Testing the health of the public sphere.
History occasionally tosses us test cases for the public sphere. One that I’ve written about elsewhere is the US debate over slavery. Because slavery was so much a part of the fabric of everyday life, and because the western religious and political tradition as institutionalized in the US at its national birth seems in retrospect so unequivocal, if there had been a healthy public sphere in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, it would have produced consensus on the abolition of slavery and on racial equality. People had ready access to information; they expressed values that should have guided their consideration; and they enjoyed access to plenty of public media. They should have made their state and federal governments get rid of slavery.
Of course, nothing like that happened. If there was a consensus among white citizens, it was in support of racial supremacy. All of the proslavery whites and a large percentage (I’d argue a super majority) of the antislavery whites believed in black inferiority. A large chunk of the freesoil movement was frankly racist, and didn’t want western territories polluted by black slavery. And even with a large majority of the citizenry at least passively opposed to slavery, there was absolutely no prospect that it would be abolished by political means. Abraham Lincoln, elected by a mere 37% of the popular vote, did not even call for abolition, and moved slowly to embrace it, even during the Civil War itself.
What made public discourse fail in the case of slavery? The party system. It's as simple as that. DeTocqueville pointed this out. Because both parties angled for majority support, and because neither major party believed that embracing abolition would win it more support than it would lose, both parties wanted to silence the abolitionists in their own ranks. Sometimes they did this by convincing them that agitation would be inopportune; at other times they raised mobs. When the Republican party succeeded the Whig party, this calculus changed a bit, but still a hard line was drawn well short of embracing the annihilation of slavery.
So the US public sphere before the Civil War failed its big test. This was the one that really counted--whether the public sphere could handle a debate on the tariff was relatively unimportant. We're still trying to wash the blood off our hands.
What are the test cases of our own day? The two that jump out at me are the environment and health care. Both have the same large moral stakes that the slavery debate held. In both cases ordinary people encounter plenty of information in their everyday lives to make up their own minds. There is more public support for environmental action and health care reform than there ever was for abolition. But in both areas there isn't much action. Why?
Vested interests--that's the obvious explanation. On both the environment and health care major industries have spent a lot of money in seducing public opinion and lobbying legislators. But is that a sufficient explanation?
Culture explains a lot, though I won't try to be too precise now about what culture means. Take the culture of the automobile, for instance: the reason why US Americans drive so much has to have something to do with a kind of irrational pleasure they derive from it. It's certainly not efficient. Many of us take on car payments as big as mortgage payments--not including the cost of insurance, gas, and upkeep. And we'll spend a lot of time sitting in our cars getting fat. Rationally, we should all prefer public transportation. But we won't take the bus, and therefore our bus service is generally lousy.
Culture (again, not being precise) can also make some things invisible while heightening the visibility of others. In the US, this is easily seen in the ideology of freedom of choice. It is assumed that freedom consists in having choices, and that whatever choices people make will be free choices. So people choose to have crappy public transportation because they don't take the bus, and people choose to have crappy television because they watch Fox instead of PBS, and so forth. But does any individual really choose the system of transportation, or the media system? Would any rational individual choose the systems in the US today? People feel free as they make their choices from moment to moment, but they certainlydo not feel free when they think about the world they live in and what they can do to change it. Instead they feel completely helpless.
Health care reform is a good example of this. In the US, almost any proposal for large scale reform will have to overcome tremendous resistance, because people don't believe that they are capable of achieving meaningful change through the political system. Their very disbelief makes them right.
When the Pres-o-dent made energy and health care cornerstones of his State of the Younyun address the other night, he placed a bet against the health of the public sphere. He bet that people would take his small bore proposals as, well, the best that you can hope for, and not rise up and demand change. He and his advisers have been right so far when they've bet against the public sphere, though they've been wrong about virtually everything else.
The media have a special role to play in promoting and supporting a healthy public sphere. The media are not themselves the public sphere, although they pretend that that's the case. Professional journalism especially. But more on this another time. Would things be different if they were doing their jobs better?
History occasionally tosses us test cases for the public sphere. One that I’ve written about elsewhere is the US debate over slavery. Because slavery was so much a part of the fabric of everyday life, and because the western religious and political tradition as institutionalized in the US at its national birth seems in retrospect so unequivocal, if there had been a healthy public sphere in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, it would have produced consensus on the abolition of slavery and on racial equality. People had ready access to information; they expressed values that should have guided their consideration; and they enjoyed access to plenty of public media. They should have made their state and federal governments get rid of slavery.
Of course, nothing like that happened. If there was a consensus among white citizens, it was in support of racial supremacy. All of the proslavery whites and a large percentage (I’d argue a super majority) of the antislavery whites believed in black inferiority. A large chunk of the freesoil movement was frankly racist, and didn’t want western territories polluted by black slavery. And even with a large majority of the citizenry at least passively opposed to slavery, there was absolutely no prospect that it would be abolished by political means. Abraham Lincoln, elected by a mere 37% of the popular vote, did not even call for abolition, and moved slowly to embrace it, even during the Civil War itself.
What made public discourse fail in the case of slavery? The party system. It's as simple as that. DeTocqueville pointed this out. Because both parties angled for majority support, and because neither major party believed that embracing abolition would win it more support than it would lose, both parties wanted to silence the abolitionists in their own ranks. Sometimes they did this by convincing them that agitation would be inopportune; at other times they raised mobs. When the Republican party succeeded the Whig party, this calculus changed a bit, but still a hard line was drawn well short of embracing the annihilation of slavery.
So the US public sphere before the Civil War failed its big test. This was the one that really counted--whether the public sphere could handle a debate on the tariff was relatively unimportant. We're still trying to wash the blood off our hands.
What are the test cases of our own day? The two that jump out at me are the environment and health care. Both have the same large moral stakes that the slavery debate held. In both cases ordinary people encounter plenty of information in their everyday lives to make up their own minds. There is more public support for environmental action and health care reform than there ever was for abolition. But in both areas there isn't much action. Why?
Vested interests--that's the obvious explanation. On both the environment and health care major industries have spent a lot of money in seducing public opinion and lobbying legislators. But is that a sufficient explanation?
Culture explains a lot, though I won't try to be too precise now about what culture means. Take the culture of the automobile, for instance: the reason why US Americans drive so much has to have something to do with a kind of irrational pleasure they derive from it. It's certainly not efficient. Many of us take on car payments as big as mortgage payments--not including the cost of insurance, gas, and upkeep. And we'll spend a lot of time sitting in our cars getting fat. Rationally, we should all prefer public transportation. But we won't take the bus, and therefore our bus service is generally lousy.
Culture (again, not being precise) can also make some things invisible while heightening the visibility of others. In the US, this is easily seen in the ideology of freedom of choice. It is assumed that freedom consists in having choices, and that whatever choices people make will be free choices. So people choose to have crappy public transportation because they don't take the bus, and people choose to have crappy television because they watch Fox instead of PBS, and so forth. But does any individual really choose the system of transportation, or the media system? Would any rational individual choose the systems in the US today? People feel free as they make their choices from moment to moment, but they certainlydo not feel free when they think about the world they live in and what they can do to change it. Instead they feel completely helpless.
Health care reform is a good example of this. In the US, almost any proposal for large scale reform will have to overcome tremendous resistance, because people don't believe that they are capable of achieving meaningful change through the political system. Their very disbelief makes them right.
When the Pres-o-dent made energy and health care cornerstones of his State of the Younyun address the other night, he placed a bet against the health of the public sphere. He bet that people would take his small bore proposals as, well, the best that you can hope for, and not rise up and demand change. He and his advisers have been right so far when they've bet against the public sphere, though they've been wrong about virtually everything else.
The media have a special role to play in promoting and supporting a healthy public sphere. The media are not themselves the public sphere, although they pretend that that's the case. Professional journalism especially. But more on this another time. Would things be different if they were doing their jobs better?
posted by jnerone at 1:17 PM
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