Joshua Paschal

It is the basic responsibility of those vested with political power of any kind to care about reasons. This is not just to say one must strive to “win” the argument: one must understand the honest form of the disagreement at hand. I want to discuss today how individuals often fail to meet even their own minimum responsibilities in this regard.

I believe one’s political responsibilities increase as one’s position in politics increase. Thus, the ordinary voter has little responsibilities relatively to politicians: but the ordinary voter does have responsibilities nonetheless.

I recently wrote about how democracies that fall into populism can slip out of democracy altogether in favor of crude authoritarianism. This relates to the role of reason and why reason–both private and public–is central to the maintenance of democracies.

Private reason (individuals being rational about their politics) deters the power of a populist sweeping of public interests. This is precisely why demagogues of all times undermine public education by cutting public education funding, pushing “school choice”, or demonizing higher education. Authoritarianism targets intellectuals, particularly public intellectuals, because intellectuals compel individuals to use their reason by challenging it. And so, authoritarian moments are often paralleled by banning of certain aspects of curricula. We see this in Hungary’s ban on gender studies, the American disparaging of critical race studies, or press freedom as a topic being banned in China, and these examples should be considered authoritative (pardon the pun).

Authoritarians are, often, disparage the humanities in favor of a false commitment to technocracy. We see this shift in educational approach in, for example, India, China, and parts of the Islamic world like Iran and the UAE. While the idea of technocracy is a different matter, the point here is that the reorientation toward STEM is usually not about technocracy in this regard. STEM becomes favored not because STEM is more valuable–it becomes more favored in authoritarian swings because the humanities teach critique, interpretation, and understanding of rhetoric. If it was merely about STEM, one would simply promote those majors by investment: it is the additional move of undermining the value of the other subjects (not just as majors but as classes at all) that is so deeply concerning. A tyranny of engineers is a tyranny nonetheless.

Public reason is also vital. The main way public reason manifests itself is in the procedures of government and elections. Maneuvers that undermine debates of any kind are deeply problematic, as civil debate is one of the main vehicles of public reason, or at least public reasonableness. Whether this is making a mockery of how a debate is undergone, rejecting doing debates at all, or forcibly denying fair participants from their right to engage in such debate: it all reduces down to an undermining of the public’s capacity to collectively reason. It matters very little if the debates are for the sake of an election or part of a practice of a legislative body–discussions must be had in order for public reason to play its proper role. Foolishness becomes mistaken for politics. Rhetoric becomes more about posturing than about real disagreement.

Demagogues don’t debate: at best they mock and disparage, worse yet they beat and imprison, and at worst they kill their opponents. Democracy dies when people begin to cheer for such.