Liberalism - Brain Cramp

We’ve gotten used to the belief that democracy always prevails.  Well, it doesn’t.  That good liberal himself, Thomas Jefferson, wrote in 1789: “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”  In politics there are few concepts more sacred than this, and a politician risks his or her own career through challenging it.Permit me to venture somewhat into that territory.  Jefferson’s observation is, of itself, a mighty validation of liberal philosophy, of the belief that truth and objective fact are all the electorate truly needs to make informed and reasonable decisions.  Recent studies in the United States reveal that the opposite might indeed be true, with serious implications for Canada.In a series of studies from 2005-2006, the University of Michigan discovered that when misinformed people, especially those who are politically partisan, were exposed to corrected facts concerning beliefs they held, they rarely changed their minds.  Researchers were surprised to discover that many of the same people actually became more strongly set in their ignorance.  It mustn’t have been easy for researchers to conclude that facts weren’t curing misinformation but were tragically making it stronger.This helps to explain a lot of what’s happening in Canada right now and why Liberals themselves, like all the other parties, are facing a new kind of electorate.  And the conclusion is inescapable: a country that permits itself to become hyper-partisan to an increasing extent runs the risk of lying outside the ability of science, relevant data, and, yes, even truth to enact a correction in the public sphere.  Scientists, professors, researchers, elderly wisdom, historical memory – these and others no longer receive the respect or sway they once enjoyed in political circles.In so many ways this polity of willing blindness confronts modern liberalism as its greatest challenge, for if, as liberals have believed for centuries now, education is the greatest prerequisite for an advanced citizenry, how can facts help when citizens themselves refuse to accept them?  In their belief that most people’s opinions are formed over a lengthy time, after careful deliberation of the relevant information, Liberals (and liberals) are coming face to face with the reality that much of modern citizenry refuses to budge, no matter what they hear.These same scientists tell us that the human brain has always functioned in this manner and was especially manifest in the times preceding the Enlightenment.  Catholic hated Protestant (and vice versa); the rich despised the poor (and vice versa); women were believed inferior no matter how gifted.  Kings, priests, archbishops, rulers, the elite – these controlled their subjects or followers through the effective use of images. rituals, or, if required, brutal coercion.  These were ages in which truth was claimed by each camp and mistruths were practiced by all.  Thankfully, there were those who fought such a system, but for many years success was limited.We know what resulted with the arrival of the Enlightenment and the freedoms that the new liberal philosophy introduced; but it leaves us with this nagging question: why is it then that in Canada, at the dawn of the new millennium, we have permitted the most partisan kind of politics, and the belief structures that support it, to dominate our public space?I think I know some of the answer.  Truth be told, probably only some 20% of the electorate remains so grounded in their ideological beliefs that they just won’t move, regardless of all the new facts brought to bear on their situation.  We know from the last election that some 40% of the electorate didn’t vote at all.  That leaves the paltry sum of 40% of citizens to embrace new truths and facts in order to bring about more informed choices.  The difficulty is that the ideological 20%, due to the heightened pitch of their innate prejudices of “us” versus “them,” works all that much harder to grab the public agenda.  And the more they succeed, the more that the non-voting public numbers will continue to climb.Don’t take this wrong.  I’m aware there are many faithful members of all parties who assemble all the facts the best they can yet still adhere to their party affiliations.  These are not of whom I speak.  The moment we permit blindness and ignorance a wide enough berth in our public discourse, it won’t be long until it becomes prejudice, which, if history is any indication, will then become hatred.  The new politics, and the new liberalism, will have to figure out a way to pull us back from this self-defeating cliff.We’ll deal more with this in the next few posts, but for now it is vital for every single citizen, of whichever party, who believes in those liberal (small “l”) ideas of education, enlightenment, and the ability to self-organize, to sit up and take this very seriously, because if the researchers in America are right, the days of a new Dark Age could be closer than we care to admit.