Hence the essential connection of knowledge and democracy. Democracy requires an informed electorate, and knowledge deficits equal civic decay. The equation poses a special problem in that democracy does not force citizens to participate. One of the ever present potentials of a free society is for its citizens to decide
not
to follow public affairs, to determine that keeping apprised and ready takes too much effort with too little personal payoff. A paper by George Mason University professor Ilya Somin, titled “When Ignorance Isn’t Bliss: How Political Ignorance Threatens Democracy,” analyzes the problem in precisely these terms. “If voters do not know what is going on in politics,” Somin asserts, “they cannot rationally exercise control over government policy.” When government grows too complex and the effects of policy drift down into individual lives in too delayed and circuitous a way, citizenship knowledge appears an onerous and impractical virtue. “Only political professionals and those who value political knowledge for its own sake have an incentive to acquire significant amounts of it,” Somin says. Who wants to read through all of the prescription-drug-benefit additions to Medicare, or break down the latest reauthorization of the Higher Education Act? Who can endure an hours-long school board meeting? Why spend weeks listening to candidates and sorting out the issues, then standing in line for two hours to vote, when a single vote never makes a difference in the outcome? No ordinary citizen has to if he doesn’t want to. Individual freedom means the freedom not to vote, not to read the newspaper, not to contemplate the facts of U.S. history, not to frequent the public square—in a word, to opt out of civic life.
The data Somin invokes come from the National Election Study, Pew Research Center, and numerous social scientists, and they all reach the same depressing conclusion. In Somin’s paraphrase, “Most individual voters are abysmally ignorant of even very basic political information.” Ever since the first mass surveys from the 1930s, too, voter knowledge has risen only slightly, despite enormous gains in education and media access. Foreseeing no improvements ahead, Somin advises another solution, a smaller government, which would reduce the amount of knowledge necessary for the electorate to fulfill its observant and controlling duties. Intellectuals and educators, however, can’t bypass the knowledge needs of the citizenry, and they must attend to the minds of the young. And one factor that might overcome their intransigence and make them more engaged citizens, one thing that will upset the quite rational calculation by young Americans of the meager practical benefits of civic behavior, is precisely the ingredient Jefferson considered essential.
Again we return to knowledge—knowledge of current events and past events, civic ideals and historical models. It supplies a motivation that ordinary ambitions don’t. Voting in every election, reading the op-ed pages, sending letters to politicians, joining a local association . . . they don’t advance a career, boost a paycheck, kindle the dating scene, or build muscle and tan skin. They provide a civic good, but the private goods they deliver aren’t measured in money or prospects or popularity. Instead, they yield expressive or moral satisfactions, the pleasure of doing something one knows is right, and those vary with how much cultural memory each person has. Consistent voters vote because voting is simply the right thing to do. Rather than suffer the shame of not voting, they leave work and stand in line, and feel better for it. People take the time to send emails to talk show hosts because not speaking their minds is more painful than speaking their minds is inconvenient. They join a boycott even though they like the things boycotted.
Knowledge heightens the moral sense that sparks such profitless commitments. It draws people out of themselves and beyond the present, sets their needs in a wider setting than private circumstances and instant gratification. Tradition raises conviction over consumption, civic duty over personal gain. Past models, whether religious, political, literary, etc., lift the bar of daily conduct. Tradition also holds leaders to higher standards. When citizens disregard the best exemplars of the past, they judge present leaders on partisan and material grounds alone, and leaders behave accordingly. But when they compare what leaders do and say today with what they said and did yesterday and long ago, they add posterity to current events and legacy to a leader’s performance. Citizens need a yardstick reaching back in time measuring actions and policies not only by their immediate effects, but also by their relation to founding principles and to divergences from them through history.
A healthy democracy needs a vigilant citizenry, and a
healthily
vigilant citizenry needs a reservoir of knowledge. Traditions must be there at hand, with citizens maintaining a permanent sense of what America is about. A roster of heroes and villains, a record of triumphs and catastrophes, a corpus of principles . . . they impart a living past that adds noncommercial, nonsocial stakes to the individual lives of otherwise private persons. An inheritance unfolds that every citizen may claim, the books, essays, and tales they read linking their separate existences to a regional, political, ethnic, religious, or other context and story within an American scheme.
The inspiring lines and climactic moments and memorable figures are ever available. It may be the words of Thoreau quietly explaining, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived.” Or Emerson urging, “Build, therefore, your own world.” Or the fateful stand of Frederick Douglass, a teenage slave, worked and whipped into servility by his master until he resolves to fight back, introducing the turnabout with, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” Or the sober spiritual musings of Emily Dickinson:
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes— . . .
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are—
None may teach it—Any—
’Tis the Seal Despair—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air—
When it comes, the Landscape listens—
Shadows—hold their breath—
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death—
We have two former candidates for the presidency meeting on a July morning in 1804 on the banks of the Hudson River for an affair of honor, the final encounter after years of political sparring. We have two failing ex-presidents holding on until July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years after they had signed the Declaration of Independence, one of them muttering as his last words, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” And there is the contemporary scene every summer afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial when families in bunches climb the steps and gaze at the monumental figure in his chair, then turn to the North wall and join other Americans in a silent read of the words inscribed there:
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
These are the materials of a richer existence, and they come from a narrow slice of time and one nation only. They raise personal experience to impersonal civic levels, and inspire citizens toward higher ambitions. They elevate popular discourse and rebut the coarseness of mass culture. They correct the dominance of passing manners and tastes. They provide everyone an underlying American-ness, a common lineage uniting citizens in the same way the king does in a monarchy, a church does in a theocracy, a dictator does in a dictatorship, and the Party does in communist states. Except that the American patrimony is evolving and ideal and accessible, the nation being “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” It remains for the people to keep those conceptions and propositions alive.
Because the American tradition lies in the hands of the populace, it does not demand conformity, nor does it homogenize different cultural, political, and ethnic strains in U.S. history. In fact, the opposite happens. People read and study the same things, but their knowledge amplifies differences at the same time that it grants them a shared inheritance. The more people know, the more they argue. They quarrel over, precisely, what America is about, over who the heroes are and who the villains are. They honor the Bill of Rights and respect electoral processes and revere Lincoln, but they wrangle endlessly over the Second Amendment, immigration, and the size of government. They select certain traditions as central, others as marginal or errant, classify certain outlooks as essentially American, others as un-American, and reinterpret the probity of annexations, Reconstruction, the Populist Movement, the New Deal, the Cold War, Reagan . . .
Knowledge breeds contention, then, but that’s how a pluralistic, democratic society works through rival interests and clashing ideologies. Disagreements run deep, and messy pursuits and cravings for power cloud the ideas and values in conflict. But the battles that ensue solicit the intelligence and conviction and rightness of the adversaries, and they collide armed with the ammunition of ideas and phrases, works of art and lessons in philosophy and religion, episodes from history and literature. An informed contentiousness serves a crucial function, forcing each antagonist to face potent dissenters, to come up with more evidence and stronger arguments. When values, ideas, and customs collide in an open public contest, one side wins and the other retires, not returning for further contest until it amends its case. And the winning side gains, too, for a steady and improving adversary keeps it from slipping into complacency and groupthink. Good ideas stay fresh by challenge, and bad ideas go away, at least until they can be modified and repackaged.
Knowledgeable antagonists elevate the process into a busy marketplace of ideas and policies, and further, at critical times, into something many people dread and regret, but that has, in truth, a sanative influence: a culture war. Culture wars break out when groups form that renounce basic, long-standing norms and values in a society and carry their agenda into mass media, schools, and halls of power. The battle lines aren’t just political or economic, and people don’t fight only over resources and access. They attack and defend the “hegemony,” that is, the systems of ideals, standards, customs, and expectations that govern daily affairs by ordinary people and big decisions by public figures. Defenders experience the system almost unconsciously as simply the way things are and ought to be, while attackers suffer it as a dynamic, oppressive, and ubiquitous construct. The conflict veers toward psycho-political and religious terrain where minds don’t easily meet and common grounds are lacking. The war is ideological, a trial of fundamental assumptions about justice, truth, beauty, and identity, and its outcome is sweeping. When local politicians raise property taxes in a county, they can alter real estate values, hire more schoolteachers, and shift millions of dollars from private to public use. But they don’t ignite a culture war. The change is too much a matter of degree, and the nuts and bolts of bureaucratic process obscure whatever cultural discords arise. But when a school district changes the reading list for sophomore English classes, deeper moral and spiritual meanings are activated. People who ignore the deliberations of school boards and pay no attention to changes in their property-tax assessments respond instantly pro and con to a teacher stating in the newspaper, “We need more works by women of color on the high school syllabus.” The decision implicates sensitive core values, and the fervor on both sides reflects how far tacit and dearly held beliefs have left the place of common sense and entered the swarm of controversy.
Not many people relish the warfare—who likes to hear basic faiths and values scorned and displaced?—and outside the ranks of intellectuals, artists, journalists, advocacy/interest groups, and other regular partisans, culture wars often appear as gratuitous and overblown occasions sowing disunity in the nation. Most likely, to parents waking up in the morning, rushing to feed the kids and drop them at school before heading to the office, the sight of a headline in the newspaper at the breakfast table trumpeting the latest flare-up strikes them as a distraction, not a battle cry. But in a larger view, not day-to-day but in the full scope of a century, culture wars serve a vital purpose in the sustenance and renewal of democratic affairs. They open new testing grounds for prevailing opinions and ideological challenges. They lift ideals out of the commonplace, positing that if ideals can’t survive debate then something must be wrong with them, or with the people who embrace them. They prevent living inspirations from hardening into routine doctrines, in the words of John Stuart Mill, into “a mere formal profession” instead of a “real and heartfelt conviction.” They shake up and realign political parties. They break down some institutions (single-sex colleges, for instance) and inaugurate others (for example, periodicals such as
Dissent
and
The Public Interest
).