by Robert DePaolo / May 17th, 2013
The word democracy can be said to be both sacred and irrelevant;
the former because it conjures up images of populist involvement, fair
play, anti-tyrannical politics and equality, the latter because it only
has meaning to the extent that the final, collective arbiter – the
people – are capable of self-governance. Democracy is not a whimsical
term, nor has it been a historical given. From the outset there was
considerable skepticism on whether the Great American experiment would
work. The French philosopher Voltaire believed such a populist system
could only be sustained in small enclaves, that with social expansion,
the alienation and sub-groupings resulting from geographically-driven
diversity in mores, habits and values would lead to chaos.
Even Thomas Jefferson seemed to have misgivings about the capacity of
America to endure. He too had misgivings about geographic, ethnic and
cultural expansion, which was rather ironic given his purchase of the
Louisiana Territory. In 1816 he discussed the concept of government
“purity” which he defined as the degree of closeness between politicians
and the people. His ideal – which he termed a “government of first
grade purity” was one in which citizens enjoyed direct and frequent
contact with their representatives, were well-informed about issues and
thus were able to influence the decisions of representatives
proactively. Realizing that America’s population would expand rapidly,
Jefferson came to accept that the USA would have to settle for a
government of “third grade purity,” whereby people would have to
substitute trust for information and proactive influence.
This was not a trivial matter to either Voltaire or Jefferson. Each
felt that democracy could only work if people were informed and
reasonable enough to themselves vote wisely. Since there was no
compulsory public education during the lives of either man, the odds on
an average citizen being able to read relevant material on policy would
have been quite low, even if made available.
The message both men were trying to convey – and one stated by John Adams
and others – was that democracy is a fragile thing, that reliance on
the masses to direct the functions of government can be a rather
tentative process. That, of course, is what led General Benjamin Lincoln
to opine that only landowners (with a heavy investment in governmental
revenues and policy) should be allowed to vote. It is what led to the
formation of the US Senate (an ostensibly enlightened body that would
insert higher reasoning skills into the process should the House and/or
the public wax foolish) and to formation of the Electoral College.
Arguably, the single most salient factor implied in their writings
was human nature. The question was (and remains) whether any democratic
state can sustain itself, given the vicissitudes, limitations and
influences on human behavior, cognition and emotion.
Criteria
That brings us to a discussion of the human elements needed to
sustain a democratic society. There are a number of ways to approach
this issue. One would be to focus on the need for a moral consensus
influential enough to regulate behavior and maintain a duty of due care;
i.e., fundamental feature of common law involving a broad societal
agreement to abstain from harming others by intent or neglect. Another
would espouse the importance of attaining a cultural frame of reference,
so that each generation would be able to view themselves in a
temporo-cultural context and come to know whether their society has
progressed, regressed, evolved, led to upward mobility etc. That would
include an awareness of the impact of events over time so people could
truly recognize the traumas and halcyon days that define national
experience. Finally, there would be some consideration of cultural
phenomena such as music, art, literature, political trends, athletics –
all those things cherished by the Ancient Greeks. Art would be
particularly important since it is proof of free expression, of an
informed, educated public with an aesthetic sense and it also
demonstrates that potentially destructive urges have been channeled into
pro-social outlets.
Science and Social Evolution
Absorbing all the above elements can be a daunting task, especially
as individual and family lives becomes so complex as to supplant
national concerns. Yet there is a way to address this issue. It is to be
found in a scientific maxim known as Information Theory.
With respect to its impact on social evolution, Information Theory
distinguishes between terms like “input,” “exposure,” and “media” and
actual information. The latter is defined as a reduction of uncertainty.
That means that some salient, distinctive code must emerge from a mass
of noise to be viewed as information. The amount of information is
measured in bits – each distinctive one representing a kind of code
teased out of a mass.
As an example; an answer to the question: Name the American president
who helped establish the League of Nations… would entail one bit of
information, since the only possible answer would be Woodrow Wilson. On
the other hand, the question: Name the president who attended an Ivy
League School, responded with force to a perceived military threat and
was a sports enthusiast would entail at least three bits — John Kennedy,
George Bush and Barack Obama.
Information Theory features several parameters. For instance, the
larger the initial mass of noise or input the greater the amount of
information attained with the emergence of a code or resolution because a
larger amount of noise (undistinguished elements) equals a larger
amount of uncertainty. With more initial uncertainty a greater reduction
in uncertainty will result from encoding. As another example; finding
your car in fifty space parking lot after a temporary memory lapse would
comprise less information that finding a needle in a haystack –
assuming the stack was a large one.
Human Nature and the Bit
The mind of a citizen operates according to Information Theory
principles and that has bearing on social evolution, particularly in a
democracy. For those minds to function optimally; i.e., according to the
reasonable person standard, requires certain conditions. The most
prominent being that the stimulus environment in the USA must lend
itself to clear resolutions, with respect to moral values, politics,
event impact, historical frame of reference and cultural itself.
The question then becomes: What conditions must exist for those
trends to prevail? First, resolutions must be specific and clear. From a
morass of inputs there must be the capacity to discerning readily what
is right vs. wrong, civil vs unacceptable, artistic vs offensive,
impactful vs. trivial. In other words a democratic society operates
through the prism of human cognition and will either evolve or devolve
in that context.
The Current Info-Climate
In a sense, it could be argued that he USA is heading in a
devolutionary path, not because of liberal or conservative thought or
due to Godlessness or fanatical religious adherence but because we might
have reached the point where the flow of information is too rapid,
voluminous and diverse to be encoded. It does not lend itself to
resolution, which leads to cognitive and emotional lassitude within the
populace. Such a condition could reach a point where young people
growing up in this environment could become functionally unaware of
what’s going on around them. In other words they might have a fleeting,
barebones-associative recognition of events but be unable to adequately
feel or interpret them.
Another aspect of information is also in play with regard to this
question. Like money, information, can incur inflation. The more
available it is, the less its value. As the amount of input increases,
not only in volume but in terms of new gadgets, sources and voices the
less meaningful it becomes until such time as a tendency toward societal
forgetfulness and/or accompanied by apathy occurs. Events that might
have impact, lead to personal growth, collective cultural memories, the
creation of moral standards and national pride become fleeting,
un-encoded and psychologically irrelevant and the citizen ends up with
no sense of generation, time or place. He lives, he dies, and no
signposts are available to mark the journey.
Conversely, a shortage of inputs makes those inputs more valuable,
more esthetically and emotionally attractive to observers, and
consequently more memorable. Ironically, a low level of input makes the
human animal hungrier for discovery and indeed more educable. In such
conditions, social mores, values, cultural staples of all kinds can more
readily guide and /or channel human behavior.
The media explosion seen in America and around the world today might
well be counterproductive with regard to the cognitive sustenance and
enlightenment of the people. This is not an argument for censorship of
specific ideas. It is a concern about the sheer volume of input on mind,
belief, actions and emotions. Child developmental theorist Jean Piaget
discovered that human cognitive growth requires the establishment of
stable schemes; fixed ideas in mind that are resilient enough to invoke
comparisons and reject or assimilate new inputs in terms of its prior
parameters (1973).
Psycho-physiologist D.E. Berlyne wrote similarly that cognitive
precursors to pleasure and creativity depend on fixed ideas with which
new inputs can be compared, reworked or eschewed.
,
A heavy and rapid input climate is somewhat antithetical to that
process, thus dampens cognition. Fleeting inputs disallow time to
process and consolidate values – one day a behavior pattern is viewed as
socially unacceptable, the next (having been supported by
celebrity-adherents) it becomes okay.
Through it all, ignorance and casuistry begin to infiltrate society.
The people get overloaded. They see and hear more but know and feel
less. They become increasingly more noise-distracted in their
understanding of the world around them. Young students process inputs
from various technological sources daily until such time as classroom
lessons become less centrally important; just one strand of hay in the
stack, indistinguishable from a plethora of meaningless signals arising
from amidst an epoch of info-lation. Predictably, boredom and mental
fatigue set in. as the young people take life on the fly. At that point
the question then becomes whether the reasonable, well-informed person
standard on which democracy hangs its hat is still reliable.
While at face value this might sound like nothing more than a
hackneyed critique of the youth culture by an oldster there is data to
support such musings. A study by the Kaiser Foundation showed that
American students spend an average of from 7-10 hours a day using
electronic devices,
that there was a high correlation between number of hours of use and poor grades in school.
If it were simply a case of more time being devoted to electronic
gadgets and less time to academics the solution might be simple – reduce
the time spent on the former. However, there is also the question of
input volume and its effect on the decision making capacities of the
citizenry. Inputs are not just a cognitive experience. They are
emotional as well. When input is fleeting, rapid, voluminous and uncoded
(i.e., low on societal impact due to its blend with myriad other
inputs) it changes the temperament, indeed the psyche of the nation.
Society and the Psyche
Beyond the notion that cognitive development requires the acquisition of stable, lasting schemes
,
is the Freudian description of ego and superego development.
Both require time and experiential constancy to consolidate. Lack of
such a stable info-climate could result in a generation of
introspectively deficient young people who lack the regulatory skills to
self-monitor, self-restrain, self-critique and self regulate. Lacking
such inner resources, they might become excessively dependent on outside
stimuli – needing “positive reinforcement’ to carry out even basic
responsibilities, becoming hyper-socialized to the point where talking,
texting, and hanging with friends take precedence over self-development,
initiative, creativity and achievement.
Is technology (more accurately technologically facilitated
input-volume), responsible for weight problems, apathy, poor academic
achievement and lack of chagrin arguably seen in many of today’s youth?
While some research tends to support those conclusions
other factors might be at work. However, there is a strong correlation
between the advent and proliferation of computer technology in American
society and a decline in academic performance, personal responsibility,
independence and initiative and such outcomes can and have been
precursors to social decline.
Unfortunately the solution is less clearly defined than the problem.
At face value the nation and its youth would benefit from less input.
They’d have time to ponder, dream and self-actualize. Yet the carrying
out of such a process seems unlikely given both entrenched
habits/addictions and the constitutional premise of free expression (an
extremely powerful combination). Parents could certainly limit time
spent on electronic gadgets but that wouldn’t solve the problem of
having innumerable TV cable stations, Internet news and entertainment
outlets and texting mini-technologies that not only dominate the psychic
landscape but also fuel the American economy.
It does seem evident that while all democratic societies must espouse
freedom of expression, it is virtually impossible to sustain a viable
nation without some level of indoctrination. In other words, there must
be a core of skills and ethical premises that are encoded, felt and
acted on by young and old. That includes taboos and the threat of that
old strand-by, social ostracism, in response to outrageous behavior.
At face value that might seem to argue for teaching religious values
in school. Obviously the constitutional tenet of separation of church
and state prohibits that. The fact that the teaching of religion is
prohibited in public schools would seem reasonable if not for the fact
that students are not taught about law or ethics either. As a result
moral values are not encoded in any sense, other than through families,
which themselves operate within the same input climate as their children
and the rest of society.
The constitutional framers developed a superb system of laws and a
process by which laws could be amended to solve future problems in
American society. Unfortunately the input glut now impinging on America
youth and the potentially dismal future that portends for the USA is a
problem that might turn out to be unsolvable in the final analysis.
MS Clinical Psychology, Practitioner in Neuro
psychology, Clinical and Educational fields. Former Prof of Psychology
NH University System, Author of several books and many articles,
president of Filmmaking company Media Milestones.
Read other articles by Robert.
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