Guest Blog: Irrational Publics and the Fate of Democracy by Stephen J.A. Ward

Irrational Publics and the Fate of Democracy by Stephen J.A. Ward is a deep and engaging explanation of how evolution and extreme historical events can cause publics to become irrational, intolerant, and anti-democratic, from one of the most influential media ethics writers globally.

In his guest blog below, Ward gives us an introduction to his book and offers some hope for the future.

Irrational Publics and the Fate of Democracy is about the manifestations of ‘irrational publics,’ that is, group extremism in history. Why did it occur? Why has it revived in our era? My book has four parts: an introduction on being rational and irrational, examples of irrational social groups from antiquity to today, an evolutionary explanation of what triggers extreme traits, and reflections on what we might do about it.

By ‘publics’ I mean the publics of nations and the sub-publics within it. Loosely defined, a public is a group with shared interests having some impact on public life. Irrational publics, or social irrationality, has produced the greatest immoral actions of mankind, from crazed medieval crusaders to the Jewish Holocaust. By an irrational group, I am referring to group behavior caused by extreme mental traits, and reality-averse beliefs. The traits and behavior are so extreme that they can be called irrational.

In my book I argue that irrational groups exhibit one or more of seven characteristics:

1. Irrationality in attitude; extreme mental traits from hyper-aggression and love of violence, to extreme hatred of others.
2. Irrationality in what is believed; beliefs that are false to facts and reality such as racist profiles, apocalyptic theories, and strange conspiracies.
3. Irrationality in how beliefs are formed and maintained; believing what suits one’s biases, with alack of fact or logic, and a refusal to question one’s beliefs.
4. A capacity to be manipulated; susceptibility to demagogues and ideologies using emotional rhetoric that targets fears and prejudices. There is what I call the erotic absolute: the need for simple, absolute answers and strict social order, and the pleasure in submission to an absolute leader.
5. Extreme patriotism; the narrowing of who is ‘one of us’ –a real Canadian or a true patriot, usually attributed to perceived minority of superior citizens.
6. A hatred of pluralism; an insistence on one religion and one morality, on sameness, not difference.
7. The other as ‘my enemy.’ Extremists often display what I call the ‘enemy stance’ toward the world; they view the person – or group – in a narcissistic or paranoid manner, on hyper-alert against threats. The enemy mind is like the periscope of a submarine emerging from the water in enemy territory, scanning for trouble or targets. Media, events, and demagogues trigger action against a presumed enemy. For example, over the summer, racist violence erupted across Britain after a false report that an immigrant had stabbed of a number of children in Southport. Such a report would not have had an impact unless there were people with an enemy stance towards immigrants and Muslims.

This irrational extremism has happened repeatedly over history from the crusades, the burning of heretics, Stalin’s purges, and the cultural purifications of Mao and Pol Pot to the colonialization of aboriginal people and the Holocaust.

My book’s main thesis is that what is happening today among publics is at least partially explained by our past as a species. From evolution, we inherited an ambivalent human nature that can be good or bad. Thus, we can be the nicest or the nastiest of creatures. It is an irony that in an age of supercomputers, of AI, of universities and public education, that so many of us are still moved by impulses millions of years old, and we use sophisticated media to ignite the most primitive part of ourselves. We seem to be entering into an irrational global era which threatens democracy, human rights, humane societies, and the future of our species.

My attraction to this topic goes back to my war reporting. In the field, I saw social irrationality erupt in front of me as I covered ethnic cleansing in the Balkans or violent religious bigotry in Northern Ireland. I watched what seemed to be cosmopolitan groups in Sarajevo seek to bomb each other into oblivion. Against such powerful dark forces, ethics seems a petty thing, an illusion of the weak, as Socrates is told at the start of the Republic. For a time, this experience created a dark place in my soul. I thought of humans as essentially evil, below their smiles. I became a moral globalist because I had seen the common humanity of suffering peoples. But I still wondered: why did this happen?

My topic is as old as Western culture. It is summed up in a line from Shakespeare’s King Lear. When the king is besieged by cruel daughters and their sycophants, Lear asks: “ Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” Today, we have sufficient knowledge of human evolution, social psychology, and culture to go beyond Shakespeare’s question. We can  suggest some tentative answers or pose some interesting hypotheses.

Morals and History

My approach in this book is a philosophical attempt to understand the phenomenon of irrational publics from an evolutionary and a historical perspective. My philosophizing about the past is rooted in the natural and social sciences, and the humanities.

The key epoch starts about 300,000 years ago when our ancestors were nomadic hunter-gatherers living in small bands in the Ice Age. It ends when Homo sapiens settle in agricultural communities and develop the first civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt and elsewhere. Recorded history begins. It was during these distant, difficult times when the human line of descent developed mental adaptations that increased fitness. The most important adaptations were the simultaneous development of what evolutionists call our Darwinian traits such as self-assertion, dominance, and power-seeking for individual survival and benefit, and our soft social traits of empathy, cooperation and loyalty for group survival and benefit. The history of early society is how these two types of traits defined the human bands, and how the traits reached an unsteady peace. The result was an ambivalent human nature that can be nasty or nice. We also inherited the capacity to manifest these traits in extreme form: self-assertion becomes hyper-aggression,  dominance becomes tyranny, loyalty become tribalism. It is in these extreme forms that our traits today are dangerous.

We have inherited the legacies of early morality and society. One legacy is the enduring parochialism of humans. All of the early moralities were parochial. Across human prehistory, the circle of moral concern enlarged from kin to partner to our group as a whole. But then the human mind seemed to hit a limit. To this day, humans struggle to care equally about strangers or non-group individuals. Another legacy is a tendency towards authoritarianism and absolutism.

What to do?

Given this narrative, how do we promote the better angels of our nature? It is difficult to change human nature, but we can alter our social life so that our cooperative traits are triggered. The issue boils down to the design of society. Can we design social, educative, and media spaces that trigger cooperation rather than aggression, knowledge rather than ignorance stoked by demagogues? Can we make our good traits and their triggers align?

One place to start is the local level. Ask yourself, how do we encounter people different from ourselves in daily life? How diverse are the sports teams we play on? How often do children and students get a chance to play with and learn from a broad spectrum of peoples? At the global level, we need cross-border dialogue among plural cultures and we need to create more opportunities for young people to travel to other nations. They need to soak in other ways of living. Also, I place a lot of stress on experiencing values, not just preaching them. To value humanitarianism, you need to know people who struggle to have their basic rights recognized, or have had the door slammed in their face because of discrimination. Democratic institutions only have vitality if the values they embody are first in our heart. Democratic communities are committed to respectful disagreement, and rational belief formation. Compromise is not a dirty word. In a plural world, the only sane future is dialogue and accommodation.

Finally, how might media create rational publics? Newsrooms should create policies on how to cover extremists and demagogues, so journalists are not passive amplifiers of misinformation or hate speech. Beyond this, there are four big things to do. The first is that journalism ethics needs to ‘go global’ in defining its aims and principles. The long-standing parochial approach where the journalist’s first loyalty to is to race, region, or nation is maladaptive in a global world. Our first duty is to protect humanity in a time of peril.

The second is that journalism should support a collective resistance to the communicative violence online –violent words against minorities and violence against evidence, facts, and legitimate expertise. News agencies, institutions, and centers for democracy should collaborate on ways to identify misinformation and hate speech and to make such analysis accessible to the public. The third is to embed media ethics deeply into our education systems so that students learn about the media they use, where information comes from, and the techniques of deception and misinformation. The fourth is to improve the education of journalists and media practitioners. Students need to know more about the world and its global cultures and traditions upon which they will report. Also of importance is the teaching of critical thinking and the dubious techniques of public persuasion. Global journalism needs cultural knowledge. We need to educate, not only train, journalists.

I think humanity can make progress. We are not without resources. We are not slaves to our extreme traits. We have our rationality. We are capable of cooperation, even benevolence. We have education, humanistic teaching, and the arts. In a world that regularly insults the dignity of the person, we should confront irrational publics lest ‘the humane’ disappear from the earth.

Stephen J.A. Ward is professor emeritus and Distinguished Lecturer in Ethics at the University of British Columbia and award-winning author and editor of 13 books on ethics and media ethics, including Objectively Engaged Journalism: An Ethic.