Skill and efficiency shouldn't be the sole determinants of whether we consider someone competent.
...Democracy, too, is unsustainable without competence at every level. We need citizens who understand our political system and who are capable of evaluating competing arguments, and we need leaders capable of developing and carrying out wise policies. Concretely, we also need voting machines that work, a voting system that ensures that the declared vote count reflects the votes that were cast, competent election officials who work in that system and who value professional integrity over party, and capable judges who can similarly evaluate, without partisan bias, whether the voting process was fair and accurate.
But any concept of competence that encompasses only skill and efficacy is an impoverished one, one that readily enables the kind of self-serving behavior and policy so many Americans distrust. After all, skilled and effective people can be careless, shortsighted, selfish, biased, corrupt, or sadistic — consider Mussolini and his supposed ability to "make the trains run on time."
If we want to rescue the concept of competence from the critiques of both right and left, we need to understand it in its broadest sense, rather than its narrowest. To be worth anything in a democracy, the idea of competence also needs to encompass judgment, humility and empathy. Evaluating legal claims about voting rights, for instance, shouldn't be a mere technical exercise; legislators, judges and other officials considering such claims need an understanding of America's history of racial exclusion, an awareness of the limits of legal processes and a keen sense of how different rules and policies will affect other living and breathing human beings.
The concept of "competence" will always be messy and contested, and to some extent, that's as it should be. But we can't survive as a cohesive nation if we can't agree on the basic premise that it is possible to know things — at least some things — with a reasonable amount of confidence, and that it is possible to get things done in a manner that we all recognize as reasonably effective.
If we give up entirely on the idea of developing a broad and shared understanding of competence or on the idea that competence matters, we might as well give up on the democratic project itself.
Rosa Brooks, a professor at Georgetown's law school, is the author of "Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City."
nyt
...Democracy, too, is unsustainable without competence at every level. We need citizens who understand our political system and who are capable of evaluating competing arguments, and we need leaders capable of developing and carrying out wise policies. Concretely, we also need voting machines that work, a voting system that ensures that the declared vote count reflects the votes that were cast, competent election officials who work in that system and who value professional integrity over party, and capable judges who can similarly evaluate, without partisan bias, whether the voting process was fair and accurate.
But any concept of competence that encompasses only skill and efficacy is an impoverished one, one that readily enables the kind of self-serving behavior and policy so many Americans distrust. After all, skilled and effective people can be careless, shortsighted, selfish, biased, corrupt, or sadistic — consider Mussolini and his supposed ability to "make the trains run on time."
If we want to rescue the concept of competence from the critiques of both right and left, we need to understand it in its broadest sense, rather than its narrowest. To be worth anything in a democracy, the idea of competence also needs to encompass judgment, humility and empathy. Evaluating legal claims about voting rights, for instance, shouldn't be a mere technical exercise; legislators, judges and other officials considering such claims need an understanding of America's history of racial exclusion, an awareness of the limits of legal processes and a keen sense of how different rules and policies will affect other living and breathing human beings.
The concept of "competence" will always be messy and contested, and to some extent, that's as it should be. But we can't survive as a cohesive nation if we can't agree on the basic premise that it is possible to know things — at least some things — with a reasonable amount of confidence, and that it is possible to get things done in a manner that we all recognize as reasonably effective.
If we give up entirely on the idea of developing a broad and shared understanding of competence or on the idea that competence matters, we might as well give up on the democratic project itself.
Rosa Brooks, a professor at Georgetown's law school, is the author of "Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City."
nyt
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