If it is the duty of Americans to know what their government is up to and how it is accomplishing it, then what of the members of the Democracy™ brand? The reporters, the pundits, the ex-politicians, the think tank heads, the casual opinion-givers and score-takers: surely their duty, their patriotic responsibility, is even greater. Titillation is a foundation of media, but it is not patriotic. Allowing a politician to mislead is the antithesis of patriotism. Allowing a political group to mislead, equally offensive. Allowing fellow media members to lie: unethical, perhaps. But more importantly, if those lies are about the substance of the issues that face the country, it is a sin against the nation. If our nation is to be a democracy, or even its more pragmatic cousin, the republic, than it is in fact the greatest sin, because to deny accurate knowledge to the population is the same as denying them a vote.
— Part 1
What is a
patriot?
I do not mean it as an idle question. It is the precise sort of question I tend to ask myself over and over again, during my more philosophical (that is to mean, more cynical; the two moods overlap far more often than not) moments, not because it seems a particularly hard question, but is a foundational one. One from which solutions to a hundred other political puzzles could fall from, as trivialities, based on that one question and response.
Whenever the political times are particularly bad, or just particularly ridiculous, I tend lose my appetite for the printed or spoken here and now, and instead drift off into more ethereal places. To put it another way; whenever something is truly, truly fouled up, whenever some actor on the political stage does something truly, bafflingly egregious, or whenever a member of the media asks pan crust or deep dish, or whenever a hundred smaller things just add up to be too much, and mean too little, the part of my head that is supposed to pay attention to such things rebels, and refuses to contemplate any of it further.
It is a question, simply, of losing a small bit of faith.
It is at those times that, backing away from the moment, I instead wonder how we all arrived there. And that is a dangerous question, for it can recurse endlessly. There is no destination to it. Ask yourself what government should do in one case, and the question becomes what government should do in the general case; ask yourself that, and you must ask yourself what government is, or is meant to be; ask yourself that, and you must quickly answer what common good might mean, or even society, or even tribe, and within only a few more recursions of the same sort you are back at the dawn of man, banging rocks together on a desolate hillside, with all of human philosophy and knowledge collapsed around you in small pieces.
This is the danger of meddling in deeper questions. A thousand brilliant minds may have come to conclusions, theorems and definitions long ago, and you may know some of their responses by rote, others in passing, or still others not a bit, but none of that matters much, once that small seed of doubt is planted. Once you have lost faith, and question that one motive, or that one theorem, then none before them are safe.
So each of us asks, to one extent or another, the same questions that the most famous of theorists, intellectuals, statesmen, artists or philosophers have asked before us, and answered more satisfactorily than we ourselves ever could. We do this for the simple reason that we are not them. We do it because true comprehension of the human condition is not transferred from person to person, only the rough outlines of it, banged out with our crude monkey paws or howled out with our crude monkey voices, but each of us self-contained in our thoughts, each of us born with brains similar enough to ask the same questions, but not similar enough to accept the same answers.
There you go, then: from patriot to monkey paws in the blink of an eye. That is what I mean about pondering the foundational questions. It is a wonderful Pandora's Box, glittering and irresistible. If I could stop time for a few hundred years, or simply be assured I would live that long, I would seek out every definition again, anew. Patriotism; government; democracy; representation; society; common good: trash every definition, wipe each word clean of all meaning, of all the baggage of these last few thousand years, and start over. What a joy that would be! What decadence! What supreme self-indulgence! Every man and woman, their own founding father; every bit of knowledge, self-learned, and self-completed!
We cannot, of course. But still... it bothers me. Every time I see a fool pretending to be a statesman, or a lie boldly told and left unchecked by the people whose sole duty would seem to be to prevent such things, I wonder where the fault lies, and which deeper layer of our assumptions did not or could not account for this, and whether we are all indeed thoroughly screwed by our own collective incompetencies.
The sole duty of any citizen towards any theoretical democracy in which they reside is to cast an informed vote. There are plenty of other civic and moral responsibilities, of course; do not litter, do not murder, do not burn down your own house or that of your neighbors—take your pick. But in terms of raw duty towards democracy, as abstract governmental construct, the singular task is to cast an informed vote. For a republic it is the same.
Note the operative adjective: an informed vote. An uninformed vote is random noise within the system: it will do nothing of value, but will do no harm, as it will be counterbalanced by other uninformed votes. If we truly count an ignorant vote as a random vote, after all, then the outcome of every "uninformed" election would be a near-tie, with the identity and margin of the winner determined only by random chance. The simplest elements of game theory will demonstrate that even if the vast majority of the votes in an election are uninformed, and therefore random, the outcome will be decided solely by the informed votes, which will break the theoretical tie and come to some theoretical decision (presuming, to be strict about it, that the number of informed votes is greater than the margin of random noise within the uninformed votes.)
This is the happy coincidence (or genius) of democracy; it could survive even in a population of the most lazy imbeciles, so long as there is some measurable fraction of citizens that takes their civic responsibilities seriously enough to inform themselves on the issues before the nation, and cast their votes accordingly.
The real-world bloody axe in our happy theoretical gears, however, is the presence of misinformation. A misinformed vote will bend the apparent will of the electorate just as well as an informed one, because it, too, is not random, and a vote based on misinformation is, in the voting booth, in fact indistinguishable from one based on true knowledge. While an uninformed vote is largely nullified by other uninformed votes, a misinformed vote has an aggregate direction: there is no natural counterweight, and the only imagined non-natural counterweight would be an exactly equal amount of misinformation pressing in the other direction.
That, however, is an impossibility. A theoretical base of random votes going in all possible directions is easily imagined, for it is a product of nature: a natural steady-state or level of statistical noise that is, by definition, "random". Misinformation, however, is a product of outside intervention, and there is no implicit equilibrium state that says the misinformation from one side will always exactly equal that of the other. It would happen only as fluke, not as rule.
Thus democracy itself can be corrupted, and with astonishing ease. The most theoretically resilient form of government, one that can stand firm against even widespread apathy or ignorance, one that will adapt according to the desires of its populace as natural function, one that explicitly inoculates itself from dictatorship or tyranny, can nonetheless be blown to and fro like a blade of tall grass by something as simple as a lie. If a lie can successfully bend the will of some small set of the population, then a liar can successfully bend the very laws of that nation, and for their own benefit.
I note all of that because the percentages matter. If knowledgeable votes outnumber misinformed votes, the informed votes will win. If there are more misinformed votes than knowledgeable votes, then the misinformed votes (presuming all misinformed votes go the same direction) will carry the day. Misinformation, then, has power in a democracy just as it does within despotism: it provides a means of manipulating the population into supporting what the despot, or the liar, wishes them to support.
Again, it is a free press—or rather, the free dissemination of information, as opposed to the withholding or manipulation of that information—that makes the difference in each case.
We often celebrate the resilience of democracy. It is far less often that we contemplate the fragility; it is a far more morbid question. To contemplate the fragility of democracy is to admit a certain mortality to it. There are things that can hurt it; there are things that can kill it.
What, then, is a patriot? Placing such a question in the context of Democracy™, the mechanism of the connection between population and government that we defined earlier, what would a patriot look like, in such a thing as that? What would a patriot do? What is the minimal duty, and what is the higher expectation?
I think this is an answerable question, or at least one we could nibble at. We have placed information itself as the primary requirement of a true democracy, and we know that misinformation represents a direct injury to it. From that, the foundational answers would seem to write themselves.
What it would look like in practice, however—how to translate disapprobation against public lies into the imperfect mechanism of Democracy™, when it seems to have lost its capability for outrage at such things—is still a more difficult question.
To be continued.