This is Part 3 of a 3-part series. Please share if you find it interesting.

We started this series with a riddle. Was Donald Trump’s rise caused by too much democracy — or too little? In one sense, we saw in Part 1, the answer might be too much. It was not backroom dealings or corporate lobbying that led to his success; it was the will of a very substantial number of people. And yet, we saw in Part 2, things look different if we think of democracy not in terms of popular pressure, but popular empowerment. Is there too much of a well-informed, financially secure public actively participating in the shaping of policy that will benefit the majority of people? I don’t think so. In this sense, there is too little democracy.

Fareed Zakaria argues that part of the solution to our problems would be a return to the ideal of responsible, civic-minded elites. This sounds reasonable. After all, don’t we want our leaders to be better than us in some ways? Don’t we want them to make wise decisions, rather than constantly trying to please us? On the other hand, the past was not exactly golden. Elites have, as often as not, tried to preserve their own interests, and much positive change — abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, workers’ rights — has happened from the bottom up. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page say in their recent paper: “We believe that–collectively–ordinary citizens generally know their own values and interests pretty well, and that their expressed policy preferences are worthy of respect.” In a healthy democracy, who gets to decide what?

Let’s try to answer this by analogy. Suppose you have a serious illness. Which of the following doctors would you most like to have? (1) A doctor who tells you, authoritatively, what your treatment should be, without explaining his reasoning or addressing your concerns. (2) A doctor who lays out a few options for you, expertly telling you the benefits and risks of each, and lets you choose based on your values and priorities. (3) A doctor who gauges your every mood, and possibly your likelihood of buying different kinds of drugs, and makes his prescription accordingly. Doctor 1 is like the elites of the past, who considered themselves so superior to the masses that they didn’t have to justify themselves. Doctor 3 is like most politicians today. Doctor 2 is the one I would want, and I would want leaders embodying similar characteristics.

Maybe this suggests an answer to our conundrums. Facts (and details, and implementations) should be decided by experts. Values should be decided by all of us.

Of course, it’s not quite this simple. (It never is, right?) For one thing, what we call “facts” depends upon our epistemic values, values concerning the nature of knowledge. Creationists, for example, disagree with the fact of evolution. They are wrong, but not stupid; if you wanted to change their minds, you would have to make them question their epistemic values.

Putting this problem to the side, there are others. If the details are hard for the public to understand, how can leaders be held to account? One answer is that this is what an effective media is for, helping translate between technical policy and democratic discourse. Another answer is that there needs to be a baseline level of competence on the part of the public. We should be scientifically literate, economically literate, historically literate, and of course, literally literate. Our ignorance should make us uncomfortable. We should want to learn more.

If factual details are difficult to understand, values can be, too. Philosophers have been honing their understanding of values for millennia; the kind of understanding they possess does not come automatically. This suggests that if public conversation on the level of values is to work, careful examination of values should feature more prominently in our educational system. Which is a challenge, since values can be such a touchy subject.

Despite these obstacles, I think separating facts from values may be a good place to start. For one thing, while it is impossible for anyone to be an expert in all kinds of facts today, it is quite reasonable for everyone to have a well-examined understanding of values.

For another, we can’t choose our facts. As Bertrand Russell said,

When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts.

It’s an admirable sentiment, very hard to live by (and often forgotten by people everywhere on the political spectrum). But while we don’t get to choose our facts, we do get to choose our values.

Zakaria, in The Future of Freedom, says, “political philosophers who write about democracy today are mostly radicals in favor of total, unfettered democracy… As a result, philosophy has little connection with reality these days.” I don’t think this is true. But it is typical of the technocratic mainstream today, which claims that we know what we value, and the only problem is technical details about how to get it. Thus, philosophy (at least the part that’s about exploring values) is obsolete. I don’t believe this.

Political philosopher Michael Sandel argues persuasively for the importance of talking at the level of values. In his TED talk, “The Lost Art of Democratic Debate,” he says:

If you think about the arguments we have, most of the time it’s shouting matches on cable television, ideological food fights on the floor of Congress. I have a suggestion. Look at all of the arguments we have these days — over health care, over bonuses and bailouts on Wall Street, over the gap between rich and poor, over affirmative action and same sex marriage. Lying just beneath the surface of those arguments, with passions raging on all sides, are big questions of moral philosophy, big questions of justice. But we too rarely articulate and defend and argue about those big moral questions in our politics.

After an interactive exploration, with the audience, of the relevance of Aristotle to modern Supreme Court battles, he continues,

There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that’s a recipe for disagreement, and for that matter, a recipe for intolerance and coercion. So better to shy away from, to ignore, the moral and the religious convictions that people bring to civic life. It seems to me that our discussion reflects the opposite — that a better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter. That, it seems to me, is a way to begin to restore the art of democratic argument.

Among the most fundamental questions in a democracy are economic questions. In another TED talk, Sandel asks, “What should be the role of money and markets in our societies?”

He says, “Today there are very few things that money can’t buy. If you’re sentenced to a jail term in Santa Barbara, California, you should know that if you don’t like the standard accommodations, you can buy a prison cell upgrade.” Seems a little absurd, no?

A little later, he continues:

It’s happening — the recourse to market mechanisms and market thinking and market solutions — in bigger arenas. Take the way we fight our wars. Did you know that in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were more private contractors on the ground than there were US military troops? Now this isn’t because we had a public debate about whether we wanted to outsource war to private companies. But this is what has happened. Over the past three decades, we’ve lived through a quiet revolution. We’ve drifted, almost without realizing it, from having a market economy to becoming market societies.

The difference is this. A market economy is a tool, a valuable and effective tool, for organizing productive activity. But a market society is a place where almost everything is up for sale. It’s a way of life in which market thinking and market values begin to dominate every aspect of life — personal relations, family life, health, education, politics, law, civic life.

One obvious problem is, not everyone has the same ability to pay. So we have unequal access to the basic institutions of life, which seems deeply unfair. Another problem is more subtle.

Sandel considers, with the audience, programs some cities tried that paid children as an incentive to read books. The programs didn’t work too well. Why? Offering money for reading, it seems, taught the kids that reading is a chore.

[There is] something that many economists overlook. Economists often assume that markets are inert. That they do not touch or taint the goods that they exchange. Market exchange, they assume, doesn’t change the meaning or value of the goods being exchanged. This may be true enough if we’re talking about material goods. If you sell me a flat screen television, or give me one as a gift, it will be the same good; it will work the same either way. But the same may not be true if we’re talking about non-material goods and social practices, such as teaching and learning, or engaging together in civic life. In those domains, bringing market mechanisms and cash incentives may undermine or crowd out non-market values and attitudes worth caring about.

In a recent paper (“Market Reasoning as Moral Reasoning: Why Economists Should Re-engage with Political Philosophy”), Sandel cites a growing body of research in social psychology supporting the idea that extrinsic motivations can crowd out intrinsic ones. Clearly, the assumption that markets are inert is questionable.

In the same paper, Sandel also brings up a second common economic assumption: that “moral sentiments are scarce resources that are depleted with use.” Lawrence Summers, for example, has said, “‘We all have only so much altruism in us. Economists like me think of altruism as a valuable and rare good that needs conserving. Far better to conserve it by designing a system in which people’s wants will be satisfied by individuals being selfish, and saving that altruism for our families, our friends, and the many social problems in this world that markets cannot solve.’”

But, Sandel rightly points out, this way of thinking seems strange to those of us who are not economists. He asks, “Should we try to conserve civic virtue by telling citizens to go shopping until their country really needs them? Or do civic virtue and public spirit atrophy with disuse?”

At heart, Sandel’s position is based on an optimism about human beings — that, given the right circumstances, most people will be good, caring, fair. The challenge, assuming he is right, is how to engineer those circumstances, and what to do about the few unscrupulous people who will try to take advantage of everyone else’s generosity.

It’s not easy to find an economic discussion of value that doesn’t try to smash it onto a one-dimensional axis (interchangeable with dollars). An economist would probably say that this is necessary, as a practical matter: different kinds of value there may be, but we have to make them comparable so decisions can be made. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the result is entirely representative of reality.

Adam Smith, father of modern economics, was interested in value in its multiple senses. His most famous work is Wealth of Nations, but he also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Economics later specialized into the “science” we imagine it to be today, and as with all specialization, something was gained, but something was also lost. In her book Value in Ethics and Economics, contemporary philosopher Elizabeth Anderson attempts to re-unify economics with other kinds of value. (Anderson, by the way, did her doctorate under John Rawls, one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century.) She argues for a pluralistic theory of value, pointing out that “we don’t respond to what we value merely with desire or pleasure, but with love, admiration, honor, respect, affection, and awe as well.” Thus, goods “differ not only in how much we should value them, but in how we should value them.”

Anderson says,

The most important ideal the modern market attempts to embody is an economic conception of freedom. Economic freedom consists in having both a large menu of choices in the marketplace and exclusive power to use what one buys there at will. It leaves one free from the constraints on use required to realize goods as higher, personal, or shared: it permits one to disregard or destroy the intrinsic value of what one owns; it gives one access to goods independent of one’s personal characteristics or relations to others; and it leaves one free from uncontracted obligations to others, free to disregard their desires and value judgments, and free to exclude them from access to what one owns.

These values, says Anderson, are entirely appropriate to commodities, but not to other kinds of goods. For instance, professionals of various kinds have standards of excellence. A strong argument can be made that doctors, lawyers, teachers, and public servants should have some autonomy from market forces to uphold their professional standards. “It’s just business” may (or may not) be appropriate for business. But this corporate attitude has increasingly infected our politics. Rather than civic virtue, it becomes simply a game of who can out-maneuver whom. The epitome of this is Donald Trump.

Speaking of things that aren’t commodities, what about human beings? Shouldn’t we regard a person as having inherent worth, regardless of what the market says? That’s a core message of religion and humanism alike. If this is right, the ideal of meritocracy becomes questionable. Taken to an extreme, it starts to look like social Darwinism: those who are smart, or charismatic, or otherwise well adapted to the current economic landscape deserve to have good lives; others do not. I strongly disagree. Evolution in the natural world works precisely because it is so brutal. Most individuals die, often painfully; only the best-adapted are able to survive and reproduce. It seems to me that markets are similar, in their brutal but fruitful competition. Therefore, our ideas should be subject to them, and our people shielded from them to some extent. We should cringe, a little, at the phrase “labor market.”

People these days are trying to use business and markets to do social good, and it’s inspiring. But ultimately, markets are more appropriate for some things than for others, and they themselves cannot decide which is which. For that, we need democracy.

Concluding Remarks

Part of me is angry that Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for president. He is a fraud who cares only about himself. He has no relevant expertise, and no moral compass. Hillary Clinton is a person of deep knowledge and principles. Even though I don’t share all her principles, I dearly hope she wins. But in a functioning democracy, there should be more than one viable alternative.

Another part of me thinks that Donald Trump is a gift in disguise. As Youtube’s Nerdwriter1 said, Trump’s gift to us is to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that our politicians, our media, and ourselves, are profoundly screwed up. Trump is a symptom. If we don’t heed the disease, things will get even worse; let’s take this as a wake-up call.

The middle class is shrinking. A growing number of people are trying to cobble together enough gig work to get by. In the best-case scenario, jobs created by new technologies will make up for jobs lost — but even if that happens, knowledge is becoming obsolete faster and faster, so people will have to continually retrain, and jump from job to job. At a bare minimum, we have to do something to make this process more humane. Generous monies should be available for continuing education. We could consider some kind of basic income scheme, so that people who are out of work are able to meet life’s needs. This had the support of Martin Luther King, and many others.

Regardless of which specific policies we choose, I think the United States should expand its definition of fundamental human rights to include food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education, and leisure. We need not have equality of outcomes, but there should be equality of dignity.

In the longer term, we will need to come up with new answers to basic questions of life. America is very individualistic. There are pros and cons to this. Going forward, do we want to stay this way, or become more communitarian? What does society owe us, and what do we owe society?

At present, our economics is based on growth. This will have to continue for some time, for one thing because there are still a billion desperately poor people in the world. But we know that, beyond a certain point, money doesn’t buy happiness. We sense that, beyond a certain point, consumerism is unhealthy, and in many ways we have already passed that point. We know we live on a planet with finite resources, and a delicate environment (this threatens us in the not-so-distant future). Growth will have to end — perhaps in my lifetime. What would a post-growth economics look like?

At present, our society’s mantra is productivity. That is what we expect of each other, and that is what official policy is designed to encourage. Beyond a certain point, what is all this productivity for? Is the intense specialization needed to achieve it healthy for us, and healthy for society? I’m a mathematician writing about political philosophy, so maybe you can guess my answer. Some people will always want to be specialists, pushing out the boundaries of knowledge, adding to humanity’s resources. Good for them. But I would guess they are in the minority. Wouldn’t it be great if we each had the freedom to play in as narrow or as broad an arena as we want?

This won’t happen if we, the people, don’t make it happen. Our world is in a state of flux, with knowledge quickly becoming obsolete, with ourselves becoming obsolete in some ways. One thing we can hold onto — one thing that won’t change — is the need to come together to discuss our values and how to implement them. It may be that as we grow more sophisticated, the main task of mankind will shift from assessing what we can do, to deciding what we should do.

People are hungry for more of this. Michael Sandel’s course Justice is one of the most popular in Harvard’s history, and millions have audited the course online. Bernie Sanders baffled pundits, and resonated with voters, by ignoring the political “horse race” and focusing on fundamental questions of social and economic justice. The strength of his support among the young, who represent the future, may tell you something.

Partly, the solution to our problems is for each of us to just try. Actually go and vote, especially if you are a young person; if enough do, the effect will be revolutionary. Not only that — educate yourself on candidates and issues. Get involved, or at least support those who do. Seek out points of view that contradict yours, and contradictions within your views, and try to learn from them. Express yourself in 140 characters or more. Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, predicts that Donald Trump will beat Hillary Clinton. He says that people are essentially irrational, making decisions based on gut feelings rather than facts or ideas, and Trump will take advantage of this. Prove him wrong!

In the end, however, we can’t fix our democracy individually. Democracy itself must be a democratic project. What does democracy mean to us? What are its proper limits? Which issues should be settled by individuals, and which by governments — local, state, federal, or international? How can we improve the institutions, e.g. schools and media, that are supposed to support a healthy democracy? Government will have to change in radical ways to meet the needs of a radically changing world. We had better talk about what these changes should look like.

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, argued that “one generation is to another as one independant [sic] nation to another… Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.” Madison, however, was skeptical. Isn’t the point of having a Constitution that the principles underlying our republic should not be easy to mess with? At the moment, I would not trust us with a complete rewrite of the Constitution. Too many of our leaders are corrupt or inept, and too many of us are out of the loop; very bad changes could get locked in place.

I view this as a grand challenge. Let us aspire to be a majority-elite public, like the world has never seen before, a public enlightened enough to be worthy of Jefferson’s vision.