‘Cognitive Ecologies’: understanding mutual misunderstanding between polities
no polity can afford brittle cognition
How do we make sense of politics? Contemporary politics is often analysed by political scientists as a contest of interests, policies, institutions, nationalities, or ideologies; it’s also often analysed by media blowhards as a horse-race - who’s up, down, leading the polls, who’s in, who’s out, or whatever.
While sometimes useful, these ways of viewing the world completely disregard a deep and underlying layer of explanation: namely, how politics is determined by the conditions under which societies organise themselves to think:- how societies allocate attention, treat evidence, process dissent, correct mistakes, and preserve memory as a guide to future actions. But public life generally does not ensure our institutions are designed so that they can learn in public under conditions of low trust, limited attention, and even under conditions of persistent bad faith.
The deep risk we run in society is not a conflict over interests (for these will be always and ever present), but instead a deep conflict of mutual illegibility: where our differing political systems come to no longer share enough epistemic ground to interpret each another’s actions reliably.
Democracy doesn’t fail because people disagree (disagreement can be very valuable); democracy fails when we lose the shared methods for finding out what’s true, and fixing what’s broken.
When a polity’s conditions of thinking, learning, and processing information shift over time, polities do not simply change their policies and behaviour: they also change their epistemic metabolism - they begin to inhabit different cognitive worlds from each other, which in turn often leads to mutual misunderstandings and a subsequent loss of shared realities and shared assumptions about the nature of our political and social worlds.
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I call the environments by which polities differentially process and prioritise cognitive ecologies, a phrase intentionally blending ecological and psychological terms.