I started to write a second follow-up post on the Local Gov Camp data-visualisation session (I’ll probably finish it later today) when I stumbled on this post on conversational politics (in a very wide sense of the term) from my favourite US blogger – it made the point I was inching towards better than I could:
“It turns out (from a study of ethics rather than our topic, politics) that people “have a hard time offering an account of their moral reasoning that contains consistent substantive content.” They are “largely incapable of articulating their moral decision-making process in substantive, propositional terms.” Often, their responses to open-ended questions are rationalizations of what they have done, not reasons that will guide what they do.”
A couple of weeks ago, I posted here on some of the thinking that casts doubt on the suitability of voters to …. er … vote – a sort of briefing for a ‘devil’s advocate’ – and I’ve been looking for way of articulating any of the powerful reasons why the political process matters.
Do read the whole post because it’s very interesting on the way we respond to multiple choice questions and how easy it is to predict our conclusions. But something else occurs to me.
Peter concludes:
“We ought to give good reasons to justify (or criticize) our own actions. We should be interested in other people’s reasons and their reactions to ours. The act of interpreting the public thoughts of working-class urban youth thus has a moral motivation, even if those reasons are not strongly influential in their own lives. I don’t think that current psychological research precludes the hope that good arguments can change people’s implicit stances or premises, which then affect their behaviors.
In short, we should strive to understand other people’s arguments in case they are right and to decide how to respond effectively if they are not.”
Surely there’s a bigger opportunity than understanding how people articulate and assert their political preferences? I’m really interested in the way that people go beyond this and collectively describe the problems that they face – particularly ones that aren’t well-trodden arguments that have gone mainstream. It’s one step further away from the politics that Peter is writing about – but currently one that is monopolised by the small number of social forces that shape our perceptions and define our options so effectively.
Can’t think of a word for that collective entity – can I just refer to it as Babylon seeing as I’ve got Bob Marley playing in the next room at the moment?
