Today’s democracies were founded on a 17th-century vision of truth, which we might not survive. Three hundred years ago, the Age of Enlightenment championed the ideals of liberty, progress, tolerance, constitutional government, and the separation of church and state. These ideals gave birth to modern democracy and were rooted in a new and radical concept of truth.
This new way of thinking about truth is so embedded in our contemporary culture that we forget how radical it was and how central it is to the whole experiment. For most of human history, truth was unknowable and shrouded in mystery. It was only accessible to holy men who were selected for visions. People prayed, consulted oracles, and looked to the stars. Truth was fluid and changed with the will of the gods or bent to the rule of the mighty. Pharaohs could erase you from history. New gods would absorb the names of the old ones. Truth was as rare and precious a treasure, jealously guarded by alchemists, priests, and the powerful.
Enlightenment thinkers imagined a consistent, accessible truth. Truth that is available to everyone and universally applicable. You understand truth not through meditation or religious stories, but by observing the world around you. Everyone can be a rational person: observe facts and construct theories, hunt down observations, and solve contradictions. Only in a logical universe could science exist. Consistency means that the facts we observe demonstrate how the Universe works. By observing more facts, growing knowledge, science can model an objective truth.
For most of our collective past, societies told stories about warriors, holy men, damsels in distress, and clever tricksters. The heroes of the new Rational Age were scientists and detectives. Sherlock homes observed facts, and when he had eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must have been the truth. With science and observation available to all rational humans, it no longer made sense to believe that some individuals were ordained by God to rule over others. Each rational person had the right and obligation face truth and govern themselves accordingly. Man was now the rational animal!
This is the radical belief that spawned modern democracy. The founders of the Enlightenment did not believe that all men were rational. Rooted in old prejudices, democracy was limited to the landed gentry. Over the slow arc of time, Enlightenment’s ideals of progress and tolerance kept expanding our belief in universal suffrage. Public libraries and schools were established. Museums were created and opened to the masses. Through education, we believed we could create universal rational thought and expand democracy and voting to all people.
This might be the original hubris of the Enlightenment. Thinking like a scientist or detective might not be something that can be taught. We accept that people have natural aptitudes for music or art. We know that people cannot just learn away clinical depression or autism. Anyone can learn music theory, but the tone deaf will not adapt to music the same way people with perfect pitch can. Central to the Enlightenment’s philosophy is the notion that humans are rational animals, but the facts don’t seem to support this assertion.
In the voting public, some people buy lottery tickets, believe in conspiracy theories, and check their daily horoscopes. These are not scientists and detectives. They experience truth as an emotion or feeling. The same way a person with perfect pitch knows if a note sounds right. They cannot explain it. They just know. Some part of humanity knows when something sounds right. They can feel it in their gut when something is wrong. They are not using formal logic or statistical analysis. They are not assembling facts and hunting down inconsistencies. Indeed, a major trademark of emotional thinkers is that they are able to hold contradictory ideas as equally true. Centuries of education have not eradicated irrationality.
If anything, in the last three hundred years, the gap has widened. We live in an era of unprecedented access to scientific education and data. More information than ever before has been verified, indexed, and made accessible. It isn’t helping. Three hundred years ago, anyone could drop an apple and experience gravity. Individuals could observe the motions of the planets with their naked eyes. Today, science involves millions of experts sharing billions and billions (Hey, Mr. Sagan) of data points. To participate in science requires funding, time, and a grasp of complex theories.
Three hundred years ago, people were deciding things that they could directly experience. Today, we expect the voting public to understand how vaccines work, the risks of climate change, and how to best manage a pandemic. Voters are also faced with complex geopolitical questions, trade agreements, public welfare, and infrastructure policy. We are forced to rely on experts to advise and professional scientists and detectives to understand and expand our objective truth.
Perhaps rational thinking isn’t so much a skill as it is the way some people are wired. Likewise, maybe emotional thinking is just as hardwired. In the arrogance of scientists, we thought we could educate it away, make everyone think like us, see the world as a mechanistic system, and participate in rational governance. If our enlightened ideal of universal rationality is false, can we trust universal democracy?
The 21st century continues to demonstrate our failures to extend rational truth to all people. Instead of being guided by experts, our politics are being led by modern-day PT Barnums, fooling some of the people all of the time. Watching President Trump in action is a terrifying demonstration of how easily verifiable truth is swept away into the noise of a constant three-ring circus. The examples are too numerous, as he shifts from one claim to a counterclaim in the same rally. Trump’s genius is his understanding of emotional truth. For people who are not scientists or detectives, they experience an emotional feeling that something sounds right, or rings true. They don’t need to apply the rigors of science or weed out inconsistency. They have no problem feeling that it is true that Trump supports the military and also know that he dodged the draft, made fun of Sen. McCain for being a prisoner of war, and mocked families who had lost loved ones in the service of the military. It’s not that they don’t see the contradictions, but they don’t feel them.
Trump is not the start of this war on truth; a reality TV star president is just the next obvious step. Hitler’s propaganda enabled a genocide. Russia’s and China’s state-controlled media rewrite history as a way of invading countries and calling them liberation. In the US, corporations have eroded Americans’ trust in scientists and experts to discredit the truth about their negligence. How can we know if climate change is real? In destroying this trust, they opened a Pandora’s box to a nation of people who believe in a conspiracy of the deep state and #FakeMedia. Americans cannot be trusted to make rational decisions about a flat earth or vaccines. How could you trust the voting public with knowing who believes?
To save democracy, we need to achieve herd immunity against irrationality, or change who gets to vote on what. If the democracy of man as a rational animal fails, then we fall back to what? Machiavelli’s Princes? If we haven’t already. We will return to a time when truth was a fluid commodity, controlled by the powerful and not available to all who bothered to reason.