This was an interesting read and I hope I don't come off as disagreeable, but I have some ideas which differ quite a bit from what you've reported as Russell and Patterson's ideas.
My experience of the pandemic was apparently a bit different from theirs. I don't recall ever being restricted from debating masks, lockdowns, or school closures. In fact, I published quite a number of blog posts and social media posts about these topics and I don't recall being censored, or even really criticized.
I also recall interacting with countless individuals who were opposed to masks, to lockdowns, and to school closures. I recall reading and listening to various experts and politicians expressing a variety of views - from Andrew Cuomo's daily updates which mostly seemed to follow consensus science, to Texas Governor Dan Patrick's statement that old people should volunteer to die to save the economy; from Scott Alexander's very early review on the literature on masking to Jay Bhattacharya's Great Barrington Declaration recommending that the public should pursue herd immunity to the hundreds of critics of the GBD pointing out that it was essentially advocating eugenics. In fact my experience of the pandemic was that it brought about some of the most lively, rigorous, widespread public debate about science and how science relates to public policy that I have ever personally witnessed or participated in.
We even had the President of the United States musing about drinking bleach and irradiating people's lungs and the most popular podcaster in the world pushing horse dewormer as a miracle cure. This is, to my eye, about as diametrically opposed to the tyranny of expertise as one could conceivably get: two of the world's most powerful and influential men pushing pure bunkum and obvious snake oil on their credulous followers while the actual experts struggled to mitigate the impact of their pernicious stupidity.
So I cannot really give credit to the claim that dissent was "censored" or "silenced" as these authors claim. Instead, I see two alternate phenomena:
One, people like Patrick and Bhattacharya didn't immediately get their way: the elderly and vulnerable were not sacrificed on the altar of economics and/or cordoned off from the rest of the population - at least, not at first. Instead of doing that, most decent people recoiled in horror of the idea of abandoning the most vulnerable to death or solitude and stood in solidarity with our elders and our sick, and criticized people like Patrick and Bhattacharya as ghoulish freaks and "plague rats", and it was that criticism - perhaps overly passionate, or perhaps quite reasonable given their modest proposals - which engendered a feeling that "dissent" had been "stifled". Not the tyranny of experts, but simply the normal reaction to someone telling you that you should let your parents die for the good of society.
Two, the general population came to distrust experts not because the experts overreached during the pandemic, but because *they were specifically told to* by the most powerful and influential men in the world. Donald Trump, Joe Rogan, and the entire right-wing political and media apparatus specifically attacked the status and credibility of experts because it was politically expedient or beneficial for them to do so, and their followers bought it.
As someone who followed the science quite closely, I watched expert consensus change in real time in response to new data coming in. Far from stifling debate, experts welcomed new information and challenges to the old scientific narrative. I watched as the WHO, at a painfully glacial pace, brought its guidelines on COVID transmission into compliance with the advice laid out on a Google Doc, of all things, by scientist Jose-Luis Jimenez, which challenged the prior view that COVID was primarily spread via droplet. Jiminez - just like the Ivermectin pushers - was allowed to dissent, to publish his dissent, and to have the evidence weighed by experts. The difference is not that Jiminez was allowed to speak and the Ivermectin guys weren't. The difference is that the aerosol hypothesis was confirmed and the Ivermectin hypothesis wasn't. That's science, not censorship. There's no way to do science where you just accept *all* claims. It's not the "weaponization of expertise" when people just point out that some claims have been verified while others are still in doubt. And it's not overreach for public health officials to recommend that people pursue a course of action based on confirmed claims rather than unconfirmed claims.
I've written so much I fear this should be its own blog post. My point is, to me this looks like a lot of historical revisionism in service of a specific right-wing grievance about experts, when the much simpler explanation is that right-leaning members of the public distrust experts not due to "weaponization of expertise" but instead due to unceasing right-wing griping about experts, on topics from evolution to climate change to public health to economics to every other field where reality seems to present a stubborn liberal bias.
Thanks! Maybe I'm just terminally agreeable, but I don't necessarily disagree with most of what you said. A couple of relevant points from the post/book that might help explain why:
- I did take issue with the fact that Russell and Patterson ignore the influence and reach of elites that took a very different view to the "mainstream". I only mentioned Jordan Peterson by name because he's particularly well known, but I meant to highlight the whole ecosystem you want to shift attention to. Now, they say this is because they are acting as, if you like, "internal critics" within the "expert class--they want to make their "own side" better. But you might worry this is more than a bit disingenuous--this is partly what I am getting at when I talk about the dynamics of politicisation at the end.
- One thing I *really* appreciated about the book is that, not only did they refrain from (unless I missed it) taking much of a stand on a whole range of political and scientific issues (as they repeatedly say: their issue is not with the truth of various expert claims but with the unwarranted degree of confidence with which they are treated), it wasn't easy to infer their politics. This goes along with their insistence that populism should not be understood as a purely "right wing" phenomenon. As I say, they would have found it a good deal easier to make their case if they hadn't fixated almost entirely on the US, where I think, by now, we can say that populism is very much a right wing phenomenon, even though there is an alternative history where Sanders secured the Democratic nomination in 2016 and became an even more prominent standard bearer for the "populist left". But in other parts of the world it is quite clear that populism can be found on the right and the left--for example, in South America, where most left-wing politicians could be fairly described as populists. (As could many right wing politicians, of course). And in parts of Europe you also have clear examples of left wing populism--for example, Mélenchon in France.
- I personally agree with you that all this talk of censure and intellectual tyranny is a bit overwrought. But I've been involved in enough discussions of this--and witnessed a good deal more as a spectator--to know that this is an issue that tends to get people very heated. Russell and Patterson clearly take the view that I regard as a bit of an exaggeration. But I also think there are genuine issues here. It's just that it is hard to talk about them without sounding like you are making the exaggerations that Russell and Patterson make. So I basically avoided discussing it.
My main issue with their book is that they are insufficiently precise about the target. Is it science itself? Is it the use to which politicians and other political actors put science? Is it public discourse about science? I think the pandemic clearly highlighted issues with the way in which science is used by politicians. As I say in the review, at least in the UK my impression was that our PM (Johnson) and senior Conservative politicians essentially used their array of scientific advisors as a way of avoiding taking responsibility for what were, ultimately, political decisions. I also think it highlighted issues with a lot of public discourse about science, which is not sufficiently attentive to the complexities of the scientific process you allude to. Much public discourse about these things is what you might call "discourse surfing"--any new study or piece of data immediately gets caught up in ongoing political and cultural battles, and these generate absolutely no real insight. Finally, I do think there are genuine issues within science, but they are the issues I discuss at the end. These issues exist because of the funding structure, which generates incentives to do the sorts of things that Russell and Patterson object to.
It seems I wrote a mini blog post of my own! Hopefully that helps to see where I am coming from though.
Oh, yes, I appreciated the book review. I think there is always room for improvement within institutions, and especially US institutions, which suffer from the first order problem of not being great in the first place and the second order problem of being under sustained assault for ideological reasons, which compounds the first problem. The CDC published more than its share of unsupported or erroneous information during the pandemic. Politicians made rules against gathering and then immediately broke them. Some measures were applied nonsensically, either because the policymakers didn't understand the science or because they thought the public couldn't understand the science.
But I think that most policymakers in most places were making a legitimate good-faith effort to follow the science and protect the public. And a lot of the pandemic response was actually very participative - I heard about "flatten the curve" from Tomas Pueyo long before any politician, and I gather that politicians were reading the same advocacy from social media that I was because it would always be on twitter a few days or weeks before it became policy. The response was as democratic as it could have been without holding a referendum in every city, and even then polling at the time often indicated that people like Cuomo and Fauci were much more popular than people advocating Barrington or herd immunity. There was a genuine popular outcry against anti-maskers and others who didn't want to do their part.
I also think that collective trauma has prevented us from taking a realistic look at what was done well and what was done poorly, and that claims of "tyranny" and "censorship" are a large part of what's preventing us from doing that. It's one thing to say that playgrounds should have opened before restaurants or that cloth masks were embraced too quickly with too little evidence. It's another thing entirely to say that public health measures were a priori wrong for ideological reasons and that they were imposed on us from above rather than something that many people asked for and that our democratically elected officials provided.
So while I would love to see more earnest public participation in holding institutions accountable and reforming institutions which have failed in the past, I want the goal to be to improve those institutions - not to tear them down and/or replace them with conspiratorial thinking and widespread public mistrust.
“Russell and Paterson (sic) are right to yearn for ideals in academic research and journalism. But what they don't adequately explain is how we might come any closer to realising those ideals in a world that, for better or worse (I would certainly say worse), is heavily politicised.”
Thoughts:
First, start by generating true Ph.D.’s…doctors-of-philosophy (and not narrow doctors-of-technology) that understand the pervasive ontological and epistemological issues of our day. Of great value is a Ph.D. that deeply understands not only the limits to truth-seeking but the problematic nature of the notion of truth itself. A key extra benefit is the promotion of epistemic humility, called for in this essay, that is so necessary to the project of knowledge building in both the social and natural sciences.
Second, engage in knowledge building practices that recognize that politics has always been and will forever be a central feature of the process. A good place to start would be epistemologies that weave together researchers and members of the community to which the research pertains. An exemplar of one such framework: Flybjerg’s Phronetic Social Science. Unfortunately, it has not received the attention it deserves due the challenges it poses to the dominant paradigm of the discipline in question, namely political science.
Hence, third, the need for structural and cultural realignment of incentives referred to numerous times in this essay…a huge collective (and politicized) task that stands before us if we want to move beyond our current state-of-affairs and do academic research that matters.
Thanks! Do you have any thoughts about *how* that structural and cultural realignment might be achieved? I must admit I am incredibly sceptical that it is possible. This is one reason why I'm not entirely sure what to do with the argument of a book like this. In a way I think the problems are much deeper than the argument seems to suggest, and I get a bit frustrated by the fact that the book doesn't entirely seem to appreciate this fact.
I’m afraid I’m just as skeptical as you, Robin. It would most likely require a broad cooperative social act where the system is gradually unfrozen and renegotiated over time. Taking inspiration from Kuhn, that timeline may include the necessity for the old guard to virtually die off before a shift in the existing paradigm(?) to occur. An exemplar, in the early stages of development in the US might be the emergence of the Heterodox Academy. After its founding around 10 years ago, by Jonathan Haidt, it has significantly expanded membership, as well as reach. The last few years has seen rapid growth in the number of HxA campus communities. They have a synergistic relationship with Greg Lukianoff’s FIRE and, in my estimation, have had, and continue to have, a meaningful impact on Left leaning campus orthodoxies that limit viewpoint diversity (e.g., DEI and other related ideologies characterized as ‘woke’). HxA prizes pluralism and constructive disagreement which I certainly would hope encourages more research that is cross disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary. The crisis regarding expert knowledge is rooted in the increasing emphasis on disciplinarity. What the future holds regarding the impact of organizations such as HxA on the broader academy is unknown…but it may be one viable mechanism for grass roots change coming from inside the academy.
Thanks. I don't really know much about the HxA, or in general what is going on in American universities. Where I work--the UK--the problems are so clearly the result of the way the whole sector is set up that I don't think any internal changes will have much of a positive effect. Perhaps in the US, where universities have far more freedom of action, there is more chance of positive change driven by academics.
In my PhD research, I am writing about the role of experts in democracy and focus specifically on technocracy and populism. I was not aware of this book, so thank you for mentioning it.
The definition of elites by Russell and Paterson seems flawed, and I think you highlight this beautifully by invoking Jordan Peterson. Elites and elitism are part and parcel of “populism”. In fact, empirical studies, using survey items and a “populist attitude scale” often find "elitist" preferences among “citizens with a populist attitude” (though there are many methodological issues here, of course).
A great quote, that I use in my thesis, exemplifies the way in which elitism can be viewed from the perspective of populists: ‘the former Polish Prime Minster Beata Szydło drew on the populist politics of “ordinary people” in a speech delivered in May 2017 in the Polish Parliament. “We want to help the people, not the political elites.” When Szydło was confronted with the fact that, as a prime minister, she is the elite, she replied: “We are the good elite.”’ (Buštíková, “The State as a Firm”). Although more complex, it comes down to this: for populists, it is about whether you’re with “the people” or not.
Thanks! Nice quote. One place where I do agree with the book is with the need to understand populist voters. It is probably a mistake to think that the rationalizations that populist politicians offer for their actions is a good guide to the motivations of the majority of people who vote for them. I always think of my stance towards people I vote for—I rarely vote for them because I have any faith in them or their project. I vote for them because they are less bad than the available alternatives.
Thank you for this, Robin. I really enjoyed (and drew some interesting puzzles and insights from) the piece. You ask some good -- and enduring -- questions. One of those, in the context of Russell and Paterson's conceit that expertise can be (and is) weaponised, is that "we need to ask why anyone listens to the experts—why does weaponisation work?" I linger on this question often, wondering whether the answer is as simple as our innate yearning for the semblance of certainty (particularly amidst crises). Yet, even that fails to offer real insight: why do we hold fast to some certainties and not others? Are we susceptible due to the narrative construction of "truths" (absent any real attention to their veracity)?
Thanks! I imagine it depends on lots of things--the context, the person, an so on. I had (and they have) in mind contexts where we are looking for some facts that might settle the matter, so not necessarily certainty, but some sort of indication of what we should do. I certainly think there's a tendency to look for this when it isn't necessary, or even a good idea; witness the rise of "parenting experts", "home decoration experts", and all sorts of experts they make fun of in the book. Some of these things you are better off figuring out for yourself. But then there are times when you know you can't do that--you just don't have the knowledge or skills. There's nothing wrong with that, though you can still do that more or less well.
Perhaps the lack of agreement on how to deal with COVID springs from the failure to deal with AIDS. The same political correctness which denied the use of quarantine (causing hundreds of millions of deaths) caused the elites to shy away from demanding it. The billions of people who were quarantined were protected until they ended quarantine and millions died, proving the rule.
This was an interesting read and I hope I don't come off as disagreeable, but I have some ideas which differ quite a bit from what you've reported as Russell and Patterson's ideas.
My experience of the pandemic was apparently a bit different from theirs. I don't recall ever being restricted from debating masks, lockdowns, or school closures. In fact, I published quite a number of blog posts and social media posts about these topics and I don't recall being censored, or even really criticized.
I also recall interacting with countless individuals who were opposed to masks, to lockdowns, and to school closures. I recall reading and listening to various experts and politicians expressing a variety of views - from Andrew Cuomo's daily updates which mostly seemed to follow consensus science, to Texas Governor Dan Patrick's statement that old people should volunteer to die to save the economy; from Scott Alexander's very early review on the literature on masking to Jay Bhattacharya's Great Barrington Declaration recommending that the public should pursue herd immunity to the hundreds of critics of the GBD pointing out that it was essentially advocating eugenics. In fact my experience of the pandemic was that it brought about some of the most lively, rigorous, widespread public debate about science and how science relates to public policy that I have ever personally witnessed or participated in.
We even had the President of the United States musing about drinking bleach and irradiating people's lungs and the most popular podcaster in the world pushing horse dewormer as a miracle cure. This is, to my eye, about as diametrically opposed to the tyranny of expertise as one could conceivably get: two of the world's most powerful and influential men pushing pure bunkum and obvious snake oil on their credulous followers while the actual experts struggled to mitigate the impact of their pernicious stupidity.
So I cannot really give credit to the claim that dissent was "censored" or "silenced" as these authors claim. Instead, I see two alternate phenomena:
One, people like Patrick and Bhattacharya didn't immediately get their way: the elderly and vulnerable were not sacrificed on the altar of economics and/or cordoned off from the rest of the population - at least, not at first. Instead of doing that, most decent people recoiled in horror of the idea of abandoning the most vulnerable to death or solitude and stood in solidarity with our elders and our sick, and criticized people like Patrick and Bhattacharya as ghoulish freaks and "plague rats", and it was that criticism - perhaps overly passionate, or perhaps quite reasonable given their modest proposals - which engendered a feeling that "dissent" had been "stifled". Not the tyranny of experts, but simply the normal reaction to someone telling you that you should let your parents die for the good of society.
Two, the general population came to distrust experts not because the experts overreached during the pandemic, but because *they were specifically told to* by the most powerful and influential men in the world. Donald Trump, Joe Rogan, and the entire right-wing political and media apparatus specifically attacked the status and credibility of experts because it was politically expedient or beneficial for them to do so, and their followers bought it.
As someone who followed the science quite closely, I watched expert consensus change in real time in response to new data coming in. Far from stifling debate, experts welcomed new information and challenges to the old scientific narrative. I watched as the WHO, at a painfully glacial pace, brought its guidelines on COVID transmission into compliance with the advice laid out on a Google Doc, of all things, by scientist Jose-Luis Jimenez, which challenged the prior view that COVID was primarily spread via droplet. Jiminez - just like the Ivermectin pushers - was allowed to dissent, to publish his dissent, and to have the evidence weighed by experts. The difference is not that Jiminez was allowed to speak and the Ivermectin guys weren't. The difference is that the aerosol hypothesis was confirmed and the Ivermectin hypothesis wasn't. That's science, not censorship. There's no way to do science where you just accept *all* claims. It's not the "weaponization of expertise" when people just point out that some claims have been verified while others are still in doubt. And it's not overreach for public health officials to recommend that people pursue a course of action based on confirmed claims rather than unconfirmed claims.
I've written so much I fear this should be its own blog post. My point is, to me this looks like a lot of historical revisionism in service of a specific right-wing grievance about experts, when the much simpler explanation is that right-leaning members of the public distrust experts not due to "weaponization of expertise" but instead due to unceasing right-wing griping about experts, on topics from evolution to climate change to public health to economics to every other field where reality seems to present a stubborn liberal bias.
Thanks! Maybe I'm just terminally agreeable, but I don't necessarily disagree with most of what you said. A couple of relevant points from the post/book that might help explain why:
- I did take issue with the fact that Russell and Patterson ignore the influence and reach of elites that took a very different view to the "mainstream". I only mentioned Jordan Peterson by name because he's particularly well known, but I meant to highlight the whole ecosystem you want to shift attention to. Now, they say this is because they are acting as, if you like, "internal critics" within the "expert class--they want to make their "own side" better. But you might worry this is more than a bit disingenuous--this is partly what I am getting at when I talk about the dynamics of politicisation at the end.
- One thing I *really* appreciated about the book is that, not only did they refrain from (unless I missed it) taking much of a stand on a whole range of political and scientific issues (as they repeatedly say: their issue is not with the truth of various expert claims but with the unwarranted degree of confidence with which they are treated), it wasn't easy to infer their politics. This goes along with their insistence that populism should not be understood as a purely "right wing" phenomenon. As I say, they would have found it a good deal easier to make their case if they hadn't fixated almost entirely on the US, where I think, by now, we can say that populism is very much a right wing phenomenon, even though there is an alternative history where Sanders secured the Democratic nomination in 2016 and became an even more prominent standard bearer for the "populist left". But in other parts of the world it is quite clear that populism can be found on the right and the left--for example, in South America, where most left-wing politicians could be fairly described as populists. (As could many right wing politicians, of course). And in parts of Europe you also have clear examples of left wing populism--for example, Mélenchon in France.
- I personally agree with you that all this talk of censure and intellectual tyranny is a bit overwrought. But I've been involved in enough discussions of this--and witnessed a good deal more as a spectator--to know that this is an issue that tends to get people very heated. Russell and Patterson clearly take the view that I regard as a bit of an exaggeration. But I also think there are genuine issues here. It's just that it is hard to talk about them without sounding like you are making the exaggerations that Russell and Patterson make. So I basically avoided discussing it.
My main issue with their book is that they are insufficiently precise about the target. Is it science itself? Is it the use to which politicians and other political actors put science? Is it public discourse about science? I think the pandemic clearly highlighted issues with the way in which science is used by politicians. As I say in the review, at least in the UK my impression was that our PM (Johnson) and senior Conservative politicians essentially used their array of scientific advisors as a way of avoiding taking responsibility for what were, ultimately, political decisions. I also think it highlighted issues with a lot of public discourse about science, which is not sufficiently attentive to the complexities of the scientific process you allude to. Much public discourse about these things is what you might call "discourse surfing"--any new study or piece of data immediately gets caught up in ongoing political and cultural battles, and these generate absolutely no real insight. Finally, I do think there are genuine issues within science, but they are the issues I discuss at the end. These issues exist because of the funding structure, which generates incentives to do the sorts of things that Russell and Patterson object to.
It seems I wrote a mini blog post of my own! Hopefully that helps to see where I am coming from though.
Oh, yes, I appreciated the book review. I think there is always room for improvement within institutions, and especially US institutions, which suffer from the first order problem of not being great in the first place and the second order problem of being under sustained assault for ideological reasons, which compounds the first problem. The CDC published more than its share of unsupported or erroneous information during the pandemic. Politicians made rules against gathering and then immediately broke them. Some measures were applied nonsensically, either because the policymakers didn't understand the science or because they thought the public couldn't understand the science.
But I think that most policymakers in most places were making a legitimate good-faith effort to follow the science and protect the public. And a lot of the pandemic response was actually very participative - I heard about "flatten the curve" from Tomas Pueyo long before any politician, and I gather that politicians were reading the same advocacy from social media that I was because it would always be on twitter a few days or weeks before it became policy. The response was as democratic as it could have been without holding a referendum in every city, and even then polling at the time often indicated that people like Cuomo and Fauci were much more popular than people advocating Barrington or herd immunity. There was a genuine popular outcry against anti-maskers and others who didn't want to do their part.
I also think that collective trauma has prevented us from taking a realistic look at what was done well and what was done poorly, and that claims of "tyranny" and "censorship" are a large part of what's preventing us from doing that. It's one thing to say that playgrounds should have opened before restaurants or that cloth masks were embraced too quickly with too little evidence. It's another thing entirely to say that public health measures were a priori wrong for ideological reasons and that they were imposed on us from above rather than something that many people asked for and that our democratically elected officials provided.
So while I would love to see more earnest public participation in holding institutions accountable and reforming institutions which have failed in the past, I want the goal to be to improve those institutions - not to tear them down and/or replace them with conspiratorial thinking and widespread public mistrust.
I think we mostly agree. One thing missing from the book I think is a recognition of the sheer difficulty of all this.
Thoughtful review of Russell and Patterson.
“Russell and Paterson (sic) are right to yearn for ideals in academic research and journalism. But what they don't adequately explain is how we might come any closer to realising those ideals in a world that, for better or worse (I would certainly say worse), is heavily politicised.”
Thoughts:
First, start by generating true Ph.D.’s…doctors-of-philosophy (and not narrow doctors-of-technology) that understand the pervasive ontological and epistemological issues of our day. Of great value is a Ph.D. that deeply understands not only the limits to truth-seeking but the problematic nature of the notion of truth itself. A key extra benefit is the promotion of epistemic humility, called for in this essay, that is so necessary to the project of knowledge building in both the social and natural sciences.
Second, engage in knowledge building practices that recognize that politics has always been and will forever be a central feature of the process. A good place to start would be epistemologies that weave together researchers and members of the community to which the research pertains. An exemplar of one such framework: Flybjerg’s Phronetic Social Science. Unfortunately, it has not received the attention it deserves due the challenges it poses to the dominant paradigm of the discipline in question, namely political science.
Hence, third, the need for structural and cultural realignment of incentives referred to numerous times in this essay…a huge collective (and politicized) task that stands before us if we want to move beyond our current state-of-affairs and do academic research that matters.
Thanks! Do you have any thoughts about *how* that structural and cultural realignment might be achieved? I must admit I am incredibly sceptical that it is possible. This is one reason why I'm not entirely sure what to do with the argument of a book like this. In a way I think the problems are much deeper than the argument seems to suggest, and I get a bit frustrated by the fact that the book doesn't entirely seem to appreciate this fact.
I’m afraid I’m just as skeptical as you, Robin. It would most likely require a broad cooperative social act where the system is gradually unfrozen and renegotiated over time. Taking inspiration from Kuhn, that timeline may include the necessity for the old guard to virtually die off before a shift in the existing paradigm(?) to occur. An exemplar, in the early stages of development in the US might be the emergence of the Heterodox Academy. After its founding around 10 years ago, by Jonathan Haidt, it has significantly expanded membership, as well as reach. The last few years has seen rapid growth in the number of HxA campus communities. They have a synergistic relationship with Greg Lukianoff’s FIRE and, in my estimation, have had, and continue to have, a meaningful impact on Left leaning campus orthodoxies that limit viewpoint diversity (e.g., DEI and other related ideologies characterized as ‘woke’). HxA prizes pluralism and constructive disagreement which I certainly would hope encourages more research that is cross disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary. The crisis regarding expert knowledge is rooted in the increasing emphasis on disciplinarity. What the future holds regarding the impact of organizations such as HxA on the broader academy is unknown…but it may be one viable mechanism for grass roots change coming from inside the academy.
Thanks. I don't really know much about the HxA, or in general what is going on in American universities. Where I work--the UK--the problems are so clearly the result of the way the whole sector is set up that I don't think any internal changes will have much of a positive effect. Perhaps in the US, where universities have far more freedom of action, there is more chance of positive change driven by academics.
I enjoyed this a lot. Thank you!
In my PhD research, I am writing about the role of experts in democracy and focus specifically on technocracy and populism. I was not aware of this book, so thank you for mentioning it.
The definition of elites by Russell and Paterson seems flawed, and I think you highlight this beautifully by invoking Jordan Peterson. Elites and elitism are part and parcel of “populism”. In fact, empirical studies, using survey items and a “populist attitude scale” often find "elitist" preferences among “citizens with a populist attitude” (though there are many methodological issues here, of course).
A great quote, that I use in my thesis, exemplifies the way in which elitism can be viewed from the perspective of populists: ‘the former Polish Prime Minster Beata Szydło drew on the populist politics of “ordinary people” in a speech delivered in May 2017 in the Polish Parliament. “We want to help the people, not the political elites.” When Szydło was confronted with the fact that, as a prime minister, she is the elite, she replied: “We are the good elite.”’ (Buštíková, “The State as a Firm”). Although more complex, it comes down to this: for populists, it is about whether you’re with “the people” or not.
Thanks! Nice quote. One place where I do agree with the book is with the need to understand populist voters. It is probably a mistake to think that the rationalizations that populist politicians offer for their actions is a good guide to the motivations of the majority of people who vote for them. I always think of my stance towards people I vote for—I rarely vote for them because I have any faith in them or their project. I vote for them because they are less bad than the available alternatives.
Thank you for this, Robin. I really enjoyed (and drew some interesting puzzles and insights from) the piece. You ask some good -- and enduring -- questions. One of those, in the context of Russell and Paterson's conceit that expertise can be (and is) weaponised, is that "we need to ask why anyone listens to the experts—why does weaponisation work?" I linger on this question often, wondering whether the answer is as simple as our innate yearning for the semblance of certainty (particularly amidst crises). Yet, even that fails to offer real insight: why do we hold fast to some certainties and not others? Are we susceptible due to the narrative construction of "truths" (absent any real attention to their veracity)?
Thanks! I imagine it depends on lots of things--the context, the person, an so on. I had (and they have) in mind contexts where we are looking for some facts that might settle the matter, so not necessarily certainty, but some sort of indication of what we should do. I certainly think there's a tendency to look for this when it isn't necessary, or even a good idea; witness the rise of "parenting experts", "home decoration experts", and all sorts of experts they make fun of in the book. Some of these things you are better off figuring out for yourself. But then there are times when you know you can't do that--you just don't have the knowledge or skills. There's nothing wrong with that, though you can still do that more or less well.
Perhaps the lack of agreement on how to deal with COVID springs from the failure to deal with AIDS. The same political correctness which denied the use of quarantine (causing hundreds of millions of deaths) caused the elites to shy away from demanding it. The billions of people who were quarantined were protected until they ended quarantine and millions died, proving the rule.