The Beginning of Infinity - By David Deutsch Page 0,173
stream of issues (yet still continue to disagree all the time). It is not surprising because, in their case, there are observable facts that they can use to test their theories. They converge with each other on any given issue because they are all converging on the objective truth. In politics it is customary to be cynical about that sort of convergence being possible.
But that is a pessimistic view. Throughout the West, a great deal of philosophical knowledge that is nowadays taken for granted by almost everyone – say, that slavery is an abomination, or that women should be free to go out to work, or that autopsies should be legal, or that promotion in the armed forces should not depend on skin colour – was highly controversial only a matter of decades ago, and originally the opposite positions were taken for granted. A successful truth-seeking system works its way towards broad consensus or near-unanimity – the one state of public opinion that is not subject to decision-theoretic paradoxes and where ‘the will of the people’ makes sense. So convergence in the broad consensus over time is made possible by the fact that all concerned are gradually eliminating errors in their positions and converging on objective truths. Facilitating that process – by meeting Popper’s criterion as well as possible – is more important than which of two contending factions with near-equal support gets its way at a particular election.
In regard to the apportionment issue too, since the United States’ Constitution was instituted there have been enormous changes in the prevailing conception of what it means for a government to be ‘representative’. Recognizing the right of women to vote, for instance, doubled the number of voters – and implicitly admitted that in every previous election half the population had been disenfranchised, and the other half over-represented compared with a just representation. In numerical terms, such injustices dwarf all the injustices of apportionment that have absorbed so much political energy over the centuries. But it is to the credit of the political system, and of the people of the United States and of the West in general, that, while they were fiercely debating the fairness of shifting a few percentage points’ worth of representation between one state and another, they were also debating, and making, these momentous improvements. And they too became uncontroversial.
Apportionment systems, electoral systems and other institutions of human cooperation were for the most part designed, or evolved, to cope with day-to-day controversy, to cobble together ways of proceeding without violence despite intense disagreement about what would be best. And the best of them succeed as well as they do because they have, often unintentionally, implemented solutions with enormous reach. Consequently, coping with controversy in the present has become merely a means to an end. The purpose of deferring to the majority in democratic systems should be to approach unanimity in the future, by giving all concerned the incentive to abandon bad ideas and to conjecture better ones. Creatively changing the options is what allows people in real life to cooperate in ways that no-go theorems seem to say are impossible; and it is what allows individual minds to choose at all.
The growth of the body of knowledge about which there is unanimous agreement does not entail a dying-down of controversy: on the contrary, human beings will never disagree any less than they do now, and that is a very good thing. If those institutions do, as they seem to, fulfil the hope that it is possible for changes to be for the better, on balance, then human life can improve without limit as we advance from misconception to ever better misconception.
TERMINOLOGY
Representative government A system of government in which the composition or opinions of the legislature reflect those of the people.
Social-choice theory The study of how the ‘will of society’ can be defined in terms of the wishes of its members, and of what social institutions can cause society to enact its will, thus defined.
Popper’s criterion Good political institutions are those that make it as easy as possible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and to remove rulers or policies without violence when they are.
MEANINGS OF ‘THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY’ ENCOUNTERED IN THIS CHAPTER
– Choice that involves creating new options rather than weighing existing ones.
– Political institutions that meet Popper’s criterion.
SUMMARY
It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the