Average human minds, consumed in everyday struggles or in pursuit of normative ambitions, are too unrehearsed to deal with the complexities of the wider society and the world. But often, these minds are burdened with intricate social, economic, political, and identity issues due to democratic expansions, relatively freer societies, and the growth of mass and social media.
The degree of interest or disinterest of people to participate in such exercises on difficult and diverse matters, often beyond their knowhow, sometimes depends on national and class culture. But in the end, the result generally is some chaos, lack of cohesion, and disturbance of some kind. Enlightened minds find this absence of refinement a waste of human and societal energy.
But hardly there is a way out. Social, communication, and cognitive experts, since the advent of modernity, put in a lot of thought on these issues, yet failed to solve the contradictions fully. Is participation of everyone in every discourse possible in any meaningful way?
Does democracy really demand it? Can a poor cultivator or fisherman really have any worthwhile opinion on national economy, or can they relate their group’s interest to the national level policy options or limitations, which also involves other complex interests and factors?
Or should a superstitious or uninformed random person’s casual or fluctuating opinion on a legal-ethical, state ideology, or foreign policy issue count? Solving the conflict among man’s long-held inner perceptive tendencies, the multi-faceted outer world, and objective interpretations of truth is no easy proposition.
In the early 20th century, Walter Lippmann dismissed public opinion as useless and argued that public opinion is erratic, volatile, incoherent, and hardly has any genuine relevance on its face value, in apex level policy formulation. He found that people, ultimately, live in a “pseudo environment” or in an imagined world, socially constructed and mixed with truth and fictions of their minds. He and political scientist Gabriel Almond posited that a group of top experts should analyze data and render policy advice to the political leaders whose responsibility it was to sell those to the public with their charisma.
He maintained that policy decisions should not be contingent to public opinion. In a way, he suggested for power centres to be spread out rather than consolidated in the hands of elected politicians. Chomsky criticized this position on public reason and decision-making as undemocratic.
Lippman essentially termed ideal popular democracy impracticable. Chomsky and Edward Herman, on the other hand, borrowed the term “manufacturing consent” coined by Lippmann and floated their version of the matter. While Lippmann underlined the importance of manufacturing consent neutrally and suggested its use to create social cohesion, Herman and Chomsky argued that morally repugnant consent is manufactured in unethical ways by the powerful classes, holding or influencing political offices and other pillars of state power structure, eg, media, overtly or quietly.
Often, media voluntarily falls in line for a tacit understanding, eg, many of the US media houses during the Vietnam War. To mitigate the quagmire, Chomsky stressed upon the moral and bold “responsibilities of the intellectuals.” Manufacturing consent had become one of the most popular buzzwords in the study of mass communication and political sociology.
Now it has turned into a platitude due to random overuse.
In the developing world, there are other problems too. Unlike the advanced societies, people of these countries are infested with superstition, irrational pre-modern values, regressive religious beliefs, etc. All these add to this confusion of narrow societal or world views and comprehensive objective perception of things.
This, in fact, brings back Lippmann’s idea in some way. It seems that some kind of mediation between the general perceptions of the public and the intricacies of the wider society and the world is necessary to make public opinion more informed, concise, stable, and relevant. This can make popular democracy more effective.
Independent media, the intelligentsia, and CSOs are the institutions that can do the job. In the advanced capitalist societies, the challenge is prevention of the co-option of these institutions by corporate powers; in the developing world, it’s the coalition and nexus thereof among the usurpers of state resources, ie corrupt businessmen or fake entrepreneurs, politicians, bureaucrats, professionals, intellectuals, judicial systems, and so on.
This unholy alliance also constantly pressurizes, yields power over, or lures these check-and-balance institutions, and has already corrupted the latter to a substantial extent.
It will take some unique, brave, and sustained initiatives from some quarters of society to reset these watchdog institutions, reinject the core values and intrinsic noble spirits of the same, and re-start. How and when that will happen is difficult to foretell.
Sarwar Jahan Chowdhury is an opinion contributor to Dhaka Tribune.