John Girdwood

Class 3 Cheat Sheet

First, watch the Habermas video [Note: the video starts blurry]
“Society is not only depending on technologies (that feeds into new technologies), but society is depending on continuity/reconstruction of its own traditions.”

What American traditions have you seen continue for centuries? What traditions have died out?

How do we use traditions to understand man in society? [hint: through interpretation]

“The classical meaning of democracy, based on the use of the term in ancient Greek city-states, especially Athens, is the rule by the majority (who were poor) through direct democratic participation or by the rotation of governing offices among the citizens. Democracy was conceived as a system of government by the people themselves in which the citizens met periodically to elect state officials by lot and to enact laws.” (Bankston, pg. 108)
“In the twentieth century, however, democracy has become a positive term that is synonymous with some kind of representative system.” (Bankston, pg. 108)
In America today, what is the difference between Democrats and Republicans? [Note: Don't get Professor Girdwood started, or this discussion could take up the entire semester!]

Example: Communist China; “The government sent out teams of government officials whose goal was to persuade the peasants of the wisdom of government policies. The first teams executed those they considered ‘antirevolutionary.’ That made open disagreement with the teams less likely in the future. The teams preached the primacy of obedience* to the party. Lyrics of propaganda songs** extolled Chairman Mao as dearer to the people than their own families. Ancestor worship was declared the opiate of the masses*** and private land ownership was decried as a potential source of capitalism.**** Open disagreement with the teams could result in execution, prison, the loss of privileges, or reeducation through manual labor. These policies, which were consistently applied, led to extremely uniform expressions of support for government policies and the values they embodied.” (Bankston, pg. 562)

* What other institution preaches obedience?
** What other institution utilizes songs/lyrics (often sung as hymns in unison)?
*** Who else used the phrase “opiate of the masses”? ["Religion is the opium of the masses" - Marx]
**** We will discuss capitalism later in this course.
Recall that we have previously discussed prison and loss of privileges as ways to control people in our prior classes.
What are some tactics you can think of that the government might use to get “uniform expressions of support for government policies and values”?
What is propaganda?

Professor Girdwood’s “you figure it out” explanation: If I were to tell you that you could have two criteria, moral and cognitive, to form a society, what things would you call “moral” elements and what might you call “cognitive” elements (meaning, those terms are different)? To help you out, you can label your 2 sides “cognitive/scientific” and “moral/political”.
This discussion could also run deep, in that you can talk about whether or not these are distinctly different.

“Given a fixed voting system, then democracy is meaningless: the outcome of voting is manipulable, and it is not possible to distinguish manipulated from unmanipulated outcomes because of the unkowability of private intentions underlying public actions.” (Elster, pg. 70)
Austen-Smith and Riker game theory model of legislative committee discussion: “Some legislators have incentives to conceal private information so that the final committee decision can be ‘incoherent’ by failing to reflect fully the preferences of all committee members” (Elster, pg. 72)
The prior two quotes are the antagonistic (opposing) description or view of a true deliberative democracy… or are they?

Elster, J. (1998). Deliberative democracy. Cambridge University Press.
Joas, H. (1991). Communicative action: essays on Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of communicative action. MIT Press.