Noocracy (/noʊˈɒkrəsi/ or /ˈnoʊ.əkrəsi/), or "aristocracy of the wise", as originally defined by Plato, is a system of governance where decision making is in the hands of philosophers, similar to his idea of Philosopher kings. The idea was further expanded upon by geologist Vladimir Vernadsky, and philosophers (who attended Vernadsky's lectures) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Édouard Le Roy, and their concept of the Noosphere.
Etymology
The word itself is derived from Greek nous, Gen. noos (νους) meaning "mind" or "intellect", and "kratos" (κράτος), "authority" or "power".
Development
One of the first attempts to implement such a political system was perhaps Pythagoras' "city of the wise" that he planned to build in Italy together with his followers, the order of "mathematikoi". In modern history, similar concepts were introduced by Vladimir Vernadsky, who did not use this term, but the term "noosphere".
As defined by Plato, noocracy is considered to be the future political system for the entire human race, replacing democracy ("the authority of the crowd") and other forms of government.
Mikhail Epstein
defined noocracy as "the thinking matter increases its mass in nature
and geo- and biosphere grow into noosphere, the future of the humanity
can be envisioned as noocracy—that is the power of the collective brain
rather than separate individuals representing certain social groups or
society as whole".
Rationales for noocracy
Irrationality of voters
Supporters
of the noocratic theory mainly depart from the empirical evidence that
most voters in modern democracies are largely ignorant, misinformed and
irrational. Therefore, one person one vote
mechanism proposed by democracy cannot be used to produce efficient
policy outcomes, for which the transfer of power to a smaller, informed
and rational group would be more appropriate. The irrationality of
voters inherent in democracies can be explained by two major behavioral
and cognitive patterns. Firstly, most of the voters think that the
marginal contribution of their vote will not make a difference on
election outcomes; therefore, they do not find it useful to inform
themselves on political matters.
In other terms, due to the required time and effort of acquiring new
information, voters rationally prefer to remain ignorant. Moreover, it
has been shown that most citizens process political information in
deeply biased, partisan, motivated ways rather than in dispassionate,
rational ways.
This psychological phenomenon causes voters to strongly identify
themselves with a certain political group, specifically find evidence to
support arguments aligning with their preferred ideological
inclinations, and eventually vote with a high level of bias.
Democracy's susceptibility for bad policies
Irrational
political behaviors of voters prevent them from making calculated
choices and opting for the right policy proposals. On the other hand,
many political experiments have shown that as voters get more informed,
they tend to support better policies, demonstrating that acquisition of
information has a direct impact on rational voting. For example, Martin
Gilens notes in his research that low-income democrats tend to have more
intolerant thoughts pertinent to LGBT rights, whereas high-income
democrats have the opposite preferences.
Moreover, supporters of noocracy see a greater danger in the fact that
politicians will actually prefer to implement the policy decisions of
citizens to win elections and stabilize their power, without paying
particular attention to the content and further outcomes of these
policies.
In democracies, the problem is thus not only that voters are prone to
make bad policy decisions, but also that politicians are incentivized to
implement these policies due to personal benefits. Therefore, noocrats
argue that it makes sense to limit the voting power of citizens in order
to prevent bad policy outcomes.
Use of expertise for efficient outcomes
According
to noocrats, given the complex nature of political decisions, it is not
reasonable to assume that a citizen would have the necessary knowledge
to decide on means to achieve their political aims. In general,
political actions require a lot of social scientific knowledge from
various fields, such as economics, sociology, international relations,
and public policy; however, an ordinary voter is hardly specialized
enough in any of those fields to make the optimal decision. To address
this issue, Christiano proposes a ruling system based on division of
political labor, in which citizens set the agenda for political
discussions and determine the aims of the society, whereas legislators
are in charge of deciding on the means to achieve these aims.
For noocrats, transferring the decision-making mechanism to a body of
specifically trained, specialized and experienced body is expected to
result in superior and more efficient policy outcomes. Recent economic
success of some countries that have a sort of noocratic ruling element
provides basis for this particular argument in favor of noocracy.
For instance, Singapore has a political system that favors
meritocracy; the path to government in Singapore is structured in such a
way that only those with above-average skills are identified with
strict university-entrance exams, recruiting processes, etc., and then
rigorously trained to be able to devise best the solutions that benefit
the entire society. In the words of country’s founding father, Lee Kuan
Yew, Singapore is a society based on effort and merit, not wealth or
privilege depending on birth.
This system primarily works due to citizens’ belief that political
leaders tend to have a better understanding of country’s long-term plans
than themselves; therefore, as they see positive policy outcomes, they
tend to go along with the system, rather than complain about the
meritocratic dimensions. For example, most citizens praise their
government in Singapore, stating that it managed to transform Singapore
from a third world country to a developed economy, and that it
successfully fostered loyalty in its citizens towards the country and
gave birth to a unique concept of Singaporean citizenship despite a
great level of ethnic diversity. In order to develop further Singapore’s
technocratic system, some thinkers, like Parag Khanna, have proposed
for the country to adapt a model of direct technocracy, demanding
citizen input in essential matters through online polls, referenda,
etc., and asking for a committee of experts to analyze this data to
determine the best course of action.
Criticisms
Noocracies, like technocracies, have been criticized for meritocratic
failings, such as upholding of a non-egalitarian aristocratic ruling
class. Others have upheld more democratic ideals as better epistemic
models of law and policy. Noocracy criticisms come in multiple forms,
two of which are those focused on the efficacy of noocracies and the
political viability of them.
Criticisms of noocracy in all its forms - including technocracy, meritocracy, and epistocracy (the focus of Jason Brennan's
oft-cited book) - range from support of direct democracy instead to
proposed alterations to our consideration of representation in
democracy. Professor Hélène Landemore, while arguing for representatives
to effectively enact legislation important to the polity, criticizes
conceptions of representation that aim especially to remove the people
from the process of making decisions, and thereby nullify their
political power. Noocracy, especially as it is conceived in Jason Brennan's Against Democracy,
aims specifically to separate the people from the decision on the basis
of the immensely superior knowledge of officials who will presumably
make superior decisions to laypeople.
Noocracy as anti-democratic
Jason
Brennan's epistocracy, specifically, is at odds with what is commonly
considered the supreme form of government - democracy - and with certain
criteria for democracies that theorists have proposed. Robert Dahl's Polyarchy
sets out certain rules for democracies that govern many people and the
rights that the citizens must be granted. His demand that the government
not discriminatorily heed the preferences of full members of the polity
is abridged by Brennan's "restricted suffrage" and "plural voting"
schemes of epistocracy.
In the eighth chapter of his book, Brennan posits a system of graduated
voting power that gives people more votes based on established levels
of education achieved, with the amount of additional votes granted to a
hypothetical citizen increasing at each level, from turning sixteen to
completing high school, a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and so
forth.
Dahl wrote, however, that any democracy that rules over a large group
of people must accept and validate "alternative sources of information."
Granting the full powers of citizenship based on a system like formal
education attainment does not account for the other ways that people can
consume information, is the commonly cited argument, and still eschews
consideration for the uneducated within a group.
Inefficiency of experts
Noocracy
also receives criticism for its claims to efficiency. Brennan writes
that one of the many reasons that common people cannot be trusted to
make decisions for the state is because reasoning is commonly motivated,
and, therefore, people decide what policies to support based on their
connection to those proposing and supporting the measures, not based on
what's most effective. He contrasts real people with the
ultra-reasonable vulcan that he mentions throughout the book. That vulcan reflects Plato's philosopher king and, in a more realistic sense, the academic elites whom Michael Yong satirized in his essay The Rise of the Meritocracy.
Modern political theorists don't necessarily denounce a biased
viewpoint in politics, however, though those biases are not written
about as they are commonly considered. Professor Landemore utilizes the
existence of cognitive diversity to argue that any group of people that
represents great diversity in their approaches to problem-solving
(cognition) is more likely to succeed than groups that do not.
She further illustrates her point by employing the example of a New
Haven task force made up of private citizens of many careers,
politicians, and police who needed to reduce crime on a bridge without
lighting, and they all used different aspects of their experiences to
discover the solution that was to install solar lamps on the bridge.
That solution has proven effective, with not a single mugging reported
there since the lamp installation as of November 2010.
Her argument lies mainly in the refutation of noocratic principles, for
they do not utilize the increased problem solving skill of a diverse
pool, when the political system because as debate between elites alone,
and not a debate between the whole polity.
To some theorists, noocracy is built on a fantasy that will
uphold current structures of elite power, while maintaining its
inefficacy. Writing for the New Yorker, Caleb Crain notes that there's little to say that the vulcans that Brennan exalt actually exist.
Crain mentions a study that appears in Brennan's book that shows that
even those who have proven that they have superb skills in mathematics
do not employ those skills if their use threatens their already-held
political belief. While Brennan utilized that study to demonstrate how
deeply rooted political tribalism is in all people, Crain drew on this
study to question the very nature of an epistocratic body that can make
policy with a greater regard to knowledge and truth than the ordinary
citizen can.
The only way to correct for that seems, to many, to be to widen the
circle of deliberation (as discussed above) because policy decisions
that were made with more input and approval from the people last longer
and even garner the agreement of the experts.
To further illustrate that experts, too, are flawed, Cairn enumerates
some of the expert-endorsed political decisions that he has deemed
failures in recent years: "invading Iraq, having a single European
currency, grinding subprime mortgages into the sausage known as
collateralized debt obligations."
With the contention around the reasoning for those political
decisions, political theorist David Estlund posited what he considered
to be one of the prime arguments against epistocracy - bias in choosing
voters.
His fear was that the method by which voters, and voters' quantity of
votes, was chosen might be biased in a way that people had not been able
to identify and could not, therefore, rectify.
Even the aspects of the modes of selecting voters that are known cause
many theorists concern, as both Brennan and Cairn note that the majority
of poor black women would be excluded from the enfranchised polity and
risk seeing their needs represented even less than they currently are.
Rejection of demographic unjustness of noocracy
Proponents of democracy attempt to show that noocracy is intrinsically unjust on two dimensions, using the unfairness and bad results
arguments. The former states that since people with different income
levels and education backgrounds have unequal access to information, the
epistocratic legislative body will be naturally composed of citizens
with higher economic status, and thus fail to equally represent
different demographics of the society. The latter argument is about the
policy outcomes; since there will be a demographic overrepresentation
and underrepresentation in the noocratic body, the system will produce
unjust outcomes, favoring the demographically advantaged group. Brennan defends noocracy against these two criticisms, presenting a rationale for the system.
As a rejection of the unfairness argument put forward by
democrats, Brennan argues that the voting electorate in modern
democracies is also demographically disproportionate; based on empirical
studies, it has been demonstrated that voters coming from privileged
background, such as white, middle aged, higher-income men, tend to vote
at a higher rate than other demographic groups. Although de jure every group has same right to vote under one person one vote
assumption, de facto practices show that privileged people have more
influence on election results. As a result, the representatives will not
match the demographics of the society either, for which democracy seems
to be unjust in practice. With the right of type of noocracy, the
unfairness effect can actually be minimized; for instance,
enfranchisement lottery, in which a legislative electorate is selected
at random by lottery, and then incentivized to become competent to
address political issues, illustrates a fair representation methodology
thanks to its randomness.
To refute the latter claim, Brennan states that voters do not
vote selfishly; in other terms, the advantaged group does not attempt to
undermine the interests of the minority group.
Therefore, the worry that noocratic bodies that are demographically
more skewed towards the advantaged group make decisions in favor of the
advantaged one fails. According to Brennan, noocracy can serve in a way
that improves the welfare of the overall community, rather than certain
individuals
