Hahrie Han
speaker
207 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Hahrie Han’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Great to see you. Thanks so much for having me.
Yeah, I am really interested in this question of what it takes to equip people to act identically and strategically and thoughtfully in the public square, you know? And so that's, you know, people might traditionally think of this as a question of like, how do we engage people in politics, questions about political participation, building social movements, collective action. that kind of thing.
But I think at the core of a lot of those questions is ultimately this question of, you know, what does it mean for someone to be an architect of their own future, which is what democracy should be in a sense. And how do we equip people to be able to do that? Because it's not a natural set of capacities that people need.
And then in the context of a democracy, what is the science of how people come together to behave with each other, right? Because you can't do that alone in our political system.
Yes, exactly. So I think obviously voting is important, so I'm not trying to minimize the value of that in any way. But if that's the only way in which people experience democracy or politics in their life, then I think it's a really impoverished view of what it could be, but also what it should be in our societal system.
Yeah, there's I mean, there's so many people out there who spend a lot of time defining like what is democracy and so on and so forth. And my favorite definition out there comes from a woman named Valerie Bunce, who was actually originally a scholar of Eastern Europe.
And she was trying to articulate a definition of democracy that's different from, you know, more authoritarian systems and other ways of organizing government and politics. And what she says is that democracy is unique among all other forms of government because it demands that people accept uncertainty over outcome in order to have certainty over process. Right.
Which to me is really interesting because what it does is it puts a focus. It's interesting. I mean, it's not different from other definitions in the sense that everyone would agree that democracy is a system in which people lose, right? And you have a peaceful transition of power.
But what I like about the way that she defines it is that it puts a focus on two things that I think are really important. One is the question of uncertainty, right? That we're asking people to do something that is really both cognitively and emotionally difficult for humans, right? And so it's counterproductive.
countercultural to our natural tendencies to accept that kind of uncertainty over outcome. But the second thing is it juxtaposes that with the sense that what we're trading is a commitment to a set of rights and responsibilities.
And so we have to understand all aspects of that equation, the rights and responsibilities, the uncertainty, what are the conditions under which humans will accept that or not accept that? You know, these are all, I think, really important questions that sometimes get lost if we just think about democracy as
Yeah. Yeah. Which I think has a couple different implications that are really important. So, so first it's just kind of going back to this idea of uncertainty is that like, what are the conditions under which people are going to accept uncertainty over outcome, right? They have to be willing to say, look, I don't know if the policy that I want is going to win.
I don't know if the candidate that I want is going to win the party, whatever. Right. And If people feel like the range of outcomes that they may possibly have to accept becomes too broad, then it's not irrational for them to withdraw consent from the system, right? I mean, that's a totally rational kind of act.
And so the question is, how do people come to understand what that range of outcomes is? And so I think there's a lot of interesting questions that come up if you think about that question of uncertainty. But then...
The second piece to the point about abstraction is also like, how do people come to have an experience of democracy, of all parts of that equation, of both the rights and responsibilities and the possible outcomes that can emerge?
And I think that's one thing that is part of the reason why I spend so much of my time thinking about what are the spaces in which people come to learn the capacities of democracy
citizenship and democracy and so on and so forth, because I think that experiential understanding of what it means to be a member of a small d democratic community is foundational to actually making the system work, you know, because of all the things that we just talked about.
Yeah.
I mean, there's this hilarious, I mean, hilarious in a certain kind of way, statistic that I remember learning in grad school, which is that, you know, when CNN came online and people began to be able to see like 24-hour news, sorry, not CNN, C-SPAN, when C-SPAN came online and people began to be able to see the way in which Congress works, that support for democracy and politics and people's trust in politics actually went down.
Because the original idea was that we want to have sunshine in government. We want transparency. We want people to see how the sausage is made. But it turns out when people see how the sausage is made and they realize how much compromise and negotiation goes into it, they actually – you know, dislike the process itself.
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