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The Crisis of Public Reason 
by Phil Agre 3:44pm Tue Aug 15 '00 

Who's Crazy? Almost universally,
demonstrators against corporate rule
are portrayed as purely emotional,
irrationally opposed to ideas and
institutions that are "embodiments of
reason." But the appearance of
rationality is just that--appearance. This
penetrating article by James Agre,
UCLA professor of information studies,
reproduced from his renowned online
newsletter, the Red Rock Eater News
Service, helps us think more clearly and
critically about the substance of reason,
as opposed to the appearance. 

Public Reason: Holding Power-Holders Responsible

American political culture faces a crisis of public reason. Public
reason concerns the norms of public argument, and the health of a
modern society can almost be measured by the extent to which
norms of public reason are upheld. The theory behind public
reason, which dates to the Enlightenment, is that power-holders can
be constrained by compelling them to give reasons for their actions.
If the reasons don't make sense then citizens can point that out, and
the disjunction between reason and action will eventually cause the
powerholders to lose their legitimacy and thus their power. 

The idea originates as a generalization of scientists' understandings
of their own norms of debate, and it is often scientists who insist
most strongly on the connection between reason and the health of
political institutions. If people believe in UFOs, the argument goes,
then politicians can say any old crazy thing they want, and society
will lose its last fragile protection against authoritarianism and
anarchy (these opposites often being fused by people who make
this argument).

Challenges to Public Reason: Simulated Rationality

Public reason faces a long series of challenges, which taken
together are formidable. One major challenge is the professionally
cultivated practice of simulated rationality: if you're a powerholder,
or more likely a loose network or segmentary coalition of
powerholders, and you want to take certain actions, and if norms of
public reason are in effect, then you will naturally search for
rational-sounding arguments for your plans. This procedure --
decision first, then arguments -- is utterly routinized throughout the
public and private bureaucracies of the world, and a whole industry
of public relations (and other communications professions that
operate on the same conceptual basis as public relations) exists to
support it. 

The core concept of public relations is the "perception": what
matters in practical terms is not whether one's arguments are
rational, but whether they are perceived as rational. One must
adopt the surface forms of rational argument -- arranging words in
logical-seeming ways, using scientific vocabulary, adducing
(carefully selected) facts, providing impressive-sounding statistics,
citing the opinions of authorities (that is, people who will be
perceived as authorities), and so forth. When norms of public
reason have been institutionalized, producing this reason-effect is
half the battle, and one can purchase reason-effects by the yard.

Challenges to Public Reason: Technical Rationalization

A second challenge to public reason is technical rationalization, by
which I mean the application of math-based analytical frameworks
to practical problems. Examples include the mathematical models
of operations research, a tremendous variety of simulation methods,
and too many others to enumerate. These models reached their
peak of cultural legitimacy during the Cold War, but they date back
centuries and persist robustly today. 

Rationalization produces reason-effects in the sense just described,
but its use of mathematics and its apparatus of deductive logic also
give it a special claim to reason. Deductive logic is airtight in a
precise sense: given the premises, the conclusions follow.
Proponents of technical rationalization often feel very strongly, and
it is easy to see where they get their fervor. The matters that they
model are often controversial, and answers that can be publicly
defended through airtight deductive logic are greatly to be
preferred to the hidden agendas of politicians and entrepreneurs.
To question rationalization, on this view, is to question rationality,
with all of the dire consequences that I mentioned before.

The serious problem with rationalization concerns the premises and
presuppositions of the model: "given the premises, the conclusions
follow", but the premises are rarely as "given" as all that, and the
conclusions only follow if the world corresponds to the assumptions
that have been built into the model. Most of these models depend
on quantitative "inputs" that are subject to measurement error,
assuming that they can even be measured. Sensitivity analysis
(computing the partial derivative of the output with respect to a
particular input) often reveals that the answers that formal models
provide depend so radically on unmeasurable inputs that they are
worthless. Worthless estimates of ten-year budget surpluses in the
United States and the State of Texas are current examples. 

The point is not that formal models are incompatible with public
reason; reasonable people can argue about the models themselves.
Where rationalization becomes pathological is where this
meta-level debate about the premises and presuppositions of
models is suppressed. 

This can (and routinely does) happen in several ways. The models
themselves can be obscure, whether by design or not, and this can
suppress participation in the necessary debate. The people who
apply the models can be trained to apply them in a mechanical and
superficial way, and may lack the skill to question and evaluate
them. This happens every single day. Or the dynamics of public
debate, as in the compression of sound-bite journalism, can give an
unfair advantage to those who can offer a neat answer over those
who can offer a ten-page explanation of what's wrong with it. An
extensive literature documents these problems; see for example
William H. Dutton and Kenneth L. Kraemer, Modeling as
Negotiating: The Political Dynamics of Computer Models in the
Policy Process (Ablex, 1985).

Rationalization and the Problem of Hubris

The most basic problem with rationalization is hubris. The world is
complicated, and the people who have expertise with rational
models usually do not have enough knowledge of the specifics of
particular cases to apply their models realistically. Quite the
contrary, the model creates a set of cognitive filters that tend to
exclude from consideration any factors that do not fit it. If one's
professional standing depends on the applicability of a certain
repertoire of formal models, then it is in one's interests to perceive
the world as fitting those models, and to stop inquiring into the
particulars as soon as the model has been fitted to them. 

This is bad enough when the model-expert suffers the full
consequences of inappropriate modeling, but it is much worse
when innocent parties suffer. This is the story of "urban renewal"
programs in the 1970s, in which anyone who actually lived in the
neighborhoods in question could have told the modelers what their
models were leaving out. Formal models have often proven to be
quite idiotic once somebody, in many cases an anthropologist with
an equally strong disciplinary predisposition to seeing the social
world as an interconnected whole, takes the trouble to discover the
fullness of what's happening on the ground.

The Fallacy of "The Scientific Method" As Sole Basis For
Public Reason

A variant of the problem of rationalization arises when scientists
and scientific enthusiasts (not all of them, but many) insist that the
scientific method become the sole basis for public reason. The
problem with this position is that many questions of public concern
are simply not susceptible to scientific analysis, being for example
complex moral questions. Another problem is that science does not
function in the way that scientific enthusiasts understand as "the
scientific method". The literature on social studies of science has
documented this at length, and has accordingly been excoriated by
those pseudo-scientific dogmatists who believe that the question of
how science actually works is not a fit matter for scientific inquiry.

The Struggle Over Divergent Visions

A final threat to public reason is, to put it in plain language, the
struggle over different ways of seeing things. Different professions
and cultures have different concepts, methods, and assumptions,
and people with different social positions and life experiences go
about public reason in different ways. Many people cannot tolerate
these sorts of epistemological diversity. They insist that their own
ways be regarded as objectively true, and they insist that any
appreciation of others' ways be regarded as a relativistic abdication
of reason. 

Wrong though it is, this fear of incommensurability is
understandable. Because public reason only functions if everyone
agrees to uphold it, surely the norms of public reason themselves
must be framed in a common vocabulary, which vocabulary ought
surely to provide a broader basis for commensuration of substantive
arguments. Put more simply, if everyone has their own idea about
what public reason is, where are the unanimously legitimated rules
that are going to keep powerholders accountable? Why can't
somebody from your culture, having ascended to office, simply
declare that their own cultural understanding of public reason
allows them to cite the authority of their familiar spirits as an
adequate justification for their actions? 

But the fact remains that people do have diverse understandings of
the world and of public reason itself, and that many of these
understandings are consistent with the spirit of public reason, and
that the attempt to enforce a single such understanding as the gold
standard of all public discourse is precisely the sort of 
arbitrariness that the norms of public reason exist to rule out. This 
problem has serious solutions, but they are not solutions that can be 
explained briefly or written neatly into a constitution.

These difficulties tend to discredit public reason. One encounters
foolish books such as Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power:
Democracy in Practice (translated by Steven Sampson, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998) that discover the shenanigans
that go on behind the scenes of putatively rational public debates
(in his case, over urban planning) and concludes that rationality
itself is nothing but an effect of power. In environmental
controversies one observes a struggle over ground rules, with
business and government (usually operating in concert) pushing the
debate onto the terrain of technical and scientific methods that
cannot be employed without large amounts of capital and
community organizations pushing the debate onto the terrain of
experience, memory, and narrative. 

Simulated rationality confronts an insistence that the surfaces forms
of rationality have become irretrievably corrupt. Of course many
cases are more complex, and the average timber war does include
substantial amounts of math and science on all sides. Academics
and activists have worked to make the means of scientific
rationality available to those without concentrated capital, but it's
an uphill fight at best.



Two Ideological Rejections of Public Reason

Yet even those disputes over technical rationalization do not
present the greatest danger to public reason. The greatest danger
comes from an even deeper interaction between two rejections of
reason, the ones that in the United States have come to be known
as conservative and liberal. The new jargon that is increasingly
spoken by conservative pundits and activists in the United States,
and is rarely denounced by conservatives of any stripe, constitutes a
vast assault on reason. 

The Longstanding Conservative Rejection

The conflict between conservatism and reason, in fact, is
longstanding and overt. Conservatives in Burke's day were explicit
about the evils of permitting the common people to engage in
rational thought, lest they decide to replicate the French revolution,
and the thoroughgoing arbitrariness of the new jargon serves to
undermine the possibility of popular exercises of reason in the
present day. (Whether it succeeds in this is another question.) Even
those who identify themselves as libertarians follow an overtly
anti-rationalist philosophy, as even a brief acquaintance with the
work of Friedrich Hayek should make clear. 

The argument against reason in this literature is straightforward: it
is impossible for any individual to acquire enough reliable
information to make a rational decision, any actions founded on
rational thought will therefore be delusional, any attempts at reason
should therefore regarded as dangerous, and all action should
instead be guided by tradition. This is what Burke had in mind by
commending prejudice, even though contemporary conservatives
are careful not to use that word. Conservatism is constitutionally
opposed to public reason, and this explains the abandon with
which so many conservative pundits embrace flagrant simulations
of reason, constructed through the methods of public relations, and
exhibit so little regard for the real thing.

Identity Politics: Public Reason Rejected in Response to
Trauma

But conservatives are not alone in rejecting public reason. The
rejection of public reason is central to identity politics, whose
starting-point is not the rational overthrow of prejudice in the 
public sphere but rather the creation of alternative spheres in which
silenced "voices" can be revived. 

Central to this project is the experience of a particular kind of
oppression: the infliction of irrationalist nonsense. Let us say that 
a long series of jerks indignantly sneer at you that you should stop
being a "victim", or that the Native Americans weren't really
oppressed given that there are more of them now than there were
when the white men showed up. If you are in complete possession
of your rational faculties then you will think long and hard until you
understand what is twisted about this. But being assaulted by the
indignant sneering of nonsense is a bona fide variety of emotional
trauma, and only the strongest individual can retain the capacity for
rational thought after enough trauma of that sort. 

The first step in overcoming the emotional violence of the jargon is
not the hard labor of fashioning brief rational comebacks to the
immense repertoire of nonsense lines of the jerks. No, the first step
is to make common cause with others who have been abused
similarly, reestablish the capacity for trust, compare notes on one's
experiences, and recover the ability to speak in a semipublic way
without an internalized jerk sneering at you to stop being such a
victim. The finer dictates of logic have to wait, for the simple 
reason that an emotionally brutalized person cannot yet distinguish
between rebuttals that arise from reason and rebuttals
that arise from nonreason.

The problem arises when the communities created through identity
politics fail to move past this condition by recommitting themselves
to public reason. At its worst, this kind of interrupted recovery can
lead to the worst sorts of irrationalism, as in the elaboration of
pseudo-historical scholarship. Even at its best, it prevents
traumatized people from acquiring the repertoire of rational
arguments that they need to build a mainstream political
movement. 

A vicious circle gets going, with pundits employing the most
convenient examples of identity-politics irrationalism as a means of
disguising their own irrationalism. The new jargon is filled with
projections of this sort, all of which are easy to sustain if one uses
facts selectively and otherwise applies the methods of public
relations. Notwithstanding their excesses, which hardly compare to
the positive contributions that they have made, the principal threat
to public reason has never derived from the movements of identity
politics. The more basic phenomenon is the vicious cycle set in
motion by the irrationalists who, whether consciously or by
parroting a jargon whose logic they fail to understand, promote a
hierarchical culture of deference.

Public Reason: Precondition for Democracy and Sanity

Public reason is not only a precondition for a functioning
democracy; it is also required for individuals to become and remain
sane. As human beings we develop our voices by internalizing the
responses of others, and in the long run we only remain rational if
we internalize a rational interlocutor. Only if reason is both
legitimized in theory and actually employed in practice can we be
kept honest enough to make rational sense. 

Rationality is ultimately not about the procedures of logic, which
can easily be reified in an irrational way. Rationality is ultimately
about mental health: the kind of contact with reality that we can
only maintain if we have good boundaries and a supportive
community of similarly healthy people. To oppress people one must
wound them, so that wounded patterns of thought are reproduced
from one generation to the next. 

Conservatism focuses attention on the transient pathologies that
inevitably arise as people try to regain their sanity. It does not 
focus on that sanity itself, or the considerable progress that people 
have in fact achieved in recovering it. If we neglect the tidal wave 
of insanity that pours forth daily from the punditry then that 
progress will be lost. 
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