So Say We All: On Consensus and Unanimity
The gods of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. I’m not focusing on fantasy fiction here, but it did kick it off, so they get to go in first.
Yesterday, in one of the Facebook groups I’m part of that discusses speculative fiction, there was a long discussion on the portrayal of deities in fantasy fiction – it’s a topic I’ve written a little about here, and something which may be material in Edgar’s forthcoming discussion of “dirtbag medievalism” – and while I don’t intend to discuss that topic today, there was a certain characteristic of the discourse (general discourse, not that kind of discourse,) that I find notable and wish to examine.
Notably, it was the unanimity of the discourse.
Recently, I’ve been looking at processes of consensus decision-making, and I’ve grown more and more skeptical of the idea of unanimity. It seems to me that, when everyone is in perfect agreement, there isn’t actually that much thought going on, and that the decisions reached are actually some of the lazier, less-interesting approaches.
Allow me to explain: in decision-making paradigms that seek unanimity, where that is the ideal, the character of the discourse is that a set number of options emerge (usually two; let’s think of it as the this-or-that model of debate). The partisans of these options then compete and try to have one side of the debate win out, whereby the winner is considered the “answer” to the question. Usually, the competition takes the form of argument, then a vote. Sometimes there are multiple rounds of voting and people will switch their answers. This approach is designed to produce a single answer, and when it reaches that conclusion, the debate is finished and the group moves on. If they have come up with the best answer – great! Perfect! The matter is settled.
As we can see, looking at the news, though, they never come up with the best answer. The end result is often a watered-down compromise between two options that no one is terribly enthusiastic about.
A compound model was used by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy Grand Council, the governing body of one of the largest native groups on the North American Continent, for hundreds of years.
In decision-making paradigms where the goal is consensus, the focus is not on producing one single answer, it’s about producing a course of action that everyone consents to. You can disagree with an idea and still stand aside and let the group do it – consent to let it happen. Not everything requires an enormous amount of involvement. This, of course, requires a fair amount of discussion, and requires that the people involved be invested in producing a functional agreement.
However, one interesting thing about a number of consensus-driven decision making processes is that a few of them outright ban unanimity. If ever unanimity arises, they say hang on, back to the drawing board, let’s find more options. The point here is that it requires, even in a group that it is in complete agreement, a consideration of what alternatives are viable (let’s think of this as the this-and-also model of debate, where the goal is to produce alternatives instead of reduce them).
The Sanhedrin, the highest court of temple Judaism, actually had a rule preventing unanimity in some situations as a safeguard against rash decision-making, for example.
Groups of people can be among the most intelligent and creative forces in the world – as I often tell my students none of us is as smart as all of us. The problem is that the this-or-that model means that the group can only be as smart as the smartest person – or only as smart as the person who is most skilled at talking, which is not the same thing.
Design by committee has a bad wrap for a reason: the way we do it is limiting. It leads to pat and simple answers. In many of the decision-making situations that face us in the contemporary era, this is not a viable approach.
In the discussion in that facebook group, the way that the discussion turned was that everyone seemed to give a variation on the same answer, as if the problem of “how gods work in fantasy fiction” was a soluble problem. It was simply the most intuitively satisfying answer for someone who lives in a cosmopolitan society: these fictitious gods have power proportional to the belief given to them by fictitious people. Great! Now that we have that answer, we can start talking about some other trope.
The biggest purveyor of the milieu in question was, doubtless, Dungeons and Dragons, one of the first tabletop RPGs.
The problem is that, as far as the arts go, or narratives go, calling a particular trope “solved” doesn’t make any sense. One of my biggest beefs with fantasy as a genre is how uniform it is – for a long time, everything in that genre existed on a continuum from Tolkien to Robert E. Howard, and it seems that it’s only been the past twenty-five or so years that this has changed. However, the phenomenon of unanimity is a big part of why this situation happened to begin with, and it’s why the problem will most likely reoccur.
Generally, I prefer the this-and-also approach, the yes-and of decision making. I feel that it tends to produce more novel and interesting solutions to the problems that people are considering. And this can be applied to considerations other than whether fake-Zeus or fake-Poseidon would win in a fight. There are political, economic, and artistic possibilities for consensus decision making, and we can point to problems that arise from the current dominant model.
One of the biggest purveyors of misinformation in regard to the crisis, Jim Cramer.
My skepticism of unanimity has a long history: in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis, one of the news commentary shows (the Daily Show, I believe, which in that time I could only see the day after due to timezone differences and the fact that my apartment had comcast cable, but which I watched regularly), had a supercut of pieces from various financial shows that indicated that they all were saying that it was smooth sailing forever: essentially, as the danger increased, the people whose jobs it was to warn of that danger started giving the same hollow, meaningless and, ultimately, wrong answer to questions about the state of the situation.
A caveat: if you have a team of doctors, and they give the same diagnosis, I’m not advising you to be skeptical. These situations are different: the diagnosis is a comparatively simple question, one that a team of experts can answer. Part of this is the fact that those experts can be disinterested, which isn’t the same as uninterested. To be disinterested is to be invested in the situation, but not in a particular answer. Another part is that diagnosing a medical issue is a different and more objective animal than diagnosing an economy or a polity. The same goes for things like a group of mechanics looking at a car or similar – in these situations there is a very narrow range of effective approaches and that point in the decision-making tree can be reached by examining verifiable data. The same is not true for politics, economics, or the arts. Medicine might not be solved, but it’s at least more formalized.
In short, I’m putting forward this argument, but I don’t wish for it to be taken as an attack on expertise.
The question that occurs now is this: I think of myself as intelligent, but I don’t think I’m a once-in-an-era intellect – why are the benefits of consensus and the dangers of unanimity clear to me and so few others? Why do we have a culture of unanimity-seeking instead of a culture of consent-building?
The answer, I think, is that unanimity is so much easier than consensus. It requires less engagement from the various participants, allowing them to deal with their personal problems. Those who are disengaged can simply go along with an idea, and then – this is crucial – have a moral duty to defend it because they’re actively agreeing with it. Unanimity produces complicity. It also allows ego to take the forefront — each side needs a leader, and their competition can be thought of as a heroic struggle.
Consent, on the other hand, requires active participation from the groups involved. It’s really hard. Everyone must participate in the production of new alternatives and options, or else it doesn’t work. But it also gives people the option to bow out. They don’t have to go along with something that they disagree with, but even then they helped produce the ultimate course of action because their input was factored in.
As I understand it, this is part of how the system works in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan,) which is in many ways our modern Catalonia.
This is a major factor in why consensus is effective for small groups and less so for large ones. Another major component is the fact that consensus takes a much longer time to build than unanimity. For time-sensitive matters, it simply takes too long to function. That being said, I get the sense that this might change with time, as the group becomes more adept at building consensus. Of course, a major part of this might be the ablation of the less-committed members of the group, which would reduce the size of the group, possibly down to what we might consider a “small” group.
However, it seems to me that this could be changed with the creation of appropriate rituals and “institutional” forms within the group, or possibly with a more cellular structure devolving power from a center into a web (or rhizome) of lower-order formations.
Of course, given my lack of experience, I cannot speak to this. It is simply my intuition.
One thing, however, seems certain: unanimity quickly becomes received wisdom, and it just as swiftly becomes something that cannot be questioned. In such a situation, I feel that it is self-evidently harmful – or at least “sinister” in the classical sense of being unskillful.
My intuition is that common sense should be interrogated, and received wisdom should be questioned. It seems to me that, should we dig upon that ground, we will find a few hundred years of parliamentarian and congressional decree, and a bedrock of monarchic insistence, but very little consideration for the consent of those involved.
A caveat: this system can be somewhat vulnerable to outside influence, as shown by the story of the various Sejm of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which allowed for any member to veto — notably, though, they collapsed soon after they eliminated it. Make of that what you will.