Tuesday, April 19, 2022

Claptrap

It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.
I wanted to respond to this article line by line; it’s that badly sourced and reasoned. It’s a veritable child’s  garden of vague and glittering generalities. Well, here’s an earlier paragraph:
there is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales. We see this trend in biological evolution, in the series of “major transitions” through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships. We see it in cultural evolution too, as Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions, driven by rising population density plus new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress. (Those wars of religion, he argued, made possible the transition to modern nation-states with better-informed citizens.) President Bill Clinton praised Nonzero’s optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future thanks to continued technological advance.
Yeats outlined a more incisive vision of history in A Vision with his gyres and Old Rocky Face and falcons deaf to falconers. And my Yeats’ professor in graduate school who greatly admired Yeats still thought he was nuts in that book and in his entire concept of history. This Atlantic article is just warmed over Hegelianism with the same telos in mind: the purpose of history is to produce the present, and us! Yay us!  Thank you, history! Now everybody settle down and leave well-enough alone!

Nice work, if you can get it.

But back to the Founding Fathers, who we all know thought and worked as one hive mind. And while “psychology” is an anachronism when discussing the 18th century (i.e., the word didn’t even exist yet), sure, they were just like us! See? History is ceaselessly at work trying to get to the here and now! And it’s our job to learn from history how to preserve the status quo. Or at least put it back into place.

I especially like the “accountability” on Election Day argument. What’s the incumbency rate? How likely is the incumbent to stay in office for decades?  It's usually either death of something explosive and twitchy that changes that situation.

As for the "passions" of the people, does that include completely squashing the passions of non-whites?  Does that include memorializing slavery to the point it had to be eradicated by war and three amendments to the Constitution, one of which is still more honored in the breach than in the keeping, and which is kept from being implemented by the same branch of government which had to be brought to heel by the 14th Amendment (as direct a response to Plessy and Dred Scott as any amendment in the document)?  Because the right to vote was denied to anyone who wasn't white, male, and a landowner to begin with; was that part of the "wisdom" of the "founders" reining in the "passions" of the crowd?  To this good day voter suppression is still as American as cherry pie. I suppose that's to "cool passions"?  I mean, we don't want non-whites challenging the political power of whites now, do we?  That would surely upset the status quo in ways the "founders" never intended!

Isn't that the argument?  That what the "founders" intended is holy writ and sacrosanct and their "wisdom" can never be challenged, only admired?  And how much more admirable is it than to declare their every word holy and to make their thoughts law?  And when somebody doesn't think as you do, why, we must declare them disruptive and dangerous to democracy and a risk to the republic! Not like the "cooperative future thanks to continued technological advance." We’re living in that right now. When does it become cooperative? What magic piece of technology are we waiting for?

By the way, the 90's called and they want their "McDonald's in every country will bring world peace" nonsense back.  That one blew up completely in Ukraine, or hadn't you noticed?  Apparently Putin is not a big fan of Thomas Friedman or of Robert Wright.
Much, much closer to reality than blaming Facebook for allowing us to turn over the stone of American democracy and see all the nightcrawlers. That tweet is more cogent, to the point, and well-reasoned than that entire Atlantic article.
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