| October 3, 2004 | Music | Recipe Calendar | Archives |
I never used to understand why people were supposed to avoid talking about politics and religion. I could understand that religion couldn't much be talked about because it has a major non-rational component. But politics, I thought, was about evidence and results, reason and common sense. And on the local level it seems to be so. On the local level you know people not parties. Party affiliation is not such a big thing locally. We work hard on various town projects along side Republicans, Indendents and Greens, and most often I don't know how they vote nationally. Two years ago when John Piotti ran for the state legislature as a Democrat, almost all the Republicans in town voted for him, and would again.
Party counts a bit more in governor's races, but it's still more the person. When we get to the national level, everything changes, and presidential politics becomes much more like religion. Maybe it's the distance. Like celebrity gods, the national candidates are like characters in a play, and we build little myths around them, and let them stand for all sorts of abstract things. Maybe a presidential election should be more like electing a town manager. This leads me to work on my theory of meta-political thinking. Just like with religion, if honest people of good will can look at the world and come up with conclusions that seem inescapably true, and if these conclusions differ markedly from those of other honest people of good will, then this conclusion-making activity must be relatively superficial and there must be something deeper and more important in humans that is the real basis for how they act in the world. In this light, the instinct not to discuss national politics or religion can be seen as ignoring the superficial in favor of the fundemental. Another way of looking at conclusion making at election time is that maybe it's Surowiecki's wisdom of crowds at work: If four basic conditions are met, a crowd's "collective intelligence" will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don't know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. "Wise crowds" need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people's errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single expert had been in charge.I can only hope that I and all the other ants are moving the ant hill in the right direction. |