"The Crisis of Public Reason"

Public Reason: Holding Power-Holders Responsible

American political culture faces a crisis of public reason. Public reason concerns the norms of public argument, and the health of a modern society can almost be measured by the extent to which norms of public reason are upheld. The theory behind public reason, which dates to the Enlightenment, is that power-holders can be constrained by compelling them to give reasons for their actions. If the reasons don't make sense then citizens can point that out, and the disjunction between reason and action will eventually cause the powerholders to lose their legitimacy and thus their power.

The idea originates as a generalization of scientists' understandings of their own norms of debate, and it is often scientists who insist most strongly on the connection between reason and the health of political institutions. If people believe in UFOs, the argument goes, then politicians can say any old crazy thing they want, and society will lose its last fragile protection against authoritarianism and anarchy (these opposites often being fused by people who make this argument).

Challenges to Public Reason: Simulated Rationality

Public reason faces a long series of challenges, which taken together are formidable. One major challenge is the professionally cultivated practice of simulated rationality: if you're a powerholder, or more likely a loose network or segmentary coalition of powerholders, and you want to take certain actions, and if norms of public reason are in effect, then you will naturally search for rational-sounding arguments for your plans. This procedure -- decision first, then arguments -- is utterly routinized throughout the public and private bureaucracies of the world, and a whole industry of public relations (and other communications professions that operate on the same conceptual basis as public relations) exists to support it.

The core concept of public relations is the "perception": what matters in practical terms is not whether one's arguments are rational, but whether they are perceived as rational. One must adopt the surface forms of rational argument -- arranging words in logical-seeming ways, using scientific vocabulary, adducing (carefully selected) facts, providing impressive-sounding statistics, citing the opinions of authorities (that is, people who will be perceived as authorities), and so forth. When norms of public reason have been institutionalized, producing this reason-effect is half the battle, and one can purchase reason-effects by the yard.

Challenges to Public Reason: Technical Rationalization

A second challenge to public reason is technical rationalization, by which I mean the application of math-based analytical frameworks to practical problems. Examples include the mathematical models of operations research, a tremendous variety of simulation methods, and too many others to enumerate. These models reached their peak of cultural legitimacy during the Cold War, but they date back centuries and persist robustly today.

Rationalization produces reason-effects in the sense just described, but its use of mathematics and its apparatus of deductive logic also give it a special claim to reason. Deductive logic is airtight in a precise sense: given the premises, the conclusions follow. Proponents of technical rationalization often feel very strongly, and it is easy to see where they get their fervor. The matters that they model are often controversial, and answers that can be publicly defended through airtight deductive logic are greatly to be preferred to the hidden agendas of politicians and entrepreneurs. To question rationalization, on this view, is to question rationality, with all of the dire consequences that I mentioned before.

The serious problem with rationalization concerns the premises and presuppositions of the model: "given the premises, the conclusions follow", but the premises are rarely as "given" as all that, and the conclusions only follow if the world corresponds to the assumptions that have been built into the model. Most of these models depend on quantitative "inputs" that are subject to measurement error, assuming that they can even be measured. Sensitivity analysis (computing the partial derivative of the output with respect to a particular input) often reveals that the answers that formal models provide depend so radically on unmeasurable inputs that they are worthless. Worthless estimates of ten-year budget surpluses in the United States and the State of Texas are current examples.

The point is not that formal models are incompatible with public reason; reasonable people can argue about the models themselves. Where rationalization becomes pathological is where this meta-level debate about the premises and presuppositions of models is suppressed.

This can (and routinely does) happen in several ways. The models themselves can be obscure, whether by design or not, and this can suppress participation in the necessary debate. The people who apply the models can be trained to apply them in a mechanical and superficial way, and may lack the skill to question and evaluate them. This happens every single day. Or the dynamics of public debate, as in the compression of sound-bite journalism, can give an unfair advantage to those who can offer a neat answer over those who can offer a ten-page explanation of what's wrong with it. An extensive literature documents these problems; see for example William H. Dutton and Kenneth L. Kraemer, Modeling as Negotiating: The Political Dynamics of Computer Models in the Policy Process (Ablex, 1985).

Rationalization and the Problem of Hubris

The most basic problem with rationalization is hubris. The world is complicated, and the people who have expertise with rational models usually do not have enough knowledge of the specifics of particular cases to apply their models realistically. Quite the contrary, the model creates a set of cognitive filters that tend to exclude from consideration any factors that do not fit it. If one's professional standing depends on the applicability of a certain repertoire of formal models, then it is in one's interests to perceive the world as fitting those models, and to stop inquiring into the particulars as soon as the model has been fitted to them.

This is bad enough when the model-expert suffers the full consequences of inappropriate modeling, but it is much worse when innocent parties suffer. This is the story of "urban renewal" programs in the 1970s, in which anyone who actually lived in the neighborhoods in question could have told the modelers what their models were leaving out. Formal models have often proven to be quite idiotic once somebody, in many cases an anthropologist with an equally strong disciplinary predisposition to seeing the social world as an interconnected whole, takes the trouble to discover the fullness of what's happening on the ground.

The Fallacy of "The Scientific Method" As Sole Basis For Public Reason

A variant of the problem of rationalization arises when scientists and scientific enthusiasts (not all of them, but many) insist that the scientific method become the sole basis for public reason. The problem with this position is that many questions of public concern are simply not susceptible to scientific analysis, being for example complex moral questions. Another problem is that science does not function in the way that scientific enthusiasts understand as "the scientific method". The literature on social studies of science has documented this at length, and has accordingly been excoriated by those pseudo-scientific dogmatists who believe that the question of how science actually works is not a fit matter for scientific inquiry.

The Struggle Over Divergent Visions

A final threat to public reason is, to put it in plain language, the struggle over different ways of seeing things. Different professions and cultures have different concepts, methods, and assumptions, and people with different social positions and life experiences go about public reason in different ways. Many people cannot tolerate these sorts of epistemological diversity. They insist that their own ways be regarded as objectively true, and they insist that any appreciation of others' ways be regarded as a relativistic abdication of reason.

Wrong though it is, this fear of incommensurability is understandable. Because public reason only functions if everyone agrees to uphold it, surely the norms of public reason themselves must be framed in a common vocabulary, which vocabulary ought surely to provide a broader basis for commensuration of substantive arguments. Put more simply, if everyone has their own idea about what public reason is, where are the unanimously legitimated rules that are going to keep powerholders accountable? Why can't somebody from your culture, having ascended to office, simply declare that their own cultural understanding of public reason allows them to cite the authority of their familiar spirits as an adequate justification for their actions?

But the fact remains that people do have diverse understandings of the world and of public reason itself, and that many of these understandings are consistent with the spirit of public reason, and that the attempt to enforce a single such understanding as the gold standard of all public discourse is precisely the sort of arbitrariness that the norms of public reason exist to rule out. This problem has serious solutions, but they are not solutions that can be explained briefly or written neatly into a constitution.

These difficulties tend to discredit public reason. One encounters foolish books such as Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice (translated by Steven Sampson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) that discover the shenanigans that go on behind the scenes of putatively rational public debates (in his case, over urban planning) and concludes that rationality itself is nothing but an effect of power. In environmental controversies one observes a struggle over ground rules, with business and government (usually operating in concert) pushing the debate onto the terrain of technical and scientific methods that cannot be employed without large amounts of capital and community organizations pushing the debate onto the terrain of experience, memory, and narrative.

Simulated rationality confronts an insistence that the surfaces forms of rationality have become irretrievably corrupt. Of course many cases are more complex, and the average timber war does include substantial amounts of math and science on all sides. Academics and activists have worked to make the means of scientific rationality available to those without concentrated capital, but it's an uphill fight at best.

Two Ideological Rejections of Public Reason

Yet even those disputes over technical rationalization do not present the greatest danger to public reason. The greatest danger comes from an even deeper interaction between two rejections of reason, the ones that in the United States have come to be known as conservative and liberal. The new jargon that is increasingly spoken by conservative pundits and activists in the United States, and is rarely denounced by conservatives of any stripe, constitutes a vast assault on reason.

The Longstanding Conservative Rejection

The conflict between conservatism and reason, in fact, is longstanding and overt. Conservatives in Burke's day were explicit about the evils of permitting the common people to engage in rational thought, lest they decide to replicate the French revolution, and the thoroughgoing arbitrariness of the new jargon serves to undermine the possibility of popular exercises of reason in the present day. (Whether it succeeds in this is another question.) Even those who identify themselves as libertarians follow an overtly anti-rationalist philosophy, as even a brief acquaintance with the work of Friedrich Hayek should make clear.

The argument against reason in this literature is straightforward: it is impossible for any individual to acquire enough reliable information to make a rational decision, any actions founded on rational thought will therefore be delusional, any attempts at reason should therefore regarded as dangerous, and all action should instead be guided by tradition. This is what Burke had in mind by commending prejudice, even though contemporary conservatives are careful not to use that word. Conservatism is constitutionally opposed to public reason, and this explains the abandon with which so many conservative pundits embrace flagrant simulations of reason, constructed through the methods of public relations, and exhibit so little regard for the real thing.

Identity Politics: Public Reason Rejected in Response to Trauma

But conservatives are not alone in rejecting public reason. The rejection of public reason is central to identity politics, whose starting-point is not the rational overthrow of prejudice in the public sphere but rather the creation of alternative spheres in which silenced "voices" can be revived.

Central to this project is the experience of a particular kind of oppression: the infliction of irrationalist nonsense. Let us say that a long series of jerks indignantly sneer at you that you should stop being a "victim", or that the Native Americans weren't really oppressed given that there are more of them now than there were when the white men showed up. If you are in complete possession of your rational faculties then you will think long and hard until you understand what is twisted about this. But being assaulted by the indignant sneering of nonsense is a bona fide variety of emotional trauma, and only the strongest individual can retain the capacity for rational thought after enough trauma of that sort.

The first step in overcoming the emotional violence of the jargon is not the hard labor of fashioning brief rational comebacks to the immense repertoire of nonsense lines of the jerks. No, the first step is to make common cause with others who have been abused similarly, reestablish the capacity for trust, compare notes on one's experiences, and recover the ability to speak in a semipublic way without an internalized jerk sneering at you to stop being such a victim. The finer dictates of logic have to wait, for the simple reason that an emotionally brutalized person cannot yet distinguish between rebuttals that arise that arise from reason and rebuttals that arise from nonreason.

The problem arises when the communities created through identity politics fail to move past this condition by recommitting themselves to public reason. At its worst, this kind of interrupted recovery can lead to the worst sorts of irrationalism, as in the elaboration of pseudo-historical scholarship. Even at its best, it prevents traumatized people from acquiring the repertoire of rational arguments that they need to build a mainstream political movement.

A vicious circle gets going, with pundits employing the most convenient examples of identity-politics irrationalism as a means of disguising their own irrationalism. The new jargon is filled with projections of this sort, all of which are easy to sustain if one uses facts selectively and otherwise applies the methods of public relations. Notwithstanding their excesses, which hardly compare to the positive contributions that they have made, the principal threat to public reason has never derived from the movements of identity politics. The more basic phenomenon is the vicious cycle set in motion by the irrationalists who, whether consciously or by parroting a jargon whose logic they fail to understand, promote a hierarchical culture of deference.

Public Reason: Precondition for Democracy and Sanity

Public reason is not only a precondition for a functioning democracy; it is also required for individuals to become and remain sane. As human beings we develop our voices by internalizing the responses of others, and in the long run we only remain rational if we internalize a rational interlocutor. Only if reason is both legitimized in theory and actually employed in practice can we be kept honest enough to make rational sense.

Rationality is ultimately not about the procedures of logic, which can easily be reified in an irrational way. Rationality is ultimately about mental health: the kind of contact with reality that we can only maintain if we have good boundaries and a supportive community of similarly healthy people. To oppress people one must wound them, so that wounded patterns of thought are reproduced from one generation to the next.