Long Live the Philosopher King!

The Democratization of Expertise

2009 July 02, Rahmat 08, 166 BE

Precis: Popular, general elections are only a first step to democracy. In future every government will surely be moderated by a UCS, a partnership between politicians chosen by a general election and experts chosen by their peers to consult with them in view of the consensus of scientific and religious opinion, and to carry out the resulting plans. Their own de-centralized justice, enforced by constant peer review, will assure that power will never corrupt the learned, as it has every centralized human institution in the past.

Over the past week we have discussed on the Badi' blog the empowerment that would be released by the establishment of permanent peace. Nothing less than the evolution of the natural world and human nature, Kant predicted, must eventually bring together east and west, north and south in a constitutional world government. The perpetual peace that this body enacts and protects would enable a universal polity that Kant called a "universal cosmopolitan condition." He envisioned this condition arising from a series of "reformative revolutions" consummating in a Universal Civic Society, or UCS. Like every social benefit, the UCS will be the outcome of improved education.

Schooling for a UCS will de-emphasize individual competition, tests, examinations and sorting the wheat from the chaff while emphasizing the ability to work creatively in a group; the curriculum will operate under the twin principles of irreducibility and subsidiarity, meaning that half a student's time is spent learning a trade (subsidiarity, learning what is close to hand for practical independence) and the other half gaining a liberal education, that is, learning whatever should be common knowledge for all world citizens (irreducibility: a cosmopolitan cannot be reduced to anything less than a master of universal learning).

We have discussed the introduction at an early point in this training of a full vote for children, as soon as they prove themselves to be serious apprentices of a given area of expertise. From their first day, primary pupils would prepare for their plunge into democracy by practicing peer review and meta-review along with group study projects teaching not only how to consult and learn in a group, cooperatively, but also how to teach group members while doing so.

Lacking such training, we now allow token, sporadic voting in politics (which is a sham because the numbers are too large for direct personal knowledge by electors) but the workplace, the trades and professions, education, law, corporations, families and neighborhoods are all more or less bereft of democracy. The result is that in politics we confuse populism with democracy. We set the mass of the people against the learned, and vice versa. Experts do not vote for one another, in spite of the fact that they, more than any other group except perhaps the family, have intimate and extended face-to-face contact with one another on a daily level. This extended contact is surely the first pre-requisite for pure democratic choice.

Ignorance of how to integrate on-the-spot peer review into group projects banishes experts from taking their rightful claim to primacy in the decision making process, especially in technical matters and in planning social reform.

The reason is clear.

The powers that be are very reluctant to encourage democratized expertise either in education or the workplace because this increased legitimacy of expert opinion would make it impossible to corrupt the decision making process. The privileged now manipulate policy by seeing to it that the only way for a politician to be nominated for democratic choice is to become beholden to lobbies and vested interests. The people are forced to take a gun to their own head and sell themselves to the highest bidder.

With firm guidance from a democratically chosen body of the learned, it is certain that other, more effective forms of democracy and capitalism would soon prevail. Bodies of experts would not only have the latest consensus of opinion of their fields of study on their side but they could also claim to be elected by their peers in a free and open elective process.

The best recent proof of how experts can intervene effectively and how they might operate in future is the U.N.'s panel of scientists (the IPCC, International Panel on Climate Change) studying the current statistical consensus on climate change. In spite of the fact that this body of experts has no direct political power and cannot do more than make recommendations, the IPCC has had spectacular success in grabbing the attention of policymakers everywhere (though most would argue that even this is still not enough). The IPCC's members are not elected by their peers, they are appointed under the oversight of a U.N. committee, and the U.N. itself is not a non-democratic body. Nonetheless the increasingly dire danger that they are studying has jettisoned them to an influence over the past five years that is unprecedented in the history of science.

The inexorable advance of global warming demands a quick and complete response. The problem demands radical change on every level of society, from individual behaviour (to point at just one example, the inefficiency and greenhouse gasses produced by meat production calls for a rapid increase in the numbers of vegetarians) to home construction (the wastefulness of buildings and neighbourhood design are major contributors to warming), to the way we travel (as George Monbiot points out, we should seriously consider grounding jet airplanes until we can figure out how to keep them from polluting the atmosphere at its most sensitive location).

As Kant said, both nature and human nature impel us to a single conclusion. Before we take a step to halt climate change we need to work out a happy combination of meritocracy with democracy by increasing the power and influence of experts at every level, and by making their education and daily operations as close as possible to the democratic ideal.

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