Consensus: Risk and Reward

By Lance Olsen, Unfiltered 10-11-07

In his great little play, An Enemy of the People, one of Ibsen's characters says that the majority is always wrong. We can ask how wrong, and I think we should ask whether "always" is the best term, but the assertion -- in what is perhaps western civilization's first explicitly environmental play -- comes to mind as the consensus process keeps firming its grip.

Ibsen is far from alone. An old book titled -- if I remember correctly -- Popular Delusions and Mass Hysteria, also comes to mind. So does Freud's question of whether entire societies can become neurotic, and so does the 1970s notion of a sick society.

The core thought in these cases is that irrational ideas can be contagious, and Nobel prize winning economist Robert Shiller raised that question in his book on Irrational Exuberance -- a term borrowed by Alan Greenspan just as Shiller's book was being released.

So the questions about validity of majority consensus is a good one, and we've recently been seeing case after case of consensus gone sour, in environmental, economic, medical, and military contexts.

Just within the past year, we've seen forest scientists saying that recent wildfires have challenged consensus opinion on forest science. And we've seen IPCC challenging its own consensus on the speed and extent of change in the wake of rising global temperatures. The Journal of the American Medical Association this year published a major study of the link between diet and heart disease that challenged a longstanding consensus that fatty diets are a major force behind heart disease, The Wall Street Journal covered that article well, and a New York Times story of today is based on a book that challenges that same consensus. The majority of Americans supported Bush's war -- until this year .

So, is the consensus formed by majority opinion always wrong? I doubt it. The majority of the planet does believe, for example, that the landing on the moon was NOT just a fabrication shot in a Hollywood film studio. And the majority does, however belatedly, accept that global warming does indeed entail some deeply, seriously consequential changes. Nor does the majority of America want the nation transformed into a society of snoops and torturers, like East Germany was under the Soviet Union.

But the human herd is plainly capable of making big mistakes. And Ibsen's 19th Century play still stands as a good example of how capable the herd is of becoming a mob incapable of recognizing, let alone acting on, our own best interests. No wonder then that Hamilton could say "The people? The people are a beast!" Or that Churchill could quip that democracy is the worst form of government -- except for all the others.

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