Zach has previously written about the “Promise of our Democracy” dinners in last Thursday’s issue. Look for it on dailycardinal.com.
The second session of the “Promise of Our Democracy” dialogue series ended with a moment of reflection. We were supposed to think about what made the sessions “work” for us which, given our enthusiastic participation, they clearly did. I’m not sure what made them “work” for me—I was probably naturally curious enough to handle almost anything—but the first things I thought of were a few things that did not work so well.
For two nights, we debated the merits of several possibilities for improving democracy in America. Each possibility had different moral premises, and each valued democracy, however defined, for a different reason. Similarly, when my group looked at these possibilities, we judged them based on different standards. This made it difficult to talk on common ground for a long time.
Eventually, we realized that the other arguments were not wrong, even though we didn’t accept them. We just started from different places and moral compasses. Because each of us had experienced different things and we all had a different picture of the world inside our heads, we thought different aspects of each way to fix democracy were more important than others.
One example of this kept coming up in our discussions. The purpose of the dialogue series is to deliberate on how to make “democracy” better. However, each of the proposals to fix democracy seemed to define democracy in a different way, making it difficult to directly compare some of them.
Our facilitator made an effort to have us “try on the possibility” and to take it apart and see what the idea assumed and asserted. However, we had a lot of trouble with this most of the time. Since we already had preconceived ideas about what democracy was and how it should work, it was usually hard, at first, to accept each possibility on its own terms, at least for long enough to understand it properly. It was difficult to do.
Working past our preconceived ideas wasn’t just difficult for us, each of the suggested ways to fix democracy were created by a group of people in a situation much like ours and embodies the assumptions of the people describing it. This means that there were sometimes places where different assumptions were combined in the description of the possibility, which made the possible way to fix America’s democracy difficult to talk about.
We tried to “clean up” the ideas by defining—or redefining—some of their component parts, but that was difficult for its own reasons. Even after we started describing what we thought were the most important aspects of what we call democracy, it was not enough to make any progress in understanding our disagreement.
Since this kind of impasse is no fun to stay in, we tried to get around this problem by chipping away at our disagreements until we got to the core, moral differences we were secretly encountering. Once we got to this point, it was easier to start reconciling the differences between our points of view. But this was a tedious process most of the time, I don’t think any of us felt like we were getting anything done. As far as I can tell, that’s just a problem with disagreeing, a problem that we will never be able to get away from.
We would never be able to do anything if we had to go through this argument before understanding each other’s positions, let alone making a decision. After all, the only reason we have discussions is because we want something to come out of it. But sometimes our disagreements reach a point where a discussion would never be worth it. Since there are some things that we need to do as social animals, we invented democracy as a way to deal with these disagreements.
According to the Shirky principle, “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” If this applies to our democratic institutions, then this suggests that they should be trying to preserve our strong disagreements. But that means that democratic institutions give no reason to come to an understanding that would temper these disagreements. In other words, there may be no reason for these dialogues to take place.
And the one thing I couldn’t help noticing? The room was a bit emptier than it had been last week.
Zach Thomae is a freshman majoring in computer science. Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
