Thesis Introduction (E Pluribus Unum: The Dream of Democracy)

My full thesis introduction, including An Outline and a Vibe Shift

(Here is the full, final introduction to my senior honors thesis at Harvard, ‘E Pluribus Unum: The Dream of Democracy.’ The new stuff here is the ‘Introduction’ opening section, ‘An Outline,’ and ‘Vibe Shift’— for those of you who read my earlier post ‘A Problem and a Possibility,’ feel free to skim those two short sections. ‘An Outline’ is an outline of the entire thesis, previewing its three chapters. ‘Vibe Shift’ is a sort of tonal preface to the thesis, addressing the tension between American tragedies and American dreams; it announces my intention to focus on the dreams more than the tragedies in this thesis. This positive, aspirational, pro-American attitude is not very common in modern American academia, but I think it’s an important point of view to represent.)

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Introduction

E Pluribus Unum: Out of Many, One. The national motto of the United States of America is, in a sense, a challenge. Can we really unite an incredibly diverse nation into one people? Do we even want to make one out of many? And, if so, how can we do it?

This thesis is concerned with the tensions and symbioses between ideals of individual liberty and ideals of democracy. The synthesis of the two is the ideal of ‘liberal democracy.’¹ Currently, belief in liberal democracy seems to be retreating around the world. In this context, I intend to rearticulate and reimagine the ideal of liberal democracy. Along the way, I’ll offer interesting theories of nationalism, rationality, and myth that will tie together into what I call the ‘Dream of Democracy.’ The Dream of Democracy is a myth that I believe can unify the nation, empower rational discourse, and revitalize ideals of liberty and democracy by motivating individual and collective action towards their progressive realization.

We live in a polarized America of fractured tribes. This thesis is intended to explicitly, consciously, and sincerely appeal to as many of these tribes as possible, stacking them towards common goals of liberty and democracy bound to the project of the American nation. If you’re a conservative, this thesis is for you; if you’re a progressive, this thesis is for you; if you’re a libertarian or a socialist, this thesis is for you; if you value freedom and connection, this thesis is for you. This thesis is for women and men, young and old, north and south, east and west, urban, suburban, and rural. It appeals sincerely to Christians and evolutionists, globalists and nationalists, tech bros and hippies. This thesis is for Americans. It’s also for anyone who deals with tribalism, rational discourse, philosophy, nature, myth, or dreams— which is to say that this thesis is for anyone who’s human at all.

A Problem

This project was inspired by the desire to solve a problem— a problem that strikes at the very heart of liberal democracy.

Ideals of liberty and democracy rest upon a common faith that rational discourse can progress toward shared truths. We believe that if people freely talk things out, their ideas about the world will improve, and they’ll make better choices about how to live their lives together. Discourse, dialectic, rationality— these terms all refer to a relational, generative, freeing force inherent in language, intersubjectivity, sociality.

Liberal and democratic social theorists² imagine that, when we communicate, we relate and triangulate our limited individual perceptions, progressively improving our shared understandings of other people with whom we are entangled, and by extension the shape of our wider environment. Faith in the creative alchemy of conversation lends itself to belief in democracy as a political system, because improved knowledge translates into improved collective action when voice becomes vote. Belief in democracy is based on faith in the progressive, rationalizing, truth-approaching power of dialectic.

This faith, however, is threatened by modern social science and psychology research on tribalism.³ We evolved as tribal creatures. Human rationality is inescapably filtered through the lens of our tribal identities— the groups with which we feel we belong. We engage in motivated reasoning to shore up our sense of safety in belonging to a given tribe moreso than we disinterestedly pursue unbiased truth. We have psychological defenses against any information that threatens a tribe we identify with, which is why it’s nearly impossible to convince someone in an opposing tribe of the factual superiority of your argument if it threatens their feeling of tribal membership. If your sense of psychological safety in tribal membership requires you to say that global warming isn’t real, then no amount of data or argument is going to convince you to renounce what your tribe believes. The threat of losing the tribe feels much more immediately salient than the abstract threat of global warming. Thus, our attempts at rational, democratic discourse on such topics do not progress towards shared truths, halted at the boundary between tribes.

This psychological bias in our rationality reveals limits on the possibility space through which dialectical rationality is free to progressively traverse through conversation. It seems as though the boundaries of the tribe are, in some ways, the boundaries of productive discourse. But if rationality is subservient to tribal identity, how can we believe in ideals of liberal-democratic discourse? And how could a country like the modern United States function rationally?

You could react to this disturbing situation in one of two ways. Firstly, you could take it as a blackpill on democracy; you could say screw it, democracy doesn’t work, it’s not possible, I’m gonna focus on grabbing what I can for myself and my little tribe while everything falls apart. This nihilistic attitude is shared by authoritarians and identitarians on the far right and the far left.

Alternatively, you could react to this situation by seeing it as just another hurdle to surmount in the process of dialectically developing our ideal of liberal democracy. This is the attitude of the American Pragmatist, who sees the world as full of evolving problems to progressively work on via experimentation. This is the attitude of the American Idealist, who sees liberty and democracy as worth believing in, even when it’s hard. Can we adapt to the problem of tribal rationality in such a way that allows us to preserve— and potentially even progress— our ideals of liberal democracy?

A Possibility

It seems as though the magic truth-refining power of dialogue does not work when it crosses the boundaries between groups. But, if you look at this tough fact upside-down, it seems that the magic truth-refining power of dialogue does work within the circle of a given tribe.

What if we bite the bullet on tribal rationality? What if, by accepting and embracing the fact that rationality is inherently tribal, we can actually gain a theoretical foothold which allows us to rescue ideals of liberal democracy and progressive rational discourse?

If communicative rationality can be theorized as a function of a tribe, then a pragmatic path forward becomes clear for us philosophers who wish to advance ideals of rationality, liberty, and democracy. Now, we can treat problems of forging a tribe or nation as prior to other problems of democratic theory. If we want democracy to work in America, then we must first focus on the problem of unifying the nation. Perhaps reimagining nationalism can help us develop a new understanding of democracy. For those of us who wish to continue the grand liberal-democratic tradition of experimenting with society in order to improve communication, rationality, and freedom, this is now the place to start.

This paper is particularly interested in the American context, although the theoretical implications have global resonance. After all, the United States of America is an extremely diverse nation, composed of many different tribes, factions, and circles within circles. Is democratic rationality possible in modern America? If so, perhaps it’s possible elsewhere, too. The United States of America can be viewed as an experiment in how to evolve and realize liberal democratic ideals in a contingent, material, historical project. A core theme of this story is the tension (and, perhaps, synthesis) between liberalism and nationalism, as epitomized by Daniel Webster’s famous line “Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!”⁴ The generative dialectic between individuals and collectives animates this thesis.

If we Americans have the will to believe in liberty and democracy, and we’d like to continue experimenting towards those ideals in our given context (given, for example, the agency wielded by the existing American state, and given the history of ideas and experiments that have gotten us this far), then the first step seems to be figuring out how to foster genuine national unity, how to make wide group membership psychologically salient for individuals, how to encourage them to truly believe, feel, and act voluntarily as if they are indeed interdependent parts of a shared whole. How do we create the kind of social solidarity that makes collective action and collective information processing possible? I believe there are many possible avenues here worth experimenting with, particularly in the material construction of society, but I will save these explorations for a future book; this initial thesis will particularly concern itself with the power of ideas, based on a belief that ideas can change the world.

Meaningful group myths have the power to unite peoples with different histories in a shared vision of the future, and to inspire individual and collective action towards realizing that shared vision. In this thesis, I’ll propose a specific kind of unifying American myth implied by some of our greatest poets and philosophers; I call it ‘The Dream of Democracy.’ I believe that this myth is uniquely capable of binding and empowering an open, expanding, self-improving tribe which can approach ideals of liberty, democracy, and rational discourse.

An Outline

The first two chapters of this thesis will set the stage for the Dream of Democracy. Chapter One will examine the history and possibilities of nations and nationalism in order to articulate the need for a ‘Pragmatic Nationalism’. While nationalism has often been applied toward exclusionary, violent, and oppressive ends, I posit that the power of nationalism can instead be redirected to promote a diverse and ever-evolving social group that seeks peace and productive discourse rather than domination and control. This thesis seeks to cultivate a positive and patriotic liberal nationalism that can empower collective action towards achieving a better America. Because nations are bound together by shared stories, a unifying myth is one potent way we can attempt to cultivate this healthy flavor of nationalism; the lens of myth allows us to articulate a national identity based not just on a story of the past, but on an unproven dream of the future.

Chapter Two is called ‘Tribal Rationality, Autopoietic Myth.’ In this theoretical chapter, we’ll come to understand communicative rationality as an intrinsically tribal process. By combining models from social theory and sociobiology, we’ll theorize how to best create a group capable of more ideal liberal-democratic rationality. In order to engage in productive discourse with someone, we must both feel as though we’re part of a shared group cooperating towards a shared goal of enriching mutual understanding. Through this process, we learn more about ourselves while also learning more about the wider world. Thus, we are nudged to imagine a flexible, semi-permeable, ever-expanding tribe that can progressively incorporate more and more diverse others within the bounds of our communicative community. Luckily, human tribes are flexible— and myth is one of the most powerfully flexible ways we can reshape group boundaries. Stories can bind different people together into a cooperative group. More fundamentally, humans understand the world through the lens of stories, characters, narratives; through this insight, we can theorize rationality itself as a modality of ‘myth’, rationality as something that emerges from the process of myths dialectically interacting, reconciling, and refining. By becoming conscious of the way our social cognition is inherently ‘mythical’, we can embrace it in order to create and recreate better myths more conducive to the progress of rationality.

Chapter Three puts together everything we learned in the first two chapters, and proposes a unique myth that fulfills our need for a unifying, inspiring national myth that can create the conditions for accelerating our progress towards ideal liberal-democratic discourse. Throughout this more creative chapter, while exploring the core threads and themes of the Dream of Democracy, I’ll actively mythmake by weaving in various vignettes, phanopoetic ‘images,’ representative characters, and inspirational seeds. Walt Whitman, the great poet of democracy, is our trusty guide for this chapter; his essay Democratic Vistas outlines the Dream of Democracy as the pursuit of an ever-evolving symbiosis between individuals and tribes. The Dream encourages evermore syntheses between the twin ideals of liberty and democracy, valuing unity, diversity, and relation itself all as divine ends worth pursuing in reciprocal harmony. It envisions a ‘Tribe of Tribes’ expanding through an ‘Ever-Widening Frontier’ of social experience, creating increasingly free, rich, intelligent, creative, interconnected, unique future individuals. The Dream of Democracy is a way of grounding ideals of liberal democracy with mythical thickness in order to make these ideals tangible and psychologically motivating; grounding the Dream in the national character of America and in a larger story of nature both serve this goal. Ultimately, we want to cultivate liberal-democratic individuals who don’t treat democracy as just a political system, but as a way of life, a culture, a democratic civil religion that we enact in our day-to-day lives, promote through our personal interactions, and inspire with the spread of democratic literature.

Vibe Shift

This thesis has an optimistic, idealistic tone that I’d like to address before we begin. To the modern reader, especially academic readers, it would be understandable if my consistently positive, romantic focus on the good in America’s past— as well as my relentless, evangelistic hope for its most utopian future— were interpreted as anachronistic, naive, just plain wrong, or even dangerous. After all, isn’t American history littered with crimes, soaked in blood, shackled to slavery, shadowed by genocide? Haven’t our supposed high ideals been undermined by our all-too-frequent failures to live up to them— liberty belied by bondage, democracy belied by imperialism, justice belied by innumerable injustices? I want to clarify here, up front, that I am painfully aware of these American tragedies; they are all the more painful because I love this country, and because I believe in the ideals it’s betrayed time and time again. And yet…

I believe that the only practical value of critique and shame is as a spur to better action. To react authentically to crimes and failures means choosing to live presently in ways that give us new reasons to be proud in the future. The notion of sin is useless without a notion of redemption. To wallow in irony, endless negation, unforgiving criticism, and unforgivable self-loathing without seeking a positive transformation is to give up on being an agent, to abandon our ability to choose differently moving forward, to give in to nihilism. For the last half-century, it’s seemed like Americans, and especially academics, have been culturally and structurally steeped in an attitude of endless critique towards the idea of the American nation. To be clear, this has been good and useful in many ways; as James Baldwin said, “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”⁵ Critiquing America’s awful failures is necessary if we want to learn how to make America better moving forward. But it seems to me that our culture of negativity towards America has gone beyond this pragmatic purpose, and become somewhat pathological, somewhat of an overcorrection. Baldwin also said that “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”⁶ We must face the terrible, but we also must remember the various and beautiful; we face the terrible for the sake of the various and beautiful.

This thesis is intended as a balancing response to the understandable overcorrection against American national pride that we’ve witnessed in academia and our broader culture these last few decades— call it a vibe shift. It is a sincere, uncool, idealistic attempt to resuscitate and reinvent what I see as America’s best ideas; furthermore, it’s an attempt to mythologize those ideas, to make them inspirational, motivating, and thus more likely to be pursued and realized. Thus, if my Whitmanic tone sometimes seems overly optimistic, or seems to ignore some obvious critiques of America that one would expect to hear in modern academia, do not chalk it up to naivety. I’m aware of the darkness, but I’m also confident that plenty of other writers will address it well. What I believe is most needful now is an attempt to search under all the American detritus for those few sequoia seeds of what has been truly great— no, truly good— about the American story thus far; then, with creative and critical hands together, we can plant and water those seeds in fresh soil so that the American future can grow more various and beautiful than our wildest dreams.

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1. In this paper, when I use the word “liberal,” I mean it in the classic Enlightenment sense as valuing “liberty.” For classical liberals like the Founding Fathers, ‘liberal’ implied concern for individual freedom and a belief in the inherent value of individuals. By “democracy,” I mean to extend that concern for individual freedom to every individual in a collective on a universal basis; for me, democracy also implies valuing the collective in its own right, and recognizing the way it’s formed by the inextricably intertwined relationships of individuals. By combining the two, we get the self-reliant rule of ‘We the People’ through common discussion and consent. As we’ll see over the course of this paper, the ideal of liberal democracy has implications far beyond the merely political.

2. (like John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and Jurgen Habermas)

3. (as cited by Jonathan Haidt, Robert Sapolsky, Ezra Klein, E.O. Wilson, etc)

4. Daniel Webster, 1830

5. James Baldwin, "As Much Truth As One Can Bear" in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Kenan, 28-34.

6. James Baldwin, "A Talk to Teachers" in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985, 325-332.