Alexis de Tocqueville, worried about the undue power American democracy granted to the people, famously warned about the “tyranny of the majority.” There is now a new despotism, equally dangerous. It is a tyranny of the individual over himself — as damaging to social utility as it is to personal intellectual growth.

 

In his recent New Yorker essay “Groupthink,” Jonah Lehrer examines the efficacy of brainstorming — most specifically, its key strategic rule that brainstormers refrain from criticizing each other’s ideas during the thought-generation process. He finds that while hundreds of businesses, think tanks and schools continue to employ brainstorming as a strategy for finding solutions to tough problems, there’s just one problem: “It doesn’t work.”

 

In fact, explains Lehrer, countless studies have shown that banning criticism during brainstorming sessions lowers the number, quality and efficacy of the groups’ final decisions. Groups that encourage criticism of faulty ideas regularly outperform groups where a friendly but false consensus prevails.

 

But technology — particularly the Internet — tends to generate precisely this type of dangerous consensus among the like-minded. Legal scholar Cass Sunstein has warned in his book “Republic.com 2.0” that new forms of social media have allowed individuals to control what they read, see and hear to an unprecedented degree. Since we prefer to consume things we know and like, argues Sunstein, this has fragmented and polarized the delivery of previously nonpartisan content to consumers of new media. Thus liberals can watch Rachel Maddow every night without ever reading Charles Krauthammer, while conservatives can obsessively replay YouTube clips of Newt Gingrich pontificating about food stamps without ever taking a serious look at Paul Krugman. The results are “echo chambers” and “information cocoons” where sheltered citizens successfully avoid dealing with opinions they don’t want to hear.

 

Social networking contributes to the problem.  Our friends, on the whole, tend to share our ideological and political outlook on the world, and Facebook has now enabled us to take that comforting consensus online (thus the domination of my news feed by links to the Huffington Post and The New York Times and the general absence of links to the National Review and the Weekly Standard). Surrounding ourselves with circles of the pleasantly like-minded, argues Sunstein, can be comfortable. But it comes at the cost of increasing partisan polarization and the calcification of existing ideological prejudices.

 

This is all, of course, little more than statistical confirmation of what British philosopher John Stuart Mill recognized nearly one hundred and fifty years ago in his 1869 work “On Liberty” — that disagreement and discord tend to maximize social utility, while conformity, forged by legal or social pressure, tends to minimize it.

 

First of all, notes Mill, never taking intellectual opposition seriously undermines our ability to see where we may be wrong and to change our opinions accordingly. Society and the individual both lose out when errors go unchallenged. Equally importantly, conformity limits our ability to more keenly discern why, when and how we are right. Without the blessing of a loyal opposition, we can start to take the correctness of our opinions for granted, without fully appreciating the underlying premises or reasons for that correctness. The luxury of consensus thus begets intellectual complacency.

 

While Stanford is in some ways a beautifully diverse place, inhabited by people from nearly all backgrounds and cultures, I think that it can also be ideologically homogeneous to a degree that Sunstein, Lehrer and Mill would find damaging.

 

I don’t buy Rick Santorum’s assertion that college is a liberal conspiracy to indoctrinate young people; every political science and ethics professor with whom I’ve taken classes has done his or her best to encourage real debate, and to present both sides of controversial political issues.

 

But the student responses to such intellectual exercises tend to be one-sided, or at best prefaced by “I don’t actually believe this, but…” There are generally lots of people willing to argue for more limits on corporations and more spending on the social safety net, but few willing to advance a principled case against regulation or mount a spirited defense of the free market. The fact that I agree with most of it makes matters worse; I much prefer a nuanced refutation of my own beliefs to endless variations on them.

 

Transcending this reflexive conformity requires a deliberate effort to continuously engage with arguments we find wrong and even absurd. Here at Stanford, it might require a daily dose of David Brooks or George Will, some Hayek or Friedman alongside Rawls and Marx — a spoonful of distasteful medicine forced down the throat to cure the ailment of ideological homogeneity.

 

It might rankle at first. But in the end, both the individual and society as a whole benefit from a real engagement with thoughtful opposition.

 

Agree — or, even better, disagree — with Miles anytime at milesu1 “at” stanford “dot” edu.