Daily Inspiration Quote by Herbert Spencer

Spencer’s jab lands because it flatters the reader’s suspicion while pretending to be a neutral description. “Average ignorance” isn’t just an insult; it’s a surgical reframing of the jury from civic ideal to statistical problem. By invoking “average,” he borrows the language of social science and turns democratic legitimacy into mere aggregation: not wisdom multiplied, just ignorance normalized. The line’s acid is that it doesn’t accuse jurors of being uniquely stupid. It suggests they’re reliably ordinary, which is worse for a system that sells itself on collective judgment.

The “twelve men” matters, too. Spencer isn’t picturing a cross-section of the public so much as the Victorian public sphere: male, property-tinged, educated enough to be eligible, yet still, in his view, cognitively unfit for the moral and evidentiary complexity of modern life. The subtext is paternalism with a stopwatch. Spencer, a major voice for evolutionary social theory and a skeptic of state power, distrusted mass decision-making not only because it could be wrong, but because it could be confidently wrong while wearing the costume of fairness.

Contextually, this is 19th-century Britain anxiously professionalizing everything - medicine, policing, bureaucracy - while leaving justice to ritual and lay participation. Spencer’s line exploits that tension: if society demands expertise everywhere else, why does it romanticize amateurism precisely where liberty is at stake? The sting is that the jury’s moral symbolism becomes its vulnerability. A system designed to protect citizens from elites may also protect them from reality.