Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason William Davies

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
William Davies
Hannah Arendt, whose thinking is at the heart of our center, believed that persuasion was at the heart of civilized government. At the same time, however, Arendt well knew the limits of persuasion. When confronted by ingrained prejudices, ironclad ideologies, or faceless bureaucracies, reasoned persuasion stands little chance. The well-known "rage against the machine" is a rational response to a bureaucratic system of power that claims to be rational, natural, and unavoidable. The real source of rage, Arendt understood, is a sense of powerlessness born of "a much deeper hatred of bourgeois society." Arendt sees that in the face of such hypocritical quasi-rational structures of power, rage can often appear to be "the only way to set the scales of justice right again."
Rage can seem righteous just as today rage against immigrants, white people, and experts is justified by those crusaders who argue that in an unjust and hypocritical system, rage is necessary for radical political change. Such collective rage may inspire virtues of courage, loyalty, and meaning; but the virtues of rage come at a cost: It is the disintegration of the common sense and common viewpoints that unites us beyond our political, racial, class, and sexual identities.
Faith in a rational politics was shaken in the 1930s, but the rise of totalitarian governments led democracies to reject a politics of angry mobilization. We are witnessing, once again, the retreat of reason and the return of rage as a key driver of political and social relations. At a moment when materially comfortable societies are teetering and the visceral attraction of tribalism is rising all around us, we must ask how our liberal democracies can survive and thrive amidst intensifying partisanship and the decline of public reason. The flip-flopping, nonscientific nature of our collective responses to travel bans, vaccines, masks, and lockdowns make clear that public discourse is driven by emotions rather than reason.
Social Media is not to blame for the rage that is ravishing our society, but the algorithms that drive social media do allow emotional and angry opinions to spread with unprecedented vigor and vitality. It is easy to condemn social media for its filter bubbles, its spread of rumors and conspiracies, and its polarizing impact on our lives; social media is so successful in splintering our society, however, because the very foundations of liberal democracies are so tenuous. And the rage that social media thrives upon answers a real need for belonging and conflict and sacrifice at the heart of the human condition.
The Hannah Arendt Center Conference Rage and Reason responds to the undeniable fact that rage and emotions are increasingly a force in our political and cultural lives. We ask:
• How can democratic rage be harnessed in social and political movements?
• Is rage essential to call out systemic and ingrained injustice?
• How can a politics of rage acknowledge rational and expert authority?
• If humans are tribal beings, how can they live in multicultural liberal societies?
• Are experts and elites themselves simply one tribe defending their self-interests?
• Must social media contribute to the fracturing of society into raging tribes?
• Is there a common interest in society knowable through reason?
Above all, we ask, how can we uphold our liberal institutions and our common world in the midst of the polarization and fracturing of that world?

[@paulwolinsky1538]

William Davies touches on a number of important topics included in debates or discussions of our current epistemological crises, but somehow, he still doesn't, in a way I think Arendt would be forced to, confront the power dynamics inherent in the problematic he himself lays out.
Davies does well to point out the combination of financial priorities with those of speed, early in his discussion. And this is of obvious importance, when the scale and intensity of these priorities are so dominant.
But while he talks about the importance of consensus, pragmatism and how these and other things factor into decision-making, he doesn't really even bring up what the decisions bear on in the real world until towards the end of the talk, when he brings up climate change at 35:19, and the COVID controversy (I forget when, here).
In both of these hugely impactful crises, despite the fact that there has been a great deal said and published about them, in one case,(climate change) media conglomerates control the flow of information so that it is still conceivable that there are large parts of the population that are unaware of the nature of the problem. There is no involvement of a democratic response, because information is not being shared in proportion to its importance or its significance for a democratic population. So, as in a mathematical equation, the signs or markers for "democracy" cancel or are cancelled out, and we are left with Arendt's totalitarian world, which is some sense, just an elaboration of Gramsci's hegemony.
With COVID, where 4 per cent of the world's population experienced 20 per cent of world COVID deaths, it can be said that much of the population simply wished to stay ignorant of science and medical expertise, and so there were not fertile or adequate roots in the population for an appropriate response. It must be added, however, that even the government's responses were often inept, misinformed, or ill-timed, and occurred within a business context of high-stakes pharmaceutical marketing and distribution.
All in all, Davies does a good job of speaking to the limits both of expertise and discourse in what are non-democratic and even anti-democratic contexts.

[@sash3497]

Thank you for posting. Didn’t Freud say all thought Is based in emotion ? To be given neuro scientific evidence to support this making it more respectable. Or indeed Nietzsche say similar ?
I like the point about the parallel state and the central banks. Great talk.
Fast thinking -,impulsive - reminded of the two systems fast and slow.