Too Dumb for Democracy? by David Moscrop

Author:David Moscrop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2019-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

Speed

Let’s start with speed. The milieu of twenty-first-century Western democracies is marked by a pace of life never seen in human history. To a person born in, say, the twelfth century, life would have been slow, whether they noticed it or not. Nine hundred years ago, it took a long time to do just about everything. It took ages to travel long distances, to communicate with those not in our immediate vicinity, to build things.

As we accumulated technical and scientific knowledge, we applied our discoveries and inventions to life in a way that has speeded things up. Journeys that once took weeks or months now take hours. In the eighteenth century, it took more than six weeks — and often much longer — to cross the Atlantic from Europe to North America, if you managed to survive the journey. Today, a flight from London to New York takes about eight hours. Even in the nineteenth century, prior to the invention of telegraphy, a speedy message by Pony Express, a mail service, would take ten days to get from California to Missouri.1 In 2013, researchers in the United Kingdom created a fibre-optic network that could transmit near the speed of light — at 99.7 per cent the speed of light, in fact. That’s about 299,792,458 metres per second. At that speed, a message would be delivered between Los Angeles and Kansas City before you finished saying the P in Pony Express.

What is wrong with that? A few things. First, doing things faster means doing more things, which I will say more about in a moment when I talk about volume. The implication of “faster and more” is that we have less time to make any single decision. For some decisions, a lack of time isn’t a problem — “Is that a jaguar in the bushes? Who cares? Run!” or “Do we cook tonight or order in… Hello, Domino’s?” But when it comes to making political decisions, time is your friend because it takes time to collect information, to learn it, to reflect on it, and to decide on it.

Excessive speed encourages us to use heuristics — when you are expected to get something done quickly, take a shortcut — and to over rely on System 1’s quick-thinking strategies. As I said earlier, automatic, intuitive decision-making strategy works well sometimes. But when it does not work, which is often when faced with complex tasks, it really does not work. So being able to override System 1 and to think rationally, autonomously, and deliberately is important. When life is sped up beyond a certain point, however, that becomes especially difficult. The very nature of our brains is such that we are constantly making speed vs. accuracy trade-offs with a propensity to tilt towards making faster, easier decisions that rely more on heuristics and less on reason.

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