Martin Rowson illustration
Illustration by Martin Rowson

This article is a preview from the Summer 2019 edition of New Humanist

Imagine you are a climate scientist, and you see impending catastrophe made more likely by a collective refusal to act. There is misinformation and denial masquerading as scepticism, but also apathy: we need to act now, and even though the effects of climate change are already becoming evident, for many people the crisis still feels remote. Moreover, combatting climate change will entail upheavals in every aspect of our lives, from food consumption to travel, without any immediately tangible effect. What do you do?

On the one hand, you will feel a need to intervene: the urgency of the situation requires it – this is what led to the “March for Science” launched in April 2017. Yet to do so could endanger your authority as a scientist, and in two ways. First, science purports to stand outside politics, seeking only to establish and explain facts. Climate denialists often insinuate that climate scientists are driven by a hidden political agenda (anti-capitalist, anti-corporation, anti-American, anti-freedom), and to make overtly political statements risks giving weight to this narrative. Second, to transform your expertise into pithy political messaging risks erasing all the caveats and epistemological doubt that characterise the scientific method. This renders the science itself vulnerable: more is expected of it than it can deliver, and claims taken in isolation can be disproved so as to bring the whole edifice crashing down. Scientific legitimacy, so hard won, is thereby irreparably damaged.

The experience of economists during Britain’s EU referendum in 2016 offers a cautionary tale. Statistical models based on probability were seized upon and reframed as prophecies, deployed to frighten people into voting Remain, but then dismissed as “Project Fear”. These “predictions” were said to reflect the economists’ political bias – and for many a Brexiteer, didn’t they belong to the very technocratic elite from whom we need to “take back control”? That economists disagree in their models, analyses and prescriptions got lost in the noise.

Why should it be that experts have become the focal point of populist anger in the last two decades? After all, this is a period during which more people are being educated – and later into life – than ever before, and where the achievements of science and technology, from 3D printing to the discovery of the Higgs Boson, are both awe-inspiring and taken for granted. In Nervous States: How Feelings Took Over the World (Jonathan Cape, 2018), a wide-ranging and ambitious attempt to grasp the current rejection of experts, William Davies suggests inequality is to blame. He argues that as wealth and economic activity become more unevenly spread within a nation, the statistics that have historically represented the nation’s social, demographic and economic profile cease to hold legitimacy for the citizens whose lives they purport to measure. If you have regularly been told that the economy is growing, and yet you only ever feel poorer and more economically precarious, you are unlikely to be swayed by reports of GDP growth. Similarly with unemployment data: you might continually be told that more people are in work than ever before, and fewer are looking for work, but your daily experience tells of worse and more insecure jobs, of underemployment, of people forced to reclassify themselves as self-employed so employers can avoid paying National Insurance or holiday and sick pay, of people giving up on searching for work altogether. As Davies notes, this leads to a crisis not just in the legitimacy of the experts, as individuals removed from people’s everyday concerns, but in the legitimacy of the expertise itself. The technocrats have lost their techne.

But is the predicament of the economist really like that of the climate scientist? For a start, economists are found across a range of institutions – academia, central banks, private banks, government agencies like the National Audit Office, credit ratings agencies, consultancies, privately funded thinktanks or investment firms. Many “experts” make a lot of money out of their expertise, and are brought into a potential conflict of interest when they use this expertise to please their funders. Climate scientists, by contrast, are for the most part housed in universities or publicly funded research organisations. And it is hardly clear whether economics counts as a “science” equivalent to meteorology, geology, oceanography and so on. Couldn’t the claim of economists to be “scientific”, and thus to stand outside political ideology, be construed as itself an ideological strategy – in fact, as its ultimate ideological claim? In this sense, it is not clear whether the backlash against the “expert” is a reaction to expertise in general, or simply to the uses to which it is put.

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It is commonplace to say we live in unprecedented times. There is a temptation to see current events as wholly unlike what has come before: the effects of social media on our psychological and cognitive states, or on our democracies; the prevalence of “fake news” and the monetisation of personal data; the cultural disconnects within individual nation-states between a predominantly urban, cosmopolitan, university-educated population and people from largely rural or postindustrial small towns. There is also a temptation to respond that these are simply a new manifestation of age-old phenomena. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates warns that the new technology of “writing” will destroy memory, much as we now agonise that our phones have become memory prostheses – who can remember phone numbers or birthdays these days, now they are stored on our phones? Demagogues did not start with Twitter; misinformation, propaganda and conspiracy theories have been around for millennia.

Davies’s account allows us to avoid falling into either camp. Certain institutions and conventions that have upheld both the notion of truth and the social status of the expert are now profoundly destabilised, but the conditions for this instability are long in the making. Davies traces these institutions back to their foundation in the late 17th century, where they emerge from a set of historical processes associated with the Enlightenment tradition of thought: the scientific revolution, the growth of mercantile capitalism, colonial expansion and the establishment of the modern nation-state. All these led to the need for a “common set of facts”, and a “consensus on the nature of truth”. Such consensus then allowed tradespeople to trust one another (as Davies notes, the word “truth” derives from “trust”), inventors or natural philosophers to share and evaluate one another’s observations effectively, geographers to put together maps with ever greater accuracy, lawmakers to know their populations in ever greater detail.

Yet this model of truth was not without violence. The need for a transparent language and set of procedures, publicly available to all, meant that technocrats favoured a numerical, quantitative model. As a result, vast swathes of human experience now stood outside the domain of truth. Davies argues that our current predicament derives in part from the truism that what is measurable is not necessarily what makes lives worth living. We have reached a point at which the information technocrats obtain from people’s lives – such as GDP or unemployment data – bears only minimal resemblance to the way people experience their own lives. The violence of technocratic expertise went further still. It facilitated the emergence of an informed, empowered citizenry, but only through the subjugation, exclusion and destruction of all those denied citizenship. The experts of the early Enlightenment facilitated colonialism: cartographers mapped new regions, economists and insurers assured the profits of slave ships, anatomists could give scientific legitimacy to racism. If the expert-technocrat was a key figure in the establishment of early modern nation-states, he (and it was always a “he”) was equally involved in the violence perpetrated as these nation-states established themselves, from enclosures at home to colonialism abroad.

Did this violence result from the specific political projects it accompanied, or is it intrinsic to the way this kind of expertise operates? There is a longstanding critique of scientific rationality that considers it to be bound up in forms of domination. It receives perhaps its canonical expression in William Wordsworth’s lament, “We murder to dissect” – the way we gain access to the workings of nature, he warns, involves killing the very nature we seek to understand. And Mary Shelley would characterise Victor Frankenstein’s desire for knowledge as an urge to “penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places”, thereby turning scientific discovery into sexual violence. In the mid-20th century, the philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer understood the Holocaust not as a rejection of the Enlightenment but as the culmination of one strand of it. As the Nazis deployed their advances in science, technology and bureaucracy in order to perpetrate the most horrific crimes, they demonstrated that Enlightenment logic could turn humans into objects of knowledge whereby they cease to have agency and are rendered expendable in their millions. If expertise attains its legitimacy by virtue of its abstraction and disembodiment, in which the lived experience of individuals is turned into binding categories, then the relation between expert and object of expertise is one of power as much as knowledge.

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Does the current backlash against experts echo this critique of scientific rationality? It is striking that the contemporary anti-expert feeling is being mobilised for the most part by a populist, nativist right wing, in concert with anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers and creationists. This is a trend that was first observed by Bruno Latour in 2004, where he saw the critique of Enlightenment reason being weaponised against science as part of a culture war. (Peter Salmon wrote about Bruno Latour in our Spring 2018 edition.) More recently, criticisms from the left of economists who failed to predict the financial crash of 2008 were appropriated by Brexiters who wanted to discredit experts for entirely different reasons in 2016.

Yet there is one marked difference between the classic critique of expertise and the recent anti-expert backlash. Romantics such as Wordsworth and Mary Shelley, the Frankfurt School of Adorno and Horkheimer, and postcolonial and feminist theorists all focused on structures. The populist backlash, by contrast, is decidedly ad hominem: an attack on experts, not expertise.

For the earlier critique of expertise, the problem with disinterested objectivity was that it led to inhuman practices and conclusions: the interests it served were not the individual expert’s, but rather the system of hierarchies and authorities that relied on particular kinds of expertise to seem legitimate. Today, this is caricatured simply as a self-serving elite of technocrats rewarding themselves at everyone else’s expense.

Why should this backlash against experts be happening now? Davies’s answer is that it arises from a privatisation of expertise, and of the access to it. Throughout the Enlightenment, the consensus on truth depended on the public sphere as a space where knowledge was shared, made open to evaluation, contestation and modification. In recent decades, such spaces have increasingly been privatised. We need only think of the data owned by tech companies, which is monetised and kept secret in order to maximise its value, or of high-frequency traders’ algorithms, which make their profits by responding to price movements milliseconds before the rest of the market.

In another recent book, New Dark Age (Verso, 2018), James Bridle reaches a similar conclusion. High-frequency trading shows that “digitisation made the markets both more opaque to noninitiates, and radically visible to those in the know”. For Bridle, this is in keeping with the major social consequence of digital technologies: a far more radical separation between those with access to knowledge and those barred from it. This reaches its peak in the extraction of personal information, taken from monitoring our online habits, which is visible to the companies surveilling us and those purchasing the data, but not to us who produce it.

Bridle goes on to suggest that when knowledge is privatised, and the majority of people are faced with this radical opacity, conspiracy thinking becomes a form of “folk knowledge”: an attempt to put together accounts of the world based on the incomplete information that individuals can assemble online. Our current moment is particularly prone to this kind of conspiracy thinking because we are faced with both a lack of information and, through big data, a surfeit of informational “noise”.

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If digital technologies have amplified this trend, then Davies nevertheless points out that this is itself only the latest stage in a much longer set of developments. He distinguishes “knowledge” from “intelligence”: if knowledge aspires to slowly achieved objectivity and consensus, “intelligence” is strategic, and depends on speed and its non-availability. Knowledge belongs to peace, and intelligence to war – and, Davies argues, “intelligence” is the basic characteristic of financial markets. He notes that the model of the entrepreneur celebrated by Ludwig von Mises, the father of neoliberal economics, mimics the ideal general outlined by the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz a century earlier: each acts decisively and quickly, unhindered by fear of failure or rational self-doubt, not waiting for the “facts” to be established; each is willing to sacrifice those below them to obtain victory, even when following a hunch. The state of “constant flexibility and reactivity” that is expected of everyone who participates in contemporary life, from CEOs to Uber drivers to 24-hour news obsessives, shows how the logic of warfare has re-entered civilian life.

With the dominance of the market economy, moreover, intelligence intrudes upon the production of knowledge itself. The fallout from the 2008 financial crash showed how economics as a discipline was prone to conflicts of interest, but a similar process is also at work in scientific research, notably through the concept of intellectual property. Davies points to the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act in the US as a crucial moment in this history: scientists are incentivised to patent their findings rather than share them among other scientists, at which point the model of knowledge available to all, and a scientific community working impartially towards truth, starts to fall apart.

As experts are drawn to marketise their knowledge, they become complicit in the system they should be trying to understand. At the same time, the expertise itself becomes more remote and shut off from the public sphere. The consensus on truth is eroded precisely because the trust underpinning it is replaced by competition. And then a further trust – in expertise, and in experts themselves – disappears.

If this is the predicament that experts currently face, then how should they respond? Reading both Davies and Bridle, one wonders whether it is possible to undo the privatisation of knowledge; to reinstate the consensus, trust and public availability upon which expertise for so many centuries was based. Yet what they also remind us is that experts have never stood outside politics, and that their legitimacy is itself a political construct, embedded in broader structures of hierarchy and authority.

The developing climate crisis will necessarily place science into everyday political discourse in a way that makes the model of the disinterested expert untenable: every climate expert will have some interest in the future survival of humanity. But the recognition that expertise is never wholly disinsterested need not be grounds to dismiss it; it is the refusal of experts to admit when they have political interests that raises suspicion. Indeed, at a time when technological advances are increasingly privatised and opaque, there is an ever greater need for scientists to conduct their work in public. Otherwise, our future may end up at the mercy of conspiracy theorists, denialists and “alternative facts”.