We must be better than the politics of bullying

We have seen government buildings invaded, public officials held hostage, local leaders harassed in their homes, and speakers and professors hounded off campuses, and now more of this has been promised.

Americans are better than this! We are blessed with a political tradition stretching back 800 years, enshrining unprecedented power and rights for the people and showing us how they should be exercised — the Magna Carta, the indictment of Charles I, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

When an established political system proves rigid and unresponsive, we have shining models of how to challenge it — Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela. It is turning up the volume of demands for justice without intimidation that produces seemingly impossible results.

But no license to bully people is found in this treasure trove of wisdom. In fact, the bullies always turn out to be wrong — Hitler's Brown Shirts, Mao's Red Guards, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Ku Klux Klan. Their fatal flaw is that the very nature of bullying forecloses the opportunity to see one's own errors.

We are now struggling to accomplish things no community has ever done before — to establish a truly pluralistic society with genuine justice for all, distribute abundant resources to meet everyone's basic needs, and empower all people. Even if these lofty goals are not in dispute, we have little idea of what the details of these aspirations should look like, much less how to attain them.

The challenges we need to work out together are only going to grow more intense. How do we preserve individual autonomy in the face of artificial intelligence that can often make better decisions for us than we can ourselves? How do we manage the biotech and genetic engineering techniques that will soon make possible the creation of superhumans?

Our only hope is to trust in the slow, deliberative, pluralistic processes that stumble along toward results that satisfy no one, but eventually surpass the accomplishments of true believers. That is democracy.

The simple fact is that we are just not smart enough to be bullies. No one person or group has the capacity to see the whole picture. No one knows the whole truth.

Consider just two of our shortcomings. Our minds are engineered to believe what people say — you could not live in a community if you had to fact check everything someone said to you. But today our minds are the targets of innumerable information peddlers who exploit our innate naiveté to accumulate power or profit.

Moreover, evolution has equipped our minds with strong filters. If you are crossing a field, you won't even see the beautiful flowers if a bear comes out of the woods. And faced with an unmanageable barrage of factual claims, we tend to ignore what doesn't fit into what we already believe to be true. Of course, the internet always will serve up compelling confirmation for whatever gets into our heads.

Isn't this an age for healthy humility rather than self-righteousness?

I have spent my career in the legal system, which of course is a prime example of a system carefully constructed to minimize the distortions caused by individual cognitive limitations. All parties get a chance to present their points of view, using only reliable evidence. Judges take time to work out complex decisions in writing. Appellate judges sitting in groups review the work of trial courts.

The wisdom of such a system is clear to those of us in it. Most of us have been burned at some point by issuing a wrong order in one of those rare situations where all sides of a question do not get fully considered. Despite all the safeguards, all the good judges I know constantly wonder whether they have done the right thing.

Do bullies ever take time to wonder? Do they make sure they have carefully considered all sides of an issue? Do they consider why, in most societies throughout history, two political orientations have persisted?

I keep seeing an analogy from quantum physics. In the world of very small objects, light changes from waves to particles when it is measured, electrons jump from one orbit to another without traveling through the space in between and subatomic particles called fermions have to rotate twice before they come back to the same place. Scientists cannot form a mental picture of such strange objects because our mental machinery was evolved in the macro world where nothing behaves like that.

Naturally, physicists developed opposing views about the true nature of this alien world. Yet the brilliant spokespersons for the two camps, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, engaged in respectful dialogue with each other for decades trying to understand and persuade each other.

Do we owe each other any less in the strange new world we are trying to manage? We are climbing a steep mountain path on a stormy night with a weak flashlight. It would be good to link hands.

Abraham Lincoln, who presumably had somewhat greater claim to moral certainty than we do, nonetheless advised a humble search for truth: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right …"

Bruce Peterson is a senior district judge and teaches a class on lawyers as peacemakers at the University of Minnesota Law School.