Minority Rule Is What Lets the Majority Keep Its Myths

Here is a connection I do not see made often: between the way we are governed and the fact that most people still hold religious beliefs that would not survive contact with a real decision.

The usual explanations for the persistence of religion are psychological. People fear death, want meaning, inherit what their parents held. All true. But there is a political explanation as well, and it points at the structure of the state rather than at the structure of the mind.

Nobody Asks You

Consider what a citizen of a representative regime is actually asked to decide about. Nothing. Once every few years he picks a person, and the person and the person's party then handle every question of substance without consulting him again.

This means that a person can go through an entire life without ever having to answer, with consequences, a single hard question. Should the country go to war? Not his call. Should the state permit abortion, and until when? Not his call. Should a dying patient be allowed to ask for death? Should embryos be used in research? Should we spend money looking for life on other planets, or on cures, or on weapons? Somebody else decides, and he is free to hold whatever opinion he likes about it, because the opinion costs nothing and changes nothing.

A belief that is never tested against a decision never has to be coherent. You can believe that life begins at conception and never have to vote on what that implies for a woman you know. You can believe that the dead are with God and never have to decide whether to keep a body breathing for another year. You can believe the universe was made for us and never have to fund or refuse a telescope. Minority rule takes every one of these questions off your desk, and with the questions goes the pressure to think them through.

Myths Survive Where They Are Not Used

Religion is the clearest case. Its claims are about exactly the matters on which the state decides for us: life, death, the body, war, retaliation, what the world is and what we owe each other. If those decisions were ours, the claims would be tested every year against real cases, and claims that are tested tend to be modified or dropped.

Look at where religious belief has already eroded. It has eroded most among people whose work forces them to decide things against reality: physicians, engineers, scientists. Not because they are cleverer, but because a belief that would make you do your job badly gets quietly set aside. The rest of the population is never put in that position by the political system. Their beliefs are decorative, and decorative beliefs are cheap to keep.

I have argued elsewhere that people do not much want the truth outside the domains where being wrong hurts. Representative government is a machine for making sure that almost no domain hurts.

What Direct Decisions Would Do

Now imagine the same person under a direct democracy at the highest level. Several times a year he votes on questions of the kind listed above, and the outcome is real: the law changes, the money moves, the war is declared or not.

The first thing that happens is that the question has to be faced. Not "what does my tradition say" but "what do I want to happen to this patient, this woman, this soldier, this budget". A great deal of religious doctrine does not survive that translation. It was never meant to; it was meant to be recited.

The second thing is that the debate happens in public, among people who will each cast a vote. A position has to be argued, not merely held. Arguments from scripture do not travel well outside the congregation, and in a national argument about euthanasia the person who says "because God forbids it" is discovering, possibly for the first time, how little that moves anyone who does not already agree.

The third thing is repetition. One hard question changes nothing; twenty a decade do. Each one is another occasion on which the mythological account of the world is set beside the practical one and found less useful.

The result is more secularism, not because anyone is argued out of religion, but because the arrangement that let religion go untested is removed. The beliefs that remain will be the ones people are willing to act on and defend in front of their neighbours, which is a much smaller set than the ones they are willing to report on a survey.

Why This Matters Beyond Religion

I care about this for a reason larger than my views on religion.

The questions I listed, war and retaliation especially, are the ones on which a species with our weapons can destroy itself. We are currently answering them with a mixture of leaders' interests and populations' myths, and the myths are load-bearing: they supply the certainty, the enemies, the willingness to die and to kill. A population that has had to face real questions about war and death, repeatedly and with consequences, is a population with fewer myths in that region, and a population with fewer myths in that region is harder to march.

That is the path we are not on. The one we are on lets a minority decide and lets the majority keep its stories, and the stories are exactly the material a minority needs when it wants a war.