive examples. And so can those who think that the environment is inherently fragile, such as when a climate doomist reinterprets nearly all instances of extreme weather as signs of the coming planetary apocalypse. Our experience of the world isn’t unambiguous enough to enforce any particular storyline about nature. And, at the same time, scientific data is so plentiful and varied to be able to seemingly corroborate whichever one we arrive at. In a sense, our various (religious and non-religious) credences are the glue that holds together the tiny shards of factual understanding that we each possess.

At the same time, if this groupish behavior isn’t a subversion of our nature as human beings, but rather an expression of the fundamental character of a social animal, then we can’t see the dominance of credences in our political thinking as something that can be excised. And this poses problems for how we normally think about democracy. Typically, democracy is cast as a kind of government by discussion. And many pro-democracy people hold their own kind of credence about it, that if we could just create the right kind of deliberative forums, equalize economic power, etc. then a sort of popular will can emerge, or at least durable compromise agreements.

A recent controversy over a proposed data center in my town reminded me of this. The problem with the proposal is that it is technologically utopian and the company has no track record of success. The proposal names both atmospheric water farming and small modular nuclear reactors as part of its system, neither of which the firm has had any real experience with. But the public outrage doesn’t center as much on these facts as on claims about water usage and energy prices. Simple back of the envelope arithmetic shows that the million gallons per day water requirement, supposing that it came from local supplies rather than the atmosphere, is on par with what a medium sized farm or refinery would use. If project produced all its own electricity, impact on local energy prices would be slim to none.

To me, the repetition of easily disputed factual claims signals that the debate has been captured by a credence, especially when stronger factual objections are available. Opponents in the public are essentially saying, “These data center people are not a part of our community. They can’t be trusted and will bring us harm.”[i]

That’s not to denigrate opponents. Political speech can be factually dubious without being illegitimate. Companies working in the data center space need to get their acts together and figure out how to persuasively act like neighbors and community members rather than appear to be handmaidens to Silicon Valley interests or speculative investors. Public opposition reflects a real failure on their part.

The trouble is that once the situation gets this far, collective problem solving is undermined. When credences dominate public interactions, debates become fanatical and problems suddenly seem zero sum. “If the data center is using water, it must be at the expense of local farms/environment” becomes a taken-for-granted belief. Dubious factual claims become akin to catechisms, repeated in order to signal group belonging, that hinder deliberation rather than help it. Any imaginative energy that could be directed toward thinking up what it would take for a data center to be compatible with the needs of a small desert community is spent on conjuring apocalyptic nightmares.

Even if the process is a democratic success in that the public feels heard and that they have an influence, the broader impact is further inflaming divisions, hardening the credences that separate different parts of the population. The locals get seen as hick yahoos who fight progress. The image of AI investors as nothing more than vultures preying on the water and energy resources of economically suffering towns gets reinforced. The result is that productive negotiation regarding data centers becomes harder, not easier.

Democratic Bureaucrats?

High stakes discussions aren’t productive unless we’re able to keep groupishness from running amok. Juries are example of how we accomplish that on a small scale. Bring together a dozen people from all of over the community, refashion them into a group, and hopefully you’ve controlled for the various credences that jurors came in with.

Yet, juries aren’t really scalable. No doubt that there are “citizens’ assemblies,” and other exciting experiments in deliberative democracy. But I think there’s a real need for democratic politics to work without requiring so many evenings from citizens. There’s something to John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse’s observation that many Americans appear to want a kind of “stealth democracy” that functions without their involvement.

While on its surface that attitude suggests that citizens want a well-functioning technocracy, or rule by non-corrupt, well informed, and unbiased experts, that’s not the conclusion that I draw from it. First, such an ideal technocracy is utopian dream. Second, I’m no longer convinced that bureaucracy and democracy are necessarily opposites.

Michael Lipsky long ago recognized that street-level bureaucrats effectively enact their own policies. Think of teachers who get to interpret, at least until recently, what implementing state learning goals meant, police officers who choose which deviant acts to ignore and which to crack down on, or unemployment bureaucrats who can guide an unusual case through the system quickly or let it languish. Bureaucracies are inherently political. But the traditional tendency to see expertise and politics as opposites have led us to neglect the exploration of how bureaucratic politics itself could be made democratic.

This leads me to wonder what it would look like if bureaucrats were trained and tasked with not employing expert knowledge but with facilitating democracy. What if planners in charge of zoning saw themselves as less in the business of executing the codes on the books, and more in terms of devising solutions that explicitly brokered between NIMBYs and YIMBYs (and were enabled to do so)? They might see their jobs as discerning where deviances from the single-family residential zone were desired, or at least more tolerated, and enabling experiments with different urban designs. Insofar as democracy is about resolving conflict and representing most people’s interests, then this kind of action isn’t really technocratic. It’s a kind of public negotiation, but one that happens through action more so than discussion. It’s a way of lessening the hold of credences, which too often insert themselves to short-circuit negotiation and make even the smallest, most incremental policy changes nearly impossible.

Rather than focus on persuasion and agreement, the point is to enable disagreement to be turned into small changes, experiments that might push at least a portion of the population to rethink their factual beliefs about urban space, data centers, or whatever. No doubt that it wouldn’t sway those who hold most firmly onto their credences, but if it can cut down on the fanaticism on display in many public hearings, I’d see it as a win.

Yet there are obvious concerns about this new role for bureaucrats. Who holds them accountable and how? How can we be sure that they’ve brokered fairly between opponents and haven’t been captured by one of them? No doubt that there’s always a need for democracy to be rooted in discussion-based forms of accountability, but we also need a political system that doesn’t so often devolve into group identity-driven bickering and actually gets stuff done.

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[i] A public hearing about the closing of the university pool was remarkably similar, where it was clear that it was people’s emotional attachment to the old pool that was driving outrage, but the discussion centered on incredulity on the easily confirmed figures about low usage/revenues and the high costs of maintaining and renovating a several-decade old structure.