I thought I might start regular posting with a brief and obvious reaction to this tweet of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s which has received a bit of pushback:
The principle that policy should be informed by evidence is, I would venture, near universally agreed upon. The crucial problem, visible to so many, but apparently not to Tyson, is that we need to know what we want policy to do. This is the basic work of politics and it is always messy. It involves everyone figuring out their own values, appreciating other people’s values, and negotiating a shared plan of action. Evidence-based policy is the final phase of the cycle.
Rationalia’s constitution does not define how its government is formed and so is perfectly consistent with, say, an absolutist monarch. Perhaps this monarch wishes to resolve ethnic tensions within his country. His policy is thus to engineer a famine in a region inhabited by the minority and then settle large numbers of majority members there. The plan makes sense and may have a precedent, but its rationality says nothing about its desirability.
Defenders of Tyson might say at this point that this is all well and good but that political debates at the moment seem to be happening in the realm of facts rather than values. A key case is climate change where a small group of experts tell the rest of us that it is occurring. An ideal politics would take the best guesses of relevant scientists and figure out what to do with that knowledge. As it is, one side of the debate is cynically choosing to deny the science itself to prevent an expected policy response that they do not like - namely the ceasing of fossil fuel use.
Good faith arguments are possible: one might acknowledge that climate change is occurring but that the benefits to the world’s developing countries of cheap electricity outweigh the costs of the carbon released. But these arguments are rarely used by politicians because they are unconvincing to most people.
This only shows one side of the blame. As Paul Krugman often tells us, ‘the facts have a liberal bias.’ The fact-loving side of politics assumes away questions of value just like the fact-denying side. The values that are apparently so evident and universal that Tyson does not need to include them in Rationalia’s constitution mean that policy flows simply from the fact-discoverers.
In the recent EU referendum in Britain many institutions and experts claimed publicly that the economic effects of Brexit would be negative. Fine, but the Remain campaign apparently did not see the need to reconcile this fact with the other possible effects of Brexit, and the values of the British public.
This is technocracy; a politics that divides the world into the Informed and the Ignorant.
Coincidentally, here is another tweet of Tyson’s:
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 4, 2016
This is an anti-democratic way of thinking. It is somehow easier to believe this than to believe that all people are essentially intelligent and well-meaning and that even so, catastrophic disagreements regularly occur.
I bring all this up because I think it gets at a few of the big themes affecting politics today and may even be the central factor in a looming crisis of democracy.