Equality by lot

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the attitudes that underlie support for elections and lack of support for or outright rejection of sortition. My main point was that the arguments that are often provided for elections and against sortition should not be taken as being the causes of the positions they purport to justify but rather as rationalizations of those positions. The positions themselves are due to underlying pre-existing attitudes that are usually unacknowledged. Unlike the arguments, which are easily debunked, the attitudes are coherent and rational and provide real and reasonable causes for the observed behavior – a positive view of elections (as an ideal rather than in its actually existing manifestations) and an apathetic or negative view of sortition.

In the post I argued that the most common pro-elections and anti-sortition attitude is “conservatism or mental inertia”. I gave two justifications for this attitude. First, electoralism is the status quo and any radical change involves risk, which people wish to avoid. Second, “becoming a supporter of a fundamental political change involves the adoption of a new radical mindset which is never easy”.

Reading Emmanuel Todd’s 2017 book Où en sommes-nous ? [Where are we now?], I came across the notion of the “memory of places [mémoire des lieux]”. This is the notion that societies maintain certain ideas and habits which are quite persistent despite various changes which these societies undergo. This was reminiscent of “conservatism or mental inertia” and therefore sent me back to look at the post. I soon realized that the “attitude” of “conservatism or mental inertia” is actually rather transparently two separate attitudes, “conservatism” and “mental inertia”, which are quite distinct and quite clearly correspond to the two different justifications provided. Conservatism is clearly associated with the perceived risk which radical change involves, while mental inertia is clearly associated with the effort involved in “the adoption of a new radical mindset”.

Of the two attitudes, it is seems obvious that conservatism is the less important one and it is mental inertia, the “memory of places”, that is the attitude which is by far the most significant obstacle to the emergence of sortition as a viable competitor to elections. While conservatism, as well as another attitude, elitism, do play, or potentially could play, some non-negligible role in maintaining the status quo, these only enter into play once a rational evaluation of the situation is engaged in. Such engagement can only be made once a challenge to the default dominant mindset is acknowledged. Mental inertia is an obstacle to such an acknowledgement and is therefore a barrier that needs to be removed before any other obstacles are tackled.

Beyond pointing out the existence of the memory of places, Todd offers a mechanism which explains this memory. Todd claims that the fact that memories persists despite waves of immigration into the area where they exist indicates that the memory cannot be due to a strong mental attachment of individuals to the ideas being remembered. If this were the case then the immigrants would not be able to easily absorb the dominant ideas in their destinations. Rather, the attachment at the individual level to the ideas is rather weak, and the ideas persist because they are constantly being reinforced in the daily interactions within the group. Indeed, in some cases one can be convinced in the span of a conversation that a certain idea is false or problematic, while one continues to implicitly adhere to that idea in one’s thinking and with any notion of falsity of or of a problem with the idea soon dissipating. Thus, it is the mere fact that the idea is dominant that preserves its dominance.

It seems to me quite likely that this is exactly the situation with electoralism. The notion that elections are the democratic mechanism to select decision makers is conventional, and while it is easily refutable it persists due to the fact that it is constantly reinforced in our society by the social contacts between individuals and with institutions and the media.

Two points emerge from Todd’s analysis. First, it is not “the effort of adopting a new radical mindset” that is the obstacle to this mindset becoming accepted, but rather the effort of maintaining the radical mindset while immersed in a society where such a mindset is foreign. Having to constantly resist (even if only in one’s own mind) the identification of elections with democracy requires much effort and thus not merely a willingness to doubt this identification but rather a strong commitment to its opposite. Such a strong commitment to an abstract idea, an idea without any practical implications or applications in one’s personal life, is an atypical personal characteristic.

Second, following from the first, a transition from a situation where an idea is foreign to a situation where the idea is commonplace can be expected to be abrupt rather than gradual. As long as an idea is held by a minority of the population the size of the minority tends to diminish (unless the minority is organized in a self-sustaining social structure). Thus a gradual change in the public’s mindset is unlikely and change, if it comes at all, is likely to occur due to a sudden event or to an orchestrated campaign which expose large sections of the pouplation to the idea over a short period so that the reversion to the norm does not have time to counteract this exposure before it becomes itself normalized.

Filed under: Books, Elections, Sortition |