The threat of ‘neo-idiocy’. By Henry Ergas in The Australian.
A fundamental conviction of Liberal democracy is that reason and politics could work together. Today, that has crumbled.
What was:
Its core was simple. Democracy does not just need its formal structures; it needs citizens who know how to argue.
Not shout, not posture, but submit their views to the judgment of others and even change their minds. [Jurgen Habermas] … called this “the force of the better argument” and considered it the only legitimate basis of political power.
This was Western modernity’s great achievement: that when it is asked “why?”, authority must answer — with answers that withstand scrutiny. Authority could no longer rest on God or tradition. It could only rest on consent: reasoned, revisable, formed through public argument.
Old media, for all its faults, filtered. Editors decided what mattered. Reporters had to justify claims. Stories passed through people whose credibility depended on not being wrong.
What is:
Then the internet created an enormous space in which those protections were absent.
Anonymity compounded the damage. It gave voice to those the gatekeepers had shut out. But it also dissolved the oldest constraint on public speech: the knowledge that you would be held to account. Mask the speaker’s identity and every inhibition against bad faith, abuse and sheer fantasy goes with it. Even free speech’s staunchest defenders — Milton, Defoe and Mill — feared it rendered freedom of expression unsustainable: but the internet made it ubiquitous. …
The shared world that democratic discourse requires shatters into hermetic fragments. This, Habermas suggested, is not solely, or even mainly, a failure of technology. It is a failure of character. …
Democratic citizenship requires psychological maturity: citizens strong enough in ego to renounce the fantasy of omnipotence, to tolerate uncertainty, to engage with genuine otherness without falling into projection or rage — or turning to violence.
The culture of the 1960s set out to overthrow the disciplines that sustained that maturity ethic. What replaced them was not liberation. … What the 1960s unleashed was a reversion to the permanently adolescent self, craving recognition rather than truth, for whom life is a theatre and to live is to be applauded.
Social media’s echo chamber universalised that condition and gave it political form. Surrounded only by reflections of itself, the self no longer encounters the otherness that alone can discipline its demands, train its impulses and instil what Tocqueville called democracy’s “habits of the heart”. …
The result is what we see on our streets, in universities and cultural institutions: the “neo-idiocy” of the highly instructed but semi-educated…
Legislation doesn’t begin to address the problem:
You cannot pass a law restoring people’s willingness to be wrong. Nor can you fine your way to intellectual seriousness. And regulation cannot recreate what has been lost: the patience to follow a complex argument, the basic trust that the other side is not simply your enemy. …
The greatest curse, Mill warned, is stupid opponents: ones who never force you to sharpen your wits.
Islam and its echo chamber of mosque culture and the Koran are the same anti-democratic phenomenon on steroids. Ironically, our leftists import Muslims for their votes! But the Islamists are incompatible with Western culture, and seek only to destroy it and replace it with their own.