The pandemic has revealed a darkly authoritarian side to expertise
Matthew Crawford
This recently published essay (1st May 2021) caught my eye. It highlights a number of issues I have been trying to raise these past few years. Rather than supply a commentary, I shall select passages that pertain to key themes in my own work, and provide the links for people who want to read deeper. The problematic I work within is this: the modern world is based on a fact and value dualism. Science – the realm of fact – is considered the only realm capable of generating knowledge about reality, the only meaningful, rational knowledge; ethics is considered merely a non-rational realm of irreducible subjective opinion or value judgements. This generates a whole range of problems, which are now becoming increasingly evident. Simply, a debilitating chasm has opened up between the field of theoretical reason – our knowledge of the external world, the realm of fact – and the field of practical reason – ethics and politics, what human agents do with objective knowledge. The dualism is debilitating because scientific knowledge – and its spin off technological know-how – is not a virtue in itself, since it lacks an appetitive quality; it gives us the ability to do things, but not the will – it doesn’t make people want to act. Further, the split denies the existence of moral truth and moral knowledge. This means, among other things, that defending the value of science as truth-seeking amounts to resting the realm of reason on a realm considered to be non-rational, merely subjective. It also amounts to a recognition that science is not enough and, alone, cannot defend itself. Marching for the value of science as truth-seeking is a political and moral act which presumes, although people still don’t quite see it, that there is such a thing as moral truth and moral knowledge after all. It is this that needs to be re-established. It is only a small step from an ethics in which human beings are allowed to choose the good as they see fit to a culture at large in which individuals feel entitled to choose the truth in the same manner. We live in a world of ‘his,’ ‘her,’ and ‘their’ truth, as given by ‘lived experience.’ As someone who has argued for the importance of lived experience and for making facts existentially meaningful, I am vulnerable to being classed with the wave of subjectivism, narcissism, and solipsism sweeping culture, all those who think subjective truth trumps objective reality, whether moral or scientific. Not so. I have always insisted on bringing the two great wings of philosophy into relation, objectivity (reason-nature) and subjectivity (reason-culture, will, artifice). It is the split between these two that is generating the problems of the age, which this article adumbrates. The article shows how these separations result not in true science and ethics, geared to both scientific and moral knowledge, but the twin evils of scientism and moralism.
In terms of the issues raised in this article, particularly relevant is the way that, in the collapse of overarching and authoritative standards in ethics and politics, unity is increasingly found wanting, with external forms being asserted to keep society together and provide direction. Science is being pressed into doing the work of ethics and politics, leading to a corruption of science and an increasingly bastardized and perverted ethics and politics. Science as authority translates into an authoritarianism in politics and ethics, the citizen voice and the legitimacy of dissensus and disagreement – the stuff of politics – being overridden by unarguable, unquestionable, non-negotiable ‘truth,’ couched in terms of panic and necessity. I analysed this with respect to climate politics and its pretensions of being ‘beyond politics’ and ‘non-political.’ The slogan ‘follow the science,’ repeated like a mantra, reveals not a genuine politics or science, but a cult. It is only in those terms that it makes any sense. There is no following ‘the science’ for any number of reasons, any of which are decisive. Here are two: 1) there is no such thing as ‘the science’ when it comes to science; this statement makes sense only in the context of an institutionalised science as a function of government, industry, and the military. Is that the intention driving ambitious and expensive programmes of climate action? 2) you cannot ‘follow the science’ for the reason that science doesn’t actually go anywhere; science is an ever-refining process of discovering the truth about reality, a method for discerning fact; where this truth leads and how these facts are to be interpreted depends on things that take us beyond the realm of science.
So what have the followers of ‘the science’ been up to?
They seem a mixed bag of people genuinely interested in the environment, people who put their faith – although they won’t call it that – in science, people who are still hooked on crude enlightenment models of reason, and people pushing agendas, activists with a cause, people so desperate for action that they will push for and support anything that looks as they it might work, people putting pressure on government ‘to act,’ and, no doubt, somewhere among the clamour, people with interests, seeking to hijack a cause and a crisis and engineer society from above, a great green megamachine under the new corporate form. Who else, I ask, has the resources – financial, technological, institutional – to support and implement these ambitious climate programmes?
Beware a politics couched in terms of ‘necessity,’ refuse the cries of panic and alarm,’ and be critical of all those who speak in the reified voice of Nature, and most especially when they make such a point of being non-political or beyond politics – that denial of politics is always but always a sure sign of political intent on the part of particular interests making claim to the general interest.
Anyhow, that’s enough from me. I am incredibly busy editing, so shall simply supply links to my recent work on this, and provide a number of passages from the article which are relevant to my work. I shall resist the temptation to add ‘this is just as I have been telling you for years!’
Basically, the appeal to science is not wrong; the appeal to science as authority is wrong; there is a need to constitute authority properly by recovering its conditions; there is a need to recover the legitimacy, dignity, and worth of politics and ethics as central to practical reason. To press knowledge drawn from the realm of theoretical reason into service as practical reason cannot but be authoritarian, undemocratic, lacking in legitimacy, lacking in motivational and appetitive qualities. The failure to understand these points has been undermining environmentalist politics from the start.
‘This book consists of a collection of essays written in response to the climate mobilisation that has followed in the wake of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Greta Thunberg’s global climate strike. The need for substantial climate action to address ecological degradation and looming destruction is now plain. XR and Thunberg have struck a chord with many. But beyond publicising the need for climate action, what, in precise institutional, policy, and financial terms, is the end game? The 'apolitical' stance and general 'humanitarian' appeal may work to attract support, but is this merely a passive radicalism that diverts energies into system-preservation rather than the system change that addressing the converging crises of the age requires?’
An examination of the 'classless' 'non-political' politics of the class that dare not speak its name; the techno-bureaucratic class of would-be planetary managers as the globalisation of Hegel's state bureaucracy as the 'universal class.' This class claims an independence of capital and labour but, in truth, derives its power and resources from both in seeking to impose a false universalism.
Selected quotes from the Matthew Crawford article, highlighting issues I examine at length in the above books:
The problems with science as authority
‘Scientific papers came to have, not a handful of authors, but hundreds. Scientists became scientist-bureaucrats: savvy institutional players adept at getting government grants, managing sprawling workforces, and building research empires.
‘On one side, science with its devotion to truth. On the other side, authority, whether ecclesiastical or political. In this tale, “science” stands for a freedom of the mind that is inherently at odds with the idea of authority.
The pandemic has brought into relief a dissonance between our idealised image of science, on the one hand, and the work “science” is called upon to do in our society, on the other. I think the dissonance can be traced to this mismatch between science as an activity of the solitary mind, and the institutional reality of it. Big science is fundamentally social in its practice, and with this comes certain entailments.
‘it is precisely the apolitical image of science, as disinterested arbiter of reality, that makes it such a powerful instrument of politics. This contradiction is now out in the open. The “anti-science” tendencies of populism are in significant measure a response to the gap that has opened up between the practice of science and the ideal that underwrites its authority.
‘The work of reconciling science and public opinion is carried out, not through education, but through a kind of distributed demagogy, or Scientism. We are learning that this is not a stable solution to the perennial problem of authority that every society must solve.
The phrase “follow the science” has a false ring to it. That is because science doesn’t lead anywhere. It can illuminate various courses of action, by quantifying the risks and specifying the tradeoffs. But it can’t make the necessary choices for us. By pretending otherwise, decision-makers can avoid taking responsibility for the choices they make on our behalf.
Increasingly, science is pressed into duty as authority. It is invoked to legitimise the transfer of sovereignty from democratic to technocratic bodies, and as a device for insulating such moves from the realm of political contest.
‘One of the most striking features of the present, for anyone alert to politics, is that we are increasingly governed through the device of panics that give every appearance of being contrived to generate acquiescence in a public that has grown skeptical of institutions built on claims of expertise.
‘Michael Lind has argued that covid laid bare a class war, not between labor and capital, but between two groups that could both be called “elites”: on one side, small business owners who opposed lockdowns and, on the other, professionals who enjoyed greater job security, were able to work from home, and typically took a maximalist position on hygiene politics. We can add that, being in the “knowledge economy,” professionals naturally show more deference to experts, since the basic currency of the knowledge economy is epistemic prestige.
‘“Following the science” to minimise certain risks while ignoring others absolves us of exercising our own judgment, anchored in some sense of what makes life worthwhile. It also relieves us of the existential challenge of throwing ourselves into an uncertain world with hope and confidence. A society incapable of affirming life and accepting death will be populated by the walking dead, adherents of a cult of the demi-life who clamour for ever more guidance from experts.
It has been said, a people gets the government it deserves.