Thursday, January 18, 2024

Fugitive Thoughts on the SEP entry on Democracy



1    I am a big fan of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I have learned a lot from it over the years and am generally very impressed by the quality of the content. 

   I do have some problems with the article on Democracy, though. This, of course, is quite likely the result of my being more familiar with the matters discussed in that piece than I am with most of the others I have come across. After all, I’ve spent the last decade of my life reading and thinking about those issues. I do think, though, that, independent of my own background and interests, this particular article is somewhat more slapdash than others I have seen. (Just to give one random example of the latter, I recently read a great entry on Spinoza’s political philosophy, and, even though I did my Ph.D. thesis on Spinoza, I learned quite a bit from it.) And I want to stress that my admiration for SEP has been there whether or not I have generally agreed with the author(s) on specific subjects included in their entries. In my experience, the articles there have nearly always provided fine overviews of the most important controversies in philosophy—old and new. Furthermore, most of the articles can be read with immense benefit by both interested laypeople and experts in the field. In my opinion, it's simply an incomparable resource.

  I also want to mention right off the bat (to any  suspicious readers in these parts) that I have nothing against the lead author of the article on Democracy or the positions he takes on most of the related issues. (And I promise that I am not looking for citations to my own work, most of which has been published in pretty obscure journals and one widely unread book.) While I have never met or corresponded with Tom Christiano, I have read some of the (excellent) stuff he has written on a number of the topics covered in this article, and I think his book on what he calls “public equality” is surely the most important work anybody is likely to find on that subject. So, while I do think the article probably follows his Constitution of Equality a bit too closely, I also think that book is quite good and that people interested in democratic theory could do a lot worse than making it the cornerstone of their study.


4   OK, my critique. One thing that is likely to be noticed right off the bat when looking at the “Democracy” entry at SEP, is that, with the exception of Locke, there is not much discussion of the major figures in the history of democratic theory. Plato, Hobbes, Mill and Rousseau do get a couple of mentions each as the article proceeds, but none of their views are considered in detail, and a number of key thinkers and works are entirely ignored. Furthermore, the development of the concept of democracy through history is largely passed over. Most scholars agree that democracy's roots go back to ancient Athens, but there’s no mention of Athenian versions here. Moving forward a bit, one book that I think should not have been missed is Marsilius of Padua’s extremely important 13th Century work, Defender of the Peace. (I note, in passing, that there is no separate SEP article on Marsilius, which I think is something that really ought to be remedied, whatever may or may not be done with the Democracy entry.) In his book, Marsilius not only devotes a lot of space to touting the benefits of democracy over monarchy and aristocracy, but also spends hundreds of pages discussing the importance of separating Church and State and arguing that all earthly power should be given to State—so long as it is a majoritarian jurisdiction. His opposition to Papal powers was quite vehement! 

     Of course, authors of articles of this sort will always have to leave out this or that scholar and may need to decide generally whether they want their pieces to be focused on history or contemporary debates. But it was surprising to me that, while the usual large array of contemporary works are cited, it isn't only the Athenians and Marsilius who are omitted. There is, e.g., no Jefferson, Madison, Tocqueville, Bryce, Kelsen, Lindsay, or Schmitt. There's also not a single word on the concept of federalism and the difficult problems it poses for majoritarianism. Clearly, a conscious decision was made not to focus too much on history, so more space would be left for discussion of contemporary debates. But when the best substantive arguments are also to be found among “the greats,” as I think is sometimes the case here, it’s not clear that readers benefit by such omissions on the substance front either. (I should say again, though, that Locke is an exception to the practice here: there's quite a bit of material on his views.)

     The idea of consent pops up here and there, mostly in connection with whether individuals have an obligation to abide by governmental edicts, but there’s not, as one might expect, a section devoted to the traditional idea that democracy is, more or less, an elaboration of what follows from the concept of consenting group members. “Majority tyranny” (a particular peeve of mine, see this paper) is referred to a few times, but is nowhere defined or even explained. We read that it should be distinguished from the problem of persistent minorities because where the latter is found, "it may be the case that the majority attempts to treat the minority well, in accordance with its conception of good treatment." It would seem to follow from that way of looking at things, however, that majority tyrannies, unlike many jurisdictions in which we find persistent minorities, cannot not treat minorities in accordance with their conception of good treatment. But that is an odd suggestion, since it seems clear that we can imagine tyrannical majorities that consistently believe they are treating all of their citizens very nicely.

5   The authors tell us at the outset that they want to engage in normative, rather than descriptive theory. Their interest is in “the moral foundations of democracy and democratic institutions, as well as the moral duties of democratic representatives and citizens.” I will come back to this choice to focus discussion on moral matters, but first I want to look into what they claim to mean by “democracy” throughout the piece. The authors here indicate that by this term they mean (a) in all and only democracies, group decisions are made collectively and are binding on all group members; and (b) the decision-makers must be considered equal in some more or less “thick” sense. That is, maybe all their votes in general elections should be equally weighted, or maybe they each should get some equal (and significant) time and/or vote strength in the business of actually making laws—not just voting for representatives: but there must be some sense in which each citizen is considered equal to every other citizen. They also note that they don’t want their definition to require that democracy is a good thing; they require that it be compatible with some other form(s) of government being preferable.

                    

  When we consider the aptness of this definition, it's important to understand that democracy is often distinguished from monarchy, oligarchy, and aristocracy. (Marsilius and Hobbes make these distinctions in detail, e.g.). But such comparisons might not make sense if democracy is defined at the outset as a decision-making procedure. After all, it wasn’t generally suggested back when the relative merits of those sorts of governments were being regularly and seriously assessed, that in monarchies only the monarch can vote; in aristocracies, only elites can vote, etc. On the contrary, what was being compared was RULE by monarchs, by elites, by the demos, etc. Now, I want to stress here that I absolutely agree that something like what is settled on by the SEP authors is how democracy should be understood. My objection is that I think this must be demonstrated: it can’t be simply assumed without immediately begging questions against those who support things like sortition (picking representatives by lot) or even, arguably, such proposals as term limits. For making democracy a selection method immediately and without any argument at all turns sortitionists and term-limit advocates into anti-democrats. Again, I myself think they are anti-democratic, but I don’t believe it’s right to shove them into that camp without argument.

 Consider the fact that sortitionists generally argue that random choices of rulers from the electorate is more democratic than picking rulers by plebiscite. Why? Because they think such a method will produce a government that is much more similar (say in class or race) to the citizenry at large than selecting representatives by election will. Any such claim will be immediately foreclosed without argument if one simply starts with a definition according to which democracy is made solely a matter of how governors are selected. While I repeat that I do think this is where one needs to land, I concede that it is not the traditional understanding (say by the Athenians or Hobbes) of “democracy,” and recognize that picking a different definition without argument is unfair to those who continue to approve of that understanding. (On the other hand, I believe what the SEP authors have provided here is a good initial definition of “majoritarianism.”) 

Interestingly, the authors write that “proposed justifications of democracy identify values or reasons that support democracy over alternative forms of decision-making, such as oligarchy or dictatorship,” but oligarchy, e.g., is most commonly defined as rule of a country by a small group of elites. Some would claim, reasonably, that it doesn’t matter at all how such a group is chosen. And it seems clear, particularly in today’s U.S., that a dictator could be elected by lots of methods the authors here would have to categorize as democratic. (One other thing I will mention is that, to the extent the discussion is focused on majoritarianism, as I think it mostly is in this article, I think space should have been given to such matters as the recall of public officials and fixed terms of office. There’s nothing at all on either subject.)

 As mentioned above, in a refreshing exception to the general neglect of historical figures, there is a discussion of Locke’s argument for majority rule. Unfortunately, it shines a light on the above-mentioned problem of a too-quick definition of democracy. The authors write, “Locke thinks that a people, which is formed by individuals who consent to be members, could choose a monarchy by means of majority rule and so this argument by itself does not give us an argument for democracy.” That, of course, is hard to square with a definition of democracy precisely as a decision procedure, something which would seem to be entirely consistent with rule by a monarch.


6   A very substantial percentage of this SEP article is devoted to epistemic justifications of democracy. The idea, as is nicely explained here, is that “democracy is generally more reliable than alternative methods at producing political decisions that are correct according to procedure-independent standards.” A lot of space is given to Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, and two other suggestions are given for democracy’s supposed superiority on the reliability front as well: “the effects of cognitive diversity” and “information gathering and sharing.” What is not discussed at all is what it is supposed to mean for a public policy decision to be “correct” in the first place. I, for one, think it would be entirely unsurprising for any electoral decision to be “correct” if a vote is (as I think it is) no more nor less than a matter of asking a person or group what they want.

 The lack of any discussion of what it means for a public policy to be correct seems to me to be a major defect of this article. It functions as an unargued assumption for some sort of objective list theory of well-being. And from there we can infer that it goes on to take votes to be inquires of a sort regarding what can be expected to produce the highest levels of group well-being. I think all of that is not only controversial, but simply wrong. For whatever it may be worth, much of my book is devoted to those matters.


 To see how important this is to current controversies in democratic theory, consider the following passage: 

[I]f we expect most people to engage in other difficult and complex tasks, how can we expect them to have the time and resources sufficient to devote themselves intelligently to politics?....[O]ne widely accepted estimate puts the odds of an individual casting the deciding vote in a United States presidential election at 1 in 100 million….Anthony Downs has argued that almost all of those who do vote have little reason to become informed about how best to vote. On the assumption that citizens reason and behave roughly according to the Downsian model, either the society must in fact be run by a relatively small group of people with minimal input from the rest or it will be very poorly run. 

 And such criticisms are said to support the Platonic idea that government by a race of wise and virtuous Guardians is superior to anything that democracy can offer. My point is that knowing what one wants doesn't seem particularly time consuming or difficult, so if that’s what’s actually expected of voters, it seems silly to suggest either that it’s a terribly imposing task or that some other expert(s) could do a better job.



7   I very much like the Christiano-based arguments against epistocracy found here, which are largely based on his original analysis of “public equality.” Again, I think this is a very interesting and important approach to political authority. But it does bring us back to the claim that normative assertions about democracy and governmental authority must be moral assertions. That claim may well be correct, and whether it is or not is certainly a thorny issue, but it’s another matter that I think requires argument, and none appears here. Another way of looking at whether we ought to have democracy and whether citizens ought to abide by democratically produced edicts—regardless of the sort of outcomes this style of government does or is deemed likely to produce, is to ignore morality in favor of an entirely different sort of value, the prudential sort. That is, we can leave the question of whether democracies are ethically preferable to other sorts of government arrangements, and instead consider only whether democracies are better for the populace. (And it’s important to recognize that such assessments may be made ex ante, as well as ex post, so every prudential value judgment need not be seen as an outcome assessment of resulting well-being. I talk about this issue a bit in a recent interview that can be found here.) 

      Again, in order to get an understanding of such judgments, one has to enter into questions about just what it is that makes--or is expected to make--a life go well (ex ante). And, as indicated above, that means getting into various theories of well-being. Is it a bunch of objective items, like, say, health, wealth, loving relationships, knowledge, etc. that makes everybody’s life better, (whether they know or agree with this list or not)? Or is well-being, as hedonists think, actually determined by the level of pleasure in some person’s or group’s life? Or is it, perhaps, a function of how many or what percentage of one’s desires get satisfied? In my work, I have argued that ex ante well-being is a matter of getting to freely choose what one wants. No doubt, I may be entirely wrong about this, but I don't think that’s  really relevant here. The main point is that where one comes down on the nature of well-being is likely to determine how one decides both the question of whether votes are likely to be “correct,” and whether democracy is a “good thing” or not. So, I don’t think one absolutely must take a position here on whether democracy is—or should be thought to be—morally good. Rather, it's possible to reasonably stick to the question of whether (and how one determines whether) democracy is good for persons or groups.

8    Now, independently of whether we decide democracy is generally (prudentially) good for a group of people, we may also wonder whether those who are in a democratic polity have a duty to obey appropriately passed laws. How one is likely to answer this, must, I suppose, be at least partially a function of where one stands on moral obligations generally. If one denies such obligations or is just skeptical about our knowledge of them, one may again turn to the (at least apparently) less mysterious questions involving whether one will generally be better off by obeying such laws. And this distinction may be relevant not only to any claimed duty to obey, but also to any ostensible duty to vote. (Indeed, it should be mentioned that the authors make even the question of “What sort of representative system is best?” a moral matter!)

  As indicated, in his book, Christiano has given what I consider an ingenious theory involving treatment of others to explain why such obedience makes us both morally better and better off. Unsurprisingly, he takes the same tack in this article as well. But, in any case, while the question of whether one ought to follow democratically derived laws certainly can be reasonably construed as a moral question, I again insist that it is not the only possible perspective here--even when one considers Christiano's own approach to the subject. And, in fact, much of the discussion of instrumental versus inherent reasons for claiming this or that with respect to democratic issues found in the SEP entry seems to me to confuse or conflate these matters to some degree because prudential and moral values are not carefully distinguished. I note here, e.g., that discussions of the merits of proportional representation would be considerably clarified by distinguishing the type of value being talked about. 

   On the other hand, I will concede that I’m not entirely sure myself whether or not to make civil obedience a moral matter. It is my view, e.g., that giving minorities appropriate voice (i.e., voice reflective of their numbers) in some sense ought to be done regardless of the outcomes generated by that approach. That is, it seems to me axiomatic or fundamental in some sense, just as the equality of persons (from which we derive majoritarianism in the first place) is axiomatic. That is, although I have no great arguments to give for these principles, I resist the claim that I need to have any if I am right that they are simply fundamental starting places--whether they are moral claims or not. To conclude, if these axioms are seen as moral claims, so be it, but whether or not that is actually the best way to look at this matter is simply not obvious to me.

9   There is some discussion here of the “all-affected” theory for determining which persons should be considered subject to a polity’s laws, and I entirely agree with the negative conclusions reached in the SEP article. In fact, in my view, any number of additional attacks might have been successfully leveled against that position. It just seems to me indefensible. I believe, however, that more could have been said here on behalf of a strictly geographical determination of who must comply, and generally, on such things as who should be allowed to vote considering matters of age, competence, and alleged moral depravity (or felony convictions). There’s a lot of good literature on this.

1   Moving on, the authors' discussion of Arrow’s theorem misses what I take to be an essential matter: whether the preferences in question are ordinal or cardinal. I won’t go into this here, but I devote a significant amount of space to it in my book. Those sorts of considerations (rightly or wrongly) result in my support for Approval Voting and the Single Non-Transferable Ballot. Whatever the value (if any) of my thoughts on the particulars of voting, my general sense is that this SEP article would be better without any discussion of them at all. Voting theory is pretty arcane, and I think technical matters of that type would probably have been better left to one or more separate articles put together by other experts (maybe from the world of political science). In any case, the material on voting theory here is pretty slim and skeletal, while the literature and number of controversies regarding such issues are mountainous and dense--as well as momentous in today’s political climate. I therefore think removing that material in its entirety would make space for more philosophy and history without much reduction in quality.

      In sum, fellow democracy researchers,



     






Friday, January 5, 2024

Disinformation and the Seductiveness of Wonder

 


In 1960, William Newcomb, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, concocted what might be called a greed paradox. He asked people to imagine a game in which players are presented with two boxes. One of them is transparent and always has $1000 visibly inside it, while the other is opaque and contains either a cool million bucks or nothing at all. Players have the choice of taking both boxes or only the opaque one, and either way they get to keep all the money in the box or boxes that they choose. A simple, yet always remunerative game.

Newcomb’s rules prescribe that every participant has the following absolutely reliable information:

1.    Whoever puts the money in the boxes is a prognosticator. If she predicts the next player will take only the million-dollar box, she will always put the money in there. If she expects the player to take both boxes, she will never put even a dime in the opaque box.

2.    This prognosticator has always been correct. Historically, every prior player who has taken both boxes has gone home only with the paltry grand. But those who pick just the opaque box leave rich. (Keep in mind that a million bucks was a very tidy sum in 1960).

3.    There is no jiggery-pokery of any kind. The predictor never cheats, for example by somehow sneaking money in or out of the million-dollar box after hearing a choice made. The money is either in there or it isn’t prior to the announcement of a participant’s decision, and no change is made afterwards. There’s neither any fancy technology nor any old-fashioned legerdemain in play: just incredible predictive accuracy.

The literature suggests that there are generally two diametrically opposed attitudes maintained by those who consider Newcomb’s brainchild. The logical, apparently scientific sort can always be expected to take both boxes. I can almost hear one such scholar pleading, “How can it ever make sense not to take both? The money is either in the second box or it isn’t; my choice can’t affect the outcome. Obviously, we should take all the money being offered rather than settle for only a portion of it!”

But the pragmatist will be more interested in past results than in such scientific truisms. She wants to join the millionaire club and may not care so much (at least not while playing) about how the historical results are even credible. She’s been assured both of the uniformity of the past outcomes and of the integrity of those running the game. Concerns regarding how such apparently baffling results have occurred will seem to her purely academic. It may be mystifying that the choice to take all the money on the table is never as financially rewarding as just opting for some of it, but this may pale before her employer’s warnings about possible upcoming layoffs and her recognition that mortgage payments will continue to be required by her bank until hell freezes over.

Now, one might think that this entire debate is purely academic and doesn’t much matter in the real world. Presumably, after writing up his intriguing little paradox, Professor Newcomb went back to his radiation studies and then maybe listened to a radio show about why the California Democratic Delegation chose not to support JFK at the 1960 National Convention; or maybe he just caught a movie. After all, even if his thought experiment was cool, the real world doesn’t actually contain games where causality goes on holiday like that. Maybe Pascal’s Wager, according to which it’s silly not to believe in God once you consider the incredible benefits promised to the devout, had long been touted as a good reason for theism, but like million dollar promises, that pie has also always been in the sky. Going along with something just because doing so gives you a kind of wonderful glow, is naïve, nothing but a sucker’s game.



But what about when naivety seems to make good sense? For it seems to do so, at least in the area of medicine. Not long ago, a neighbor of mine whose entire family had just gotten over bouts of COVID, told me that her doctor had prescribed ivermectin to each of them.

“Well,” I quipped, “it certainly seems to do its job in keeping my dog free of heartworms.”

“Oh,” she shot back with a visible eye-roll, “the human dosage is very different. Anyhow, that drug was a game-changer for us.”

In the area of human health—in fact, human well-being generally—the benefits of “going along with a trusting heart” has been well known at least since Henry K. Beecher’s 1955 publication of “The Powerful Placebo” in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Beecher’s article described the first clinical studies of something care-givers had known for centuries: sometimes the only causal connection that is necessary for improvement of physical symptoms seems to be faith in the healthcare provider. Here, too, one can take the same tack as those who paradoxically eschew the second box based on nothing but the guarantee of an ostensibly sage prognosticator. Given the power of “wisdom” (real or imagined) it’s no surprise that items with exotic names like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine took off as plausible COVID remedies while the more mundane recommendations of bleach and internal lights were, if not always scorned, at least almost universally ignored. Sufferers want something that at least sounds like science—pseudo or otherwise. And a number of studies[1] indicate that we can again find two different sorts of participants in the game who will obtain differing levels of success: the skeptics and the arguably more credulous pragmatists.

Now it’s important to distinguish this effect from what happens in a traditional con, where there’s no overall or long-term benefit for the “rube” because all the real goodies go to the sophisticate running the game. Being “fooled” is a different matter in the area of one’s health. Just as it seems eminently sensible to choose to become an instantaneous fat cat rather than retain a foolish pride in one’s high level of “scientific consistency,” it also seems obviously better for a sick person to grab an opportunity for a quick and easy return to health rather than worry overmuch about what “Big Pharma” can or can’t prove to the satisfaction of a bunch of government bureaucrats (who, after all, may just be pointy-headed know-it-alls or useless patronage hires). The point is that this formerly maligned “gullibility” can reasonably be claimed to be valuable across more domains than have been regularly recognized—and thus, a perfectly sensible approach. And while it’s possible that a bad actor might profit from a bit of hyperbole, those winnings might be swamped by benefits either to the alleged “greenhorn” or to the community at large. So, it’s a mistake to treat my neighbor’s choice as analogous to a Ponzi scheme being perpetrated on an unsuspecting lamb.



Consider a few other areas where this sort of effect can be seen. First, the movies. Perhaps many of us can recall the reaction they had upon first learning that the movie Fargo (1996) wasn’t really based on actual murders in North Dakota, as is stoutly claimed in its opening moments.[2] Director Joel Coen’s thinking was clearly that the film would be more effective if it proclaimed that it was based on events that really occurred. He likely thought, “Hey, it’s a movie, and movies are allowed to be fictional, so it doesn’t matter whether it’s true when this particular one claims it isn’t fiction.” I myself felt a sort of betrayal when I found out about that move, but it was wedded to a kind of vertigo, because I couldn’t deny that Coen was right. The movie really was more effective because I bought the lie that it was a docudrama. So the disinformation didn’t just benefit the movie-makers. And, many will ask, what’s the harm? If anyone is terribly interested, they can just look it up and they’ll find out exactly how much actual truth there was in Coen’s grisly story. If it turns out that there was even less than found in the Hollywood telling of Butch Cassidy’s life, so what? Maybe the truth-stretching film makes more money, but that’s because moviegoers have benefited from increased astonishment. Who is hurt?



Next, consider a modest institution which, since its founding in 1988, has been considered a paragon of harmless wonder generation via its clever use of “the little white lie.” I’m referring to an odd storefront attraction just northwest of the Culver City section of Los Angeles called “The Museum of Jurassic Technology.” If the place remains a bit too eccentric to categorize even after a visit or two, an engaging book[3] by Lawrence Wechsler about the museum and its brilliant originator and continuing curator, David Wilson, may help. Wechsler seems to start out sharing my bewilderment at Wilson’s systematic doling out of cloudy but convincing half-truths, but he ends up lionizing the exhibitor for his appreciation and effective use of wonder. Among Wilson’s most baffling creations are a couple of quite believable but entirely fabricated pseudo-scientists. One, called Geoffrey Sonnabend, is supposed to have written a three-volume tome on the mechanism of memory while he was a faculty member at Northwestern University in the 1940s. Sonnabend’s “plane-and-cone theory of obliscence” doesn’t seem that crazy once one spends a bit of time deciphering the framed diagrammatic models on the museum wall, and even if it is a bit cuckoo, lots of weird hypotheses have been proposed over the years by quack “scientists”—especially those focusing on “the mind.” Both Sonnabend’s speculations and his personal history are admittedly vague and quite bizarre, but how much midcentury American neurophysiology is a casual museum visitor supposed to have at her fingertips? And what is unreasonable to imagine about the effects scholarly obsessions might have on a sensitive, middle-aged psychologist? After all, Sonnabend (in common with the absolutely non-fictional German scientist, Gustave Fechner, by the way) was said to have suffered a severe nervous breakdown prior to coming up with his off-kilter theory. And isn’t our faculty of memory mysterious by its very nature? I mean, what, exactly is “the past,” anyhow? If it doesn’t exist anymore, how can we manage to have access to it? If facts are weird, why can’t they have equally weird explanations and explainers?

Wilson’s museum is piled high with such stuff—much of it poorly lit and purposely askew. One exhibit may cause us to reflect that, while we are quite sure that the breath of a duck has never cured a single human ailment of any kind, we aren’t quite so certain that no now-crumbling witchcraft book (maybe a Bulgarian one?) ever suggested the effectiveness of such a cure. Is Wilson’s duck breath display approvably “historical” if what it claims can be found in a suitably old or exotic book? Is it enough that some person or group did once believe in the duck breath cure? If the bogus Professor Sonnabend is a sufficiently reasonable facsimile of actual pseudo-scientists to make for a legitimate museum exhibit, maybe it’s also enough that some person or group might have believed (in the now “obliscent” past) that the breath of a duck was curative for ague or quinsy. So why fight the delicious experience enabled by our ingenuousness, no matter how naïve it makes us seem? Who is the buzz-kill who would fault anyone merely for exhibiting a childlike innocence?

Wechsler quotes Einstein’s remark that “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious….Whoever does not know it can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.”[4] Wechsler adds that Wilson’s attitude seems to be that the “delicious confusion” produced by a visit to the Museum of Jurassic Technology “may constitute the most blessedly wonderful thing about being human” (p. 51).

Well, I can’t deny that the place is a kick. But is there really no societal cost at all associated with shrouding the very idea of truth in an everlasting ambiguity? Everyone knows that cheap and widespread dissemination of what is now widely called “disinformation” is available nearly everywhere today, and this fact is seen by some as being an existential danger to civil society.



It certainly can’t be disputed that a lot of new work on disinformation is currently being published. In fact, I’ve reviewed a few books on that matter myself.[5] One recent one I had been intending to write something about caused me to think more about a possible connection between the accommodation of an (apparently innocent) wonder and the known dangers of “fake news.” It was the late David Graeber’s final published work, Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia. Graeber was an anthropologist, but is probably at least as well known for being a firebrand anarchist, and as I began to read, I realized that the book was at least as much activism as it was anthropology. My interest in this work centered on the author’s claims about the effects on enlightenment thinking produced by certain democratic experiments allegedly taking place in several early 18th Century pirate kingdoms in Madagascar. But it wasn’t long before I began to suspect that a significant portion of Graeber’s history was based on wishful thinking. His goal was to credit such “great utopian experiments” as Libertalia, a storied pirate republic, for certain egalitarian and democratic ideas that would later be found in the works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and other enlightenment figures.

To be fair, Graeber explicitly admits that there’s never been much evidence for Libertalia’s existence. But he nevertheless believed that white, male Europeans have taken far too much credit for the intellectual breakthroughs of the 18th Century, and he noticed that the description of Libertalia in the 1724 General History of the Pyrates (by one “Captain Charles Johnson”) depicts a much more diverse origin for majority rule, equal rights for women, the jury system, decent treatment of laborers, and so on. Furthermore, Graeber argued that even if Libertalia was entirely made up, there were certainly other pirate collectives around at that time, some of them in Madagascar (and thus possibly infused with multi-racial and women-dominated institutions) that could reasonably be inferred to have had significant influence on Enlightenment thinking.

Naturally, most of Graeber’s readers will share with me the characteristic of having no knowledge whatever of what was happening around the Indian Ocean and its islands during the early 1700s. Given this ignorance, what attitude should readers take toward Graeber’s assertions about the intellectual origins of modern democracy? Suppose we do what it was suggested above that Fargo skeptics do: perform a little independent research. For example, we could pick up The General History of the Pyrates ourselves and skim a few chapters to see what strikes us as plausible. If that’s our tack, the first thing we’re likely to notice while hunting around for a copy of the book, is that about half of the numerous available versions will be attributed to Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, while the rest won’t mention Defoe at all, but instead give the author as Captain Johnson. So, perhaps, we will move on to Wikipedia and see what the (possibly self-appointed) experts there say about Libertalia. There we will find a thorough description and history of the community’s supposed leader, a certain Captain Misson, but will encounter no mention of Defoe’s possible pseudonymous authorship of the story. If we continue our investigation by looking at the Wiki pages for both Defoe and The General History of Pyrates, we will see that there is no evidence for Libertalia besides what can be found in that book, which, since the 1930s has almost unanimously been held to have been written by Defoe.

Does that settle matters? Not at all! We will also discover that the most recent, detailed scholarship absolutely denies that Defoe could have known enough about the geography of Madagascar to have been the writer.

It's all a bit dizzying, but, like the other examples given above, Graeber’s thesis was partly dependent on the accepting spirit of his readers. He had a point that he believed was important, and it was one that he knew could be more effectively made if certain questionable facts were quietly assumed to be in evidence. This is not to suggest that he should be thought of as cruelly taking advantage of his readers. He was simply moved by what he took to be an important thesis that could make the world better if somebody would successfully advance it.

Suppose he was right. Let’s say we agree that women, blacks, and Muslims have never gotten the credit they deserve for intellectual advances in the West. We might then try to defend his maneuver by noting that, in addition to righting that wrong, it is no worse than that of the ivermectin prescriber, Newcomb’s perfect predictor, or the inventor of a counterfeit murderer or midwestern neurophysiologist for purposes of entertainment. What is gained, we might ask, by being overly scrupulous? After all, sometimes the facts are simply impossible to obtain no matter how persnickety we are. We know, for example, that it’s very unlikely that any new information about Malagasy pirate societies will be unearthed in the foreseeable future. Can’t we just go with our gut and allow society to reap the benefits?

I don’t think so. It rather seems to me that the feeling of seasickness produced by a combination of an obstinate inability to discern the actual facts of some matter with a representation by an advocate (even one with whose societal goals we find congenial) is a warning that we should take seriously. It provides us with a good reason not to just go on. Well, what is my argument for this harsh position? How did what seemed to have been attitudes of innocent altruism suddenly turn into cases of culpable negligence? The answer is that times have changed dramatically since Beecher and Newcomb published the works for which they are now remembered—indeed, even since Coen may have reasoned that troubled viewers could just “look it up.” The fact is, we’re in a much more precarious world now than we were even a decade ago. Today, AI might be responsible for the design and composition of every person who can be seen cheering in a political advertisement (or beer commercial[6]), and ChatGPT may, in a single minute, have written every paper that some hapless English Literature professor is now dutifully grading. Rather than involving a quaint “Jurassic” description of the intent of an obscure (if even real!) Danish monarch to suppress a group of bashful artisans who are claimed to be capable of carving incredibly intricate pieces of controversial art onto cherry pits, the conspiracies now may concern the drinking of children’s blood by members of a large political party in the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza shop. While both indictments might harm the falsely accused, an incredibly wide distribution of nonsense is now so inexpensive, so easy, that the perils are unimaginably greater. No one is—or was ever—likely to bring a car full of weaponry to threaten the (real or imagined) former Danish King because of his allegedly severe treatment of a commune of (possible) artists.



It’s just different now. Many of us wake up each day to find our email inboxes filled with fantastic proclamations about the war Biden has secretly declared on China or a stunning proof of Trump’s murder of three of his former mistresses. We may even see something suggesting that Q believes we’ll all be enslaved by Venusian Democrats in precisely one month’s time. In today’s political and technological environment, there simply seems to be a newly born duty of increased diligence.

Does this mean we should now refuse the million-dollar box and laugh off any nutritional supplement not backed by a double-blind study? Not necessarily. The moral may be only that we need to be increasingly skeptical of assurances, and not just those regarding past winners of games like Newcomb’s or that are made by people supposedly cured by a newly hyped supplement. We need also to be generally wary of those making the most “wonderful” political promises and charges of “incredible” evildoing. Some of this work is easy and arguably has no real-world consequences. Consider “Do we really know that the chooser of the single box always got more money in the past? What’s the evidence for that wildly counterintuitive claim?” There’s no hard lifting there, and no one is likely to get angry at us for asking. But others are much trickier: “Who is funding the marketing for the drug or political prognosticator? Is there any reasonably impartial science that supports your allegation? Are there really no dangers associated with taking your word for this without evidence?” Of course, sometimes the matter at hand will be deeply vague and uncertain. There just may not be any sufficiently impartial experts who can be relied on to provide the authorship and degree of truthfulness of a particular history book or who really grasp what Republicans are currently thinking about abortion or how Democrats really feel about immigration. In such cases, it may be better to withhold our judgment completely rather than just go on—which would be to go off half-cocked.

In modern capitalistic democracies, every voter and every consumer is thought to be in a position of (at least a teensy bit of) power. That means that reliable information is essential if we aren’t going to make an even worse mess of the world than we have already. And as we have this morsel of power both to vote and purchase, there’s little doubt that if an interested person or group sees a way to alter our preferences through the use of wondrous untruths, they will try to do so. In a word, we need to understand that wonder is sublimely seductive, and the modern world makes it extremely easy to partake of items that are almost too amazing to be believed. So, in these CGI times, we should try to keep in mind that hard evidence and truth have deeper, longer-lasting value even than such glorious marvels as are most wondrous to behold.



[1] See, e.g., Zhou, Wei, et al, “The Influence of Expectancy Level and Personal Characteristics on Placebo Effects: Psychological Underpinnings” in Frontiers in Psychiatry (2019; 10:20).

[2] I understand that the 1974 Chainsaw Massacre also falsely claimed to be based on real crimes.

[3] Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995).

[4] Ideas and Opinions (1954).

[5] See, for example the reviews of books by Sophia Rosenfeld, Rick Hasen, and Lani Watson here: https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/.c/a-hornbook-of-democracy-book-reviews