Under the Cover: Too Dumb For Democracy

Too Dumb for Democracy? was born of my love of procrastination and a lucky phone call. Years ago, during my master’s degree at the University of Ottawa, I was studying democratic deliberation. One afternoon, I was tired of reading and writing it about it, so I went to my bookshelf and picked up a book I hoped would have nothing to do with the subject of my studies. It was Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza, a book about neuroscience and human behaviour. I got a couple pages in and realized that my thinking on politics and democracy was about to change. A lot.I finished my master’s and took off to South Korea to teach English for a year and a half. During that time, I read a tonne about neuroscience and political psychology. And lots of Nietzsche for good measure. I worked just as hard on this stuff during my years away from school as I did while enrolled in an academic program. Freed from the constraints of a scholarly setting and prescribed reading lists—which can be more stifling than you might expect—I started making connections between subjects and ways of thinking while enjoying routine “A hah!” moments that might have been obvious to others, but hadn’t been to me.Years later, I was doing my PhD at the University of British Columbia. My dalliance with neuroscience and democracy had morphed into an interest in psychology and political decision making and I was writing my dissertation on the good, the bad, and the ugly of how we reach political judgments—and how we might come to reach better ones. I focused on imagining ways we could bring about outcomes that are based on fact, reflection, and reasons we can share rather than subterranean bias, self-delusion, and, well, bullshit.I started doing media work. Commentary. Op-eds. Public essays. Then, one day, I got a call from an editor one day who asked me if I was writing a book.“Of course I am,” I said. If you’re a writer and someone asks you if you’re writing a book, you are most certainly writing a book. That was it. I drew on my years of thinking and reading and researching and writing about political decision making and committed to turning out something that was fresh, readable, human, and—I very much hope—useful for bringing about a more open, just, egalitarian democratic society.Around the time I was writing the book, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. The world plunged deeper into a democratic recession. The alt-right rose. The United Kingdom rebelled against globalism with a ‘Yes’ vote on Brexit. The book seemed more timely and important and useful every day. I joked, morbidly, at the time and still do that my early career has been spent successfully riding a bear market—a democratic market in decline. But I always add that I’d like nothing more than to put myself out of business by helping solve all our self-government challenges. That’s not happened. Nor will it. But my work will remain directed, like the book, towards thinking through the problems we face in democracies and developing solutions for addressing them so that we can do better tomorrow than we did yesterday.* * *Thank you to Nathaniel at Goose Lane Editions and David Moscrop for this piece. Read more Under the Cover.