Column: We should seek political truths in more than data

“Compassion must, in fact, be the stronger, the more the animal beholding any kind of distress identifies himself with the animal that suffers.”

This line from Rousseau’s “Discourse on Inequality” really gets under my skin. It sinks a knife into the assertions that I hold in the back of my head, on any given weekday afternoon, as I sort through polling numbers for a midterm or try to somehow wrap my mind around statistical models for a research paper.

It reminds me that, if we lose our ability to empathize with fellow citizens, we risk shattering our social contract.

I often presume that more information and clearer theories are what we all need to inch toward justice in politics.

But that line reminds me that our democracy needs more than information to stay alive.

This line — and all of that text — plants little seeds of doubt in the faith I place in social sciences to both model and actually create a better, more just world.

Rousseau weaves a theory that compassion is as foundational as reason to being human.

It suggests that no amount of information, no clarity of logic, no purity of calculations could make people act justly if we lack the ability to deeply identify with one another’s pain and happiness.

In this scheme, the unnatural person is not a person on the street who impulsively acts on compassion — who impulsively jumps into a fight to separate a brawl.

Rather, the unnatural one is the “philosopher” who prudently moves away from the fight, mulling over rational reasons why men fight. It’s that philosopher that’s the less healthy one for the society.

I’m sometimes afraid of becoming that philosopher.

My nation is, I think, dividing in on itself.

I watch with pain as we undergo an identity crisis over what it means to be American — and who people choose to consider as equal as themselves.

And I’m worried that I am armed to the brim with statistics but stand on the sidelines, muttering things about polling error and graphs of partisanship just like the philosopher might uselessly mutter about the physics of the fighting men’s fists.

But even if I can empathize with my fellow citizen, can my reflections ever convince someone else to?

Can any calculations or statistics persuade a fellow citizen to compassion — this essential part of our democracy?

In popular political discourse, there’s so little genuine persuasion that tugs at the soul-part and the calculator-part of us alike. And I think we might sometimes technocrat our way to forgetting that we are always a step away from unravelling our social contract.

Now, I love studying political science; I enjoy diving into courses in international peacekeeping and creating my own statistical models to predict political behavior. And I know that the experts in the social sciences are wielding these statistical tools with much more wisdom than me.

But they are powerful, change-affecting tools; in the pop science world of “big data,” the non-experts wielding them may lead us down paths that may be neither elucidating nor prescriptive.

I love these tools.

But I have to remind myself sometimes that they are tools we wield to approximate — sometimes very well — the motivations and actions of the world around us.

It is with some prodding that I remember that they are incredibly powerful and useful tools, but they do not always illuminate the most human, most just path ahead.

From the injunction that “if I have not love” then I’m a clanging symbol to the age-old call for guiding wisdom, history urges us to wield “big data” with caution and empathy.

What if I can use statistics to dissect and describe a phenomenon of hate, but cannot model anything that will inspire someone to empathize with their victim?

I admit that I am worried about how to study politics in a way that can actively preserve our liberal democracy; I’m not sure if my tools are right or that my direction is always wise.

But what I do know is that the moment I forget that an injustice against another citizen is an injustice against myself, that’s where I’d fail.