Sam Harris (H/T) argues against average citizens:
Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves. President Bush kept his edge on the “Who would you like to have a beer with?” poll question in 2004, and won reelection.
This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages — and loses — both necessary and unnecessary wars.
McCain has so little respect for the presidency of the United States that he is willing to put the girl next door (soon, too, to be a grandma) into office beside him. He has so little respect for the average American voter that he thinks this reckless and cynical ploy will work.
There’s a difference between elitism, which is a love of excellence, and snobbery, which is this bit of vitriol from Harris. To fully understand why Harris has blundered thus, we need to understand the difference between ordinary and average.
Average is a statistical category. It’s what people stumble into by default. Almost by definition, average is passive and conforming.
Ordinary is an earned category. It’s something people have to strive for, since common decency isn’t natural to humanity. Oddly enough, one must strive to be ordinary.
In this light, we can see that Palin is both far from average and profoundly ordinary—indeed, extra-ordinary. Average people might become mayors, but they rarely resign from boards in protest over other people’s ethics violations. Neither do average people challenge incumbent governors in primaries; it takes someone with ordinary decency to do that. If the statistics are true that most babies with Downs syndrome are aborted, than an average woman would have never given birth to Trig Palin—but Palin was an ordinary mother. Over the past several days, The Anchoress and Ann Althouse have done a series of posts defending the sheer ordinariness of Palin; they have done remarkable work.
But someone writing over a hundred years ago anticipated Sam Harris, who seems to yearn for his politicians to be Nietzschean supermen. He was G.K. Chesterton, and in his book Heretics, he had this defense of democracy and the ordinary:
Democracy is not philanthropy; it is not even altruism or social reform. Democracy is not founded on pity for the common man; democracy is founded on reverence for the common man, or, if you will, even on fear of him. It does not champion man because man is so miserable, but because man is so sublime. It does not object so much to the ordinary man being a slave as to his not being a king, for its dream is always the dream of the first Roman republic, a nation of kings.
Next to a genuine republic, the most democratic thing in the world is a hereditary despotism. I mean a despotism in which there is absolutely no trace whatever of any nonsense about intellect or special fitness for the post. Rational despotism—that is, selective despotism—is always a curse to mankind, because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect for him at all. But irrational despotism is always democratic, because it is the ordinary man enthroned. The worst form of slavery is that which is called Caesarism, or the choice of some bold or brilliant man as despot because he is suitable. For that means that men choose a representative, not because he represents them, but because he does not. Men trust an ordinary man like George III or William IV because they are themselves ordinary men and understand him. Men trust an ordinary man because they trust themselves. But men trust a great man because they do not trust themselves. And hence the worship of great men always appears in times of weakness and cowardice; we never hear of great men until the time when all other men are small.
In this light, McCain’s selection of an ordinary woman shows a profound respect to citizens. He could have picked the hyperachieving Mitt Romney or the blandly average Tim Pawlenty; he instead went with the ordinary Sarah Palin. And the excitement from the grassroots shows that they don’t view themselves as weak, that they trust themselves. Sam Harris, however, views the people as weak and does not trust them. Like his intellectual forebear George Bernard Shaw, Harris cares little for ordinary people and, if he believed in God, would think that He made far too many of them. Like Chesterton, Palin is an ordinary person who believes that ordinary people are blessings.
The issue over Palin has come down, as so many conflicts do these days, to another duel between Bernard Shaw and Chesterton. What’s wrong with the world, as noted here before, is that this is Bernard Shaw’s world. But every now and then, when you least expect it, Chesterton scores a victory, as unexpected as a carpenter’s son changing the world.
Posted by Hubbard in Amer-I-Can!, Audacity of Hype, Philosophy