Democracy Breathes

In Clark Miller’s 2008 “Civic Epistemologies: Consulting Knowledge and Oder in Political Communities”, he spins a fine web of connections to explain the topic of Civil Epistemologies. To untangle the skein and help me understand the concepts in a good conceptual way, I decided to diagram some of the concepts that he explains and create a few metaphors. The most important one has to do with the way that Democracy handles deliberation. But first some of the supporting framework.

The concept of Knowledge-Orders is in constructed in three stages:

1.) Knowledge as complex judgments.

2.) Complex Judgments as Dynamic Social Processes.

3.) Knowledge & Social Processes coproduced, resulting in the yin/yang of Epistemic Frameworks vs Social & Political arrangements.

Further, the Epistemic swims with the Social in a co-production dance that itself has three layers: A.) Processes for producing Knowledge claims. B.) Knowledge conflict & contestation. C.)_ Collective processes.

Looking at #2 again, we see Complex Judgments as Dynamic social processes where competing knowledge claims are:

• Articulated

• Deliberated

• Negotiated

• Discarded

• Valorized (this is where emergence takes place)

So, what’s going on might be defined as “Deliberation”. This is where the back and forth goes on in Democracy and also where my metaphor comes in. Miller explains the process itself as being “stable over short periods of time” but with room for divergence and later reintegration. I say “Democracy breathes”. Imagine the democratic process taking a deep breath, inhaling divergent ideas and different ways of viewing the world. As the state’s lungs reach capacity, filled with chaos, a threshold is reached and reintegration begins. The capillaries start to distribute oxygen into the whole system in the form of ideas and the lungs begin to relax as reintegration occurs.

One example of how this process itself is heterogeneous is the difference between the United States and Europe. The US has a low threshold for democratic participation- virtually anyone can join in. The lungs of democracy expand wide in a deep breath, taking in many divergent points of view. But this takes time and the exhale of reintegration is long in coming. Conversely, Europe has a fairly high bar for participation, a more narrow set of ideas are considered, so the process ends more quickly. Their cycle of democratic breath is more staccato and quick, albeit shallow in comparison to the US model.

Either way, the process of divergence and reintegration might be violent or peaceful. Miller goes on to explain how this may happen from changes in the Epistemic, the Social, or both. Pluralist Democracies have lots of diverse views to be considered, but usually things go peacefully. That’s the difference between a stable, heterogeneous, Democratic transition of power and violent coupes or other less optimal changes in regime.

Although it was dramatic, Bush v. Gore might be compared to the current chaos in the Middle East in what may be termed Despot v. Populace. The former was peaceful in the end, even if the nation hung in a state of uncertainty for weeks before the Democratic exhale was complete. At that point of re-integration, Bush emerged as victor, but the true winners were the US citizens, despite their particular preference for a specific candidate. Again, as flawed as the process was, it happened with no bloodshed and healthy democratic process continued to thrive.