The Marketplace of Ideas: Reflections

Those who have argued for liberal democracy have long argued for, as one of its merits, its affording a "marketplace for ideas" marrying popular sovereignty with rational discourse. Those who had arguments to make relevant to the public's life would go before it, present them as best they could, and in the process, at least over the long run, good ideas would prove more persuasive than bad ones with the generality of the public, such that the bad would fall by the wayside as the good get taken up--all as, of course, even the good ideas would be prevented from petrifying into thoughtless orthodoxy because discourse would allow for their being tested again and again, and possibly challenged by superior understandings later, to the benefit of society at large.

Of course, this vision has its prerequisites. Not the least of these is an alert public sufficiently educated to consider arguments rationally, and a media which takes seriously its obligation to keep them informed, and present them with the range of ideas for which a plausible claim could be made for presentation to that public. As many have observed again and again these prerequisites have not always been satisfied in liberal democracies, even at a very high level of economic and human development that should have provided at least the material base for meeting those prerequisites. Far from being alert and educated the public is distracted (by the crushing cares of everyday life, by the delusions encouraged in them at every turn) and, in spite of its years of schooling, left unequipped to deal with rational arguments as such by them (not the training of the mind but its indoctrination what Authority demands and Authority usually gets), let alone bring to bear any broad background on specific issues of the day, all as the media is more concerned with service to its masters than service to a public with very contrary interests. Certainly in his day C. Wright Mills was harshly critical of the situation of the country on both grounds, which shortly after left Gabriel Kolko remarking in his Main Currents in Modern American History that Americans' understanding of their society and the world of which it was a part was "perhaps the most astonishing dissociation between reality and theory ever produced in a nominally literate society."

A half century on few would say the situation is any better. Many would say the situation is in fact far worse. The American public now has on average some fourteen or fifteen years of formal education--but if the quantity of its schooling suggests people educated up to a junior college level, their literacy and numeracy are those of sixth graders. The media ecosystem would seem more developed than ever before, the cost of accessing a great deal of information nearly zero with all this has meant for the ability of those desirous of doing so to access a wider range of information and analysis. However, the largest part of that media have, due to the development of the economic realities within which they must exist and the rotting of the ideology by which they have operated, become more monopolized, more servile to powerful interests, more cowardly than they have ever been before in a manner all too evident in the "one sideism" they practice, that, for all the limits to the ability of the public to cope with the situation, has still left them increasingly alienated from the official line in a manner recalling the conventional wisdom about people in decaying "totalitarian" societies: they don't know what's really going on, but they're sure the line they're getting isn't it. Faced with this they unavoidably gravitate toward the alternatives among which they are ill-equipped to choose, some perhaps finding more truth than they otherwise would, but many others led down very dangerous byways, the more in as the gatekeepers of the Internet have created a situation in which Internet users' access to other views is extremely uneven, and this probably worsened rather than alleviated by their attempts to channel the public toward the established sources. In the process the supposed democracy of the marketplace of which sings appears in fact a kakistocracy, such as markets so often become--and our marketplace of ideas indeed a kakistocracy of ideas where, however it happens, it is the worst ideas as well as people that prevail.