What are the main ingredients of a democratic culture?

On August 25th, I’ll be giving a workshop and lecture in Greifswald. At the EUDEC conference in Freiburg, my host and I grabbed two plastic chairs and sat down in a sunny spot for a short interview, some of which is now on the fine poster ad you see here; at one point he asked me a question I haven’t heard too often: what are the main characteristics of individuals who are part of a “democratic culture”?

A democratic culture, as I understand it, is a kind of culture that develops within a group that makes decisions democratically; democratic culture makes democracy more than just a decision-making process – instead it becomes a way of life, something you notice in all kinds of interactions between people.

I came up with four main points:

• Communication at eye level (as opposed to talking up or down to someone) – regardless of age
• Respect  for all other individuals
• Willingness to listen, even when confronted with a view you disagree with
• Willingness to reflect  on one’s actions, recognize mistakes, and learn from them

To me, these are the things that people have to have in order to keep a truly democratic culture alive.

Without equal communication, respect, and willingness to listen, the discussions that are the bread and butter of democracy are impossible. Without a willingness to reflect, they’re pointless.

What do you think are the most important ingredients of democratic culture? Leave a short comment below!

Human beings are obsessed with knowledge. We instinctively believe there are facts about the world which are true, which can be known, and which explain our experience of reality. But real knowledge – thoughts about reality which are true – is incredibly elusive. Human beings aren’t very good at dealing with this.

This post is quite a long and mainly philosophical one, and part of a thought in progress.

I Intuitive knowledge

The earliest forms of knowledge, it’s safe to assume, were the result of intuitive mental “theory-building” combined with instinct. We experience things and intuitively create “theories” to explain them. When we experience something that clearly contradicts our theory so far, we either amend the theory to fit the new information, or (more often) ignore what we experienced and try to forget it as soon as we can.

We do all of this automatically, without any conscious decisions taking place.¹

This intuitive knowledge is generally very useful for dealing with things that don’t change too quickly, but it is extremely rigid and doesn’t easily adapt to new situations.

It’s also strongly influenced by other forms of knowledge, which I imagine developed later in human (pre-)history.

II Introspective knowledge

The next form of knowledge might have been the result of conscious introspection: you experience something new, and it clashes so terrifically with what you know about the world that you find yourself trying to consciously figure out how to explain it.

This gives you more flexibility: you can employ the human knack for metaphor (“this thing is kind of like that other thing”) and create thoughts that are more complex and abstract. Unlike intuitive knowledge, it involves our conscious thought and we can make conscious decisions about what to believe.

Unlike intuitive knowledge, introspective knowledge is free from the restrictions of direct experience. This enables us to reach better, more general explanations, but also means a lot of our “theories” can be completely wrong and still maintain a hold on us; the more abstract a theory, the more difficult it is to encounter direct evidence against it.

III Cultural knowledge

I imagine that Introspective knowledge gave rise to what I consider the most powerful form of knowledge in human history: cultural knowledge.

Cultural knowledge includes everything people “know” because it’s what everyone around them “knows”. One example is prejudice against homosexual activity – which became common in the West only a few centuries ago but many people seem to consider “natural”. Primitive religions are another good example, but there are many, many others.

Imagine you’re part of an ancient tribe. The oldest woman in the tribe, known and respected for her experience and wisdom in all practical things, tells you and your family “a very important secret”: there is a deity – a being with powers unlike your own – which controls the growing of the wheat that sustains the tribe.

Like people, sometimes the deity is happy, and sometimes it is angry. But when the sun is shining and the deity is happy, the tribe’s crops bloom; and when the weather is bad and the deity is angry, the wheat fails, and the weak ones starve.

Because you don’t have any better knowledge to work with, and because your life truly depends on understanding how your source of nourishment works, you probably believe this story.

What happens next is that you tell your children about this deity, and they tell their children more or less the same story, and very quickly, your whole community comes to “know” that this is how the world works. (As the Dothraki often tell a baffled Daenerys Targaryen in A Song of Ice and Fire, “it is known.”)

IV The power of conformity

Cultural knowledge arises from introspective thought and we gain it through conscious social experience, especially in our childhood, though we usually forget where it came from within a few years.

Although it spreads in a conscious way, passed from one person to another using language, it becomes anchored in far deeper unconcious processes.

If you refuse to accept the social group’s beliefs, you may find yourself quite alone. Most people will not be open to talking about such things when you refuse to see “the obvious truth”.

You may have a feeling that what you’ve been told is nonsense, but that doesn’t mean you have a better theory to offer spontaneously. The easy way out is to accept what everyone around you knows to be true, or if you don’t accept it, to keep quiet; this saves you and others the torment of being a skeptic amongst conformists.

Because of the immense power of cultural knowledge, I’m convinced this is the most common form of knowledge. It doesn’t require any effort from any individual, only the repetition of information, and conformity. This means almost every thing that we know is probably cultural knowledge; it might not all be quite as false as the belief about the wheat god, but it could potentially carry all kinds of falsities that we never notice or question because we’re busy with other things.

V Scientific knowledge

I think of intuitive, introspective, and cultural knowledge as the basic forms, but there are certainly others. One I’d especially like to consider: scientific knowledge.

In the terms I used above, scientific knowledge is a hybrid form. It mostly rejects intuitive knowledge; it is based on introspective knowledge, but makes use of the tool that gives cultural knowledge its power – social sharing of information.

Scientific knowledge is, to me, a form of cultural knowledge which embraces and encourages the skeptics. The magnitude of that innovation can’t be exaggerated: it may well be one of the biggest steps taken by humankind since the evolution of complex (syntactic) language.

VI The meaning of science

Doing science, being involved in the creation of scientific knowledge, means making the effort to introspectively consider and challenge all intuitive and cultural beliefs. But it also means to share your skeptic thoughts, in the effort to socially form a theory that is more useful than any other theory so far.

A lot of people think that scientific knowledge is even more like cultural knowledge: that what scientists think about their area of investigation is merely an opinion; that scientific knowledge is just dogma; that any experienced scientist in some field can tell you the truth about anything in that field.

People who think these things are mostly wrong.

While scientific communities are susceptible to dogma and orthodoxy, the scientific method and the scientific culture are brilliantly designed to encourage serious skepticism regarding established knowledge. As a result, scientific orthodoxies never last more than a few decades in fields where the scientific method is functional and research is active.

Individual scientists do have opinions, more than knowledge. But scientific opinion is based on relatively serious investigation of realtively well-defined issues – unlike everyday opinions, which are based on cultural knowledge and relate to vague intuitive questions about reality.

But scientists do not know reality, and discovering reality is not the goal of scientific theory. The goal is to provide a better explanation than any other explanation so far, which means that an even better explanation should be just around the corner (that is, probably less than 20 years away.)

Because of this, it’s safe to assume that this means we’re slowly getting closer to true knowledge of reality, but there’s no reason to believe we’ll ever reach it.

A scientifically literate individual informed about the current state of some field can tell you about the most realistic understanding available for that field’s set of phenomena. But if that individual is intellectually honest, they will not call this “the truth”. Just a close approximation which is close to a good match for the information available so far.

VII Convergence and confusion

In the past century or two, humanity is experiencing a very odd transformation. We are, as always, obsessed with knowledge; but we have developed scientific knowledge enough that some results – gravity, atoms and molecules, bacteria and viruses, et cetera – are understood so well that we can really make use of them in our day-to-day life. At the very least, we can use technology which is based on them, and we do, every day.

What this leads to is the integration of scientific knowledge into our cultural knowledge. When we culturally-know something, we think of it as “true reality” – even if the original source is skeptical, provisionary, scientific.

Once a belief becomes cultural knowledge, it doesn’t change nearly as easily as actual scientific knowledge.

Unlike intuitive and cultural knowledge, scientific knowledge is not created to help us deal with the world around us; science is about understanding for the sake of understanding.

So we end up with cultural knowledge that we have a hard time shaking off, but also isn’t very useful in our day-to-day lives. Even worse, it was never meant to be “the truth”, and it’s probably a decade old – or five, or ten² – and we intuitively think of it as “the truth” because nobody in our day-to-day interactions dares question it. Trying to find out what current thoery says doesn’t help, because current theory is less mature and useful, and still needs a lot of testing before it can be relied on.

It’s important to understand that this applies to every single human being. It also applies to all scientists, for everything outside of the fields they’ve seriously studied.

Sometimes, cultural biases and orthodoxy can even creep in on a scientist’s home turf and “contaminate” research – but the scientific method will clean it up within a few years if that research becomes well-known.

VIII Practical questions

What should we do about all of this? I really don’t know. It’s not my field, and I doubt there’s a definitive answer – or a close approximation – in any field, anyway. (Philosophy is even worse than science at reaching definitive answers.)

What I personally try to do is simply to identify my beliefs about the world, and try to identify where they come from and how important it is to me to hang on to them.

I try to keep in mind that “knowledge” is an illusion; that the most reliable kind of “knowledge” is the intuitive kind, which is, however, also the least accurate and the least flexible.

I try to keep in mind that anything I think I “know” could be a cultural bias. I try to remember that this applies to scientists, too, and that even the best theory is just a reliable approximation so far, and could change deeply within my lifetime.

Most of all, I try to recognize my biases, and often have to decide whether I can live with them or have to reconsider what I “know”.

What I try to never do is defend a bias simply because I happen to hold it. If I realize I don’t know why I think some thought, that thought is suspicious and I keep it to myself until I’ve looked into it again more seriously.

I can’t say any of this is fun or easy – or even that I go through with it as much as I’d like to – but considering my (introspective) beliefs about knowledge, I’d (intuitively) be uncomfortable with doing it any other way.

If you’ve made it so far in this unusually long post, maybe you’d like to share some of your thoughts/bliefs/”knowledge”. Did I miss any important form of knowledge? Is there any better way to deal with the weaknesses of the forms I discussed? Is there any point you’d like me to say more about?

References

The subject of this piece is one I’ve enjoyed thinking about for years, and I’m not sure where I stole my ideas from. A few sources that were probably influential, in no particular order, are:

• Daniel Greenberg, Worlds in Creation. Sudbury Valley School Press
• Paul Graham, What Can’t be Said. Essay on paulgraham.com
• Noam Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge University Press
• David W. Lightfoot’s introduction in Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures. Mouton De Gruyter
• James A. Michener, The Source: A Novel. Random House (see my review on this blog)

Footnotes

1. What exactly “conscious” and “decision” are would be the topic for another long post, or maybe a whole new blog.
2. For example, I heard that what is considered “normal body temperature” is the result of findings from one small study over a hundred years ago, and not considered accurate anymore.

(via Benni)

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Noam Sheizaf at +972 Magazine brought to my attention a Jerusalem Post editoral which made a few red lights in my head go off (bolding mine):

ISRAEL IS the only country in the world where Jews are the majority. Only here can they enjoy the advantages of living in a state whose language, holidays and national symbols are their own.

Let’s leave aside the truly objectionable stuff in this editorial and focus on the linguistic part. I love Hebrew, in fact, it’s my favorite of Israel’s national symbols. I would like to point out how ludicrous it is for the Post to claim Jewish “ownership” over this, or any, language.

I

Before anything else, reflect for a moment on the fact that the majority of Jews worldwide do not speak Modern Israeli Hebrew and would probably call another language (usually American English) their own.

II

The nation is a relatively new construct, dating back just to the end of the 18th century. Naming official national languages was part of the rise of nationalism in Europe. It was part of the creation of a national identity — not artificial, but put together of existing pieces.

To the linguistically uninitiated, it might seem natural that every nation-state has a language “of their own”. German for the Germans, Swedish for the Swedes, Chinese for the Chinese. But languages are actually really bad at sticking to international borders. The Swiss speak Swiss German, which is no more similar to Germany’s Standard German than is Dutch. Standard Swedish is so similar to Norwegian and Danish that the three might be considered dialects of one language, and can be understood mutually with a bit of effort. “Chinese” is not even one language; usually “Chinese” means Standard Mandarin, the official language used by the People’s Republic, but the term includes the many many languages spoken in mainland China, even though many of them only have a writing system in common, remaining unintelligible to one another.

In the case of Modern Israeli Hebrew it should be especially clear that there is not a 1:1 relationship between (Jewish) nation and (Hebrew) language. Modern Hebrew has taken on European structure in almost all areas of grammar (with some very notable exceptions), since those who revitalized it were speakers of European languages. The bulk of Israeli slang is comprised of Arabic loanwords such as ahla and sababa. And the language is spoken by non-Jews as well; the Arabic of Israeli Arabs is so full of Hebrew that efforts are underway to refresh the community’s Arabic vocabulary.

III

Nonetheless, Modern Hebrew is the result of a conscious effort of will, and one might insist that it is an exceptionally national language. After all, the Zionist made a real, and apparently successful, effort to revive the language of Jewish scripture.

But in fact, even those parts of Modern Hebrew considered “pure Hebrew” — the parts attested in the Bible and other ancient texts — are unlikely to be in any way pure or belong entirely to any ethnic group. Quite simply, no language ever does. The ancient Israelites did not live in isolation, and were surrounded by different peoples with different cultures and different languages. Inevitably, the language they spoke was affected by it, and likely eagerly assimilated elements of the gentiles’ languages, just as all languages have always done everywhere. (but see NOTE below)

IV

The suggestion that the Arabs have no place within our state, that they are a foreign entity that does not belong, is ludicrous and incredibly offensive. It is even ludicrous if you think there’s a god-given right for Jews to be in what was once Cana’an. Modern Israel (and its language) have always had non-Jewish residents (and speakers), most of them Arabs. At no point was the pre-state Yishuv isolated from Arabic culture. Israel has co-existed with Arabs, sometimes more peacefully than at other times, from the very start. Perhaps oddly, I find myself startled to see Israelis railing against Arabic culture as though it were a scary foreign influence. To me, hummus is the national dish, and even those who mistakenly think it’s falafel can’t deny there’s a bit of Arab in us.

Incidentally, sababa shel hummus, roughly “nice hummus”, is a phrase with an [arguably] European structure (cf. English “quite a day” and “hell of a guy” ), made up of two Arabic-loaned content words connected by one Hebrew function word [shel, “of”]. And what phrase could possibly be more Israeli?

I feel there is a general point here about Jewish culture – before, during, and after Diaspora. Before Diaspora, the Israelites were a part of the fabric of the Ancient Near East, going about the typical Ancient Near East national pass-times of worshiping, building, farming and conquering, maintaining a distinct culture and very distinct religion but not without influence from the languages, cultures and religions of their neighbors (who were all influenced in return, and by one another as well). In Diaspora, the Jews of every area developed their own cultural and linguistic remix. The most well-known resulting languages are Yiddish and Ladino, but they are not nearly the only ones. I recently learned that a small Jewish community in northwestern India developed a dialect of Marathi: Judæo-Marathi, still spoken in India and Israel.

And indeed, after Diaspora, the state of Israel has been a cultural patchwork quilt, taking patterns and colors from the many places its residents came from, while remaining firmly grounded in the political and cultural reality of the Middle East, which we are now undoubtedly part of.

V

One could argue, and perhaps one should, that in all of these cases the borrowing group made the borrowings its own, both by choosing them and by integrating them in a unique way (i.e. fitting loanwords to native phonology and morphology, which Modern Hebrew excels at). But there is nothing particularly Jewish about living in cultural isolation, nor is it a particularly sensible proposition that Modern Hebrew belongs exclusively to Israeli Jews. The Israeli Arabs and Palestinians have been there since before Hebrew was revitalized, Hebrew has been in contact with them ever since, and whether the Jerusalem Post likes it or not, the Arabic language and Palestinian culture are part of the fabric of the Israeli quilt.

Note

Unfortunately I am unfamiliar with Ancient Hebrew and neighboring languages of the same period, such as Philistine, Phoenician, Moabite, Hittite, and Ancient Egyptian, and can’t give examples for loanwords off the top of my head like I can with English and Modern Hebrew. I also don’t know any good source to check (though I’d be eager to get one). But I’ve certainly seen mention on Wikipedia and on Israeli linguistics blogs of loanwords from neighboring languages into Ancient Hebrew, and this is not surprising in the slightest. It would be surprising if it were the other way around.

Related reading tip

Jerry Haber of the Magnes Zionist is writing a fascinating series of articles about “Israel’s ‘Arab Problem'”. Part one, part two. I read them cross-posted on +972 Magazine, which is becoming a more and more central source for my reading…