Light from Other Minds

Political pundits may be the most powerful force in our political culture. The dictionary tells us that the pundit is somebody with knowledge and wisdom. It is also cognate with, perhaps derived from pandit, the Indian word for a Brahman who is an expert in Hindu culture, law and philosophy. In contemporary America, the word has been stretched almost beyond recognition of its original meaning. Pundits may have the pulse of public opinion, but they rarely display wisdom in judging it. Since they are credited as experts, the “ordinary citizen” tends to take what they say as political wisdom. What a properly functioning democracy requires is a citizenry educated in the complexity of political reality. Instead of providing that education, pundits tend to replicate the ideological certainties of the parties or report the opposing views without evaluating them. The result is chatter rather than thoughtful reflection. The compression of the short article or sound bite is anathema to complexity. It is the mark of an educated citizen that he acknowledges the limits of his knowledge, especially of subjects, in which he has no training. In a field such as economics, populated by so many variables, the probability of the truth of any claim does not begin to approach that of the natural sciences. (The phrase “political economy” is enough to caution against seeing it as a [natural] science,) Those who are experts in the field may disagree among themselves, so coming up against the limitations of his or her own knowledge the citizen may decide in favor of one side or another for ideological reasons or from a genuine sense that one side is more convincing than the other—ideally, with an awareness that a view or a policy that issues from the view may be mistaken or misdirected, requiring a change of direction. Ideally, a leader must combine conviction of what ought to be done with an open-minded awareness of unintended consequences. The model for change is experiment, which allows for failure. The experimental attitude should trump ideology. The scientist for whom experiment is a way of life has a built in tolerance for failure as well as desire for success. Failure may in fact be productive of future success when it points the way to another road to be taken. In contrast, the politician, who needs success in order to survive, cannot afford failure. Moreover, whether a particular policy or program succeeds cannot be measured with the precision with which one measures it in science. Acknowledging the limitations or partiality of our understanding should lead to a willingness to receive, in John Stuart Mill’ sp hrase,“light from other minds” (Himmelfarb, 92). Mill wrote a pair of essays on his mentor Jeremy Bentham, a liberal and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a conservative, vividly exemplifying the phrase. Without disowning Bentham, he exposes the narrowness as well as the value of Bentham’s teaching. In the companion essay on Coleridge, Mill, the liberal, enters into the mind of the conservative Coleridge in order to receive light from it. What he finds of value is his method of suspending judgment of an established institution or opinion in order to discover its meaning. The pursuit of meaning does not exclude the question of whether it is true or good or useful; it only postpones it. In discovering the meaning or purpose of an institution or tradition, one can then judge its abiding value fairly. The method is an implicit rebuke to the premature radical impulse to dismiss long-standing institutions thatseem to thwart progress. We should try to understand why they came into being and the human needs they satisfy before passing judgment. Mill follows Coleridge’s method in the