CapX is running a series of pieces on “Illiberalism in Europe”, with the support of the Atlas Network. The first one is by writer Helen Dale and makes a number of interesting points.
Dale is clearly more sympathetic to the populist upsurge than others. Yet she identifies persuasively one of its characters: that is, antipathy for experts. This has been accounted as a most dangerous factor by many, beginning with Tom Nichols’s book The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Dale takes a very different route, and sympathizes with the enemies of expertise.
The gist of her piece is embodied in the title: (classical) liberalism should be no friend to technocrats. This is because government by experts is an old rhetorical tool deployed to justify manifold interventions into people’s lives. Most of this expertise, according to Dale, is quite unfounded and in actual fact is only a cover for special interests. In particular, concerning lifestyle regulation she argues that:
You don’t have to be some sort of Marxist to notice how much nanny-statism involves policing undertaken by the upper-middle-classes of activities typically engaged in by minorities, many of them poor. Think attacks on alcohol, cigarettes, and sugar (working class men); attempts to ban kosher and halal slaughter (Jews and Muslims); attacks on sex work (poor women); attacks on vaping (people who quit smoking using “non-approved” methods). In other words, the ex-commies over at Spiked have a point when they suggest a great deal of modern populism amounts to people outside the bubble telling some posh, mouthy feminist to bog off and leave their porn-watching habits alone. Remember the recent ban on gender stereotyping in adverts? The Great British Public laughed its collective arse off because this is ridiculous and ridiculous things ought to be ridiculed.
Yet Dale is not calling for incompetence in government. The most subtle of her points is that one of the risks of relying too much on experts is the kind of group think that dominates experts’ groups – like many others. She would like to see “intellectually curious people, expert or otherwise” in positions of responsibility.
While I find that abstractly admirable, I am a bit puzzled by how difficult sometimes the terms of the debate are. Who is an expert, by the way? Does a Master’s degree making you one? A PhD? Certainly government has, and always has had, a limited number of experts in an academic sense. Lots of pundits claimed to be experts, but they really were not. Intellectual curiosity is a great virtue, but how can you spot it in people? And how could voters do that, in particular, on Election Day?
Dale’s piece is interesting and a good counter to many, equally interesting, pieces on the “epistocratic side”.
It seems obvious to me that classical liberals had better go back to basics: what matters is the size and the extent of government, not who governs. Yet how can you have governments that consume roughly 50% of GDP in a country, and rely on any other than allegedly competent people to manage it, I can’t see. Big government calls for arrogant government, so to say.
READER COMMENTS
Phil H
Nov 24 2019 at 6:29pm
The article has some interesting points, but I think it falls prey to the classic failure to understand institutions. Everything is ascribed to people – the dodgy dossier was all Alistair Campbell in this world, and red meat causes cancer stories is the work of “scientists” who are not good at communicating subtleties.
(It also lets off the so-called “populist” side much too easily. Where is the recognition of the naked greed that really drives health-scare movements like anti-vaccination? Wakefield was an idiot; everyone who follows has been a snake-oil salesman.)
So, for example, it rails against public health interventions like calling on people to stop smoking. But these weren’t the decision of one brainiac scientist who lacks the political nous to realise that it’s not good to intervene in people’s lives. They are the outcome of a decision-making process that has to weigh up where the money goes, and money spent on intervention has more impact than money spent on cure.
The Iraq dodgy dossier was the same thing – obviously a disastrously flawed implementation of the idea, but still the same thought process, nonetheless. I have little doubt that everyone involved thought they were doing the right thing, and would ultimately make Iraq a much better place.
If you want to argue against such processes, I think you can. But it would have to be an argument about the limitations of prediction, how much you should discount long-term future impacts, and exactly how much paternalism is acceptable to people (the answer isn’t going to be zero, I’m fairly confident). Simply railing at eggheads doesn’t get to the heart of the matter.
Mark Brady
Nov 27 2019 at 1:07am
“The Iraq dodgy dossier was the same thing – obviously a disastrously flawed implementation of the idea, but still the same thought process, nonetheless. I have little doubt that everyone involved thought they were doing the right thing, and would ultimately make Iraq a much better place.”
“[T]he right thing.” In their judgement, but not in the judgement of others. That’s part of the problem with “experts.” All too many believe that their expertise extends to the goals as well as the means.
Phil H
Nov 27 2019 at 1:48am
Mark – yes, I agree with that. But I’d say it’s not just a problem with the experts themselves. The problem is that there is no agreement on the long-term goals. Britain’s polity is apparently not mature enough to have a rational, functional debate about whether or not we are part of the EU; there’s no way we can have an effective public debate about what our vision for the future of the Middle East, whether Britain has any role in it, and what that role might be. So, yes, by default, the decisions get made by “experts” – the people who turn up. I think you’re right that their technical expertise doesn’t mean they are qualified to take fundamental decisions. They’re just the people on the ground when directions are set, usually more by default than through any conscious process.
Thaomas
Nov 24 2019 at 9:28pm
But of course G is much less than 50% of GDP. It takes few resources, a few, but not that many experts, to run transfer programs, fewer if you make the criteria for receiving benefits pretty simple.
Mark Brady
Nov 27 2019 at 1:18am
How often are academic credentials evidence that an individual is an informed and thoughtful person whose opinions should be respected and to whom authority should be accorded? And does the answer turn on the academic discipline in which the individual has formal training?
nobody.really
Nov 27 2019 at 12:21pm
Democracy basically means “government by amateur.” The modern state compensates for the obvious shortcomings of this arrangement by having a professional staff answerable to elected officials.
But the tension between expertise and populism seems intractable. It may not be a coincidence that in two televised versions of idealized “progressive” US presidencies, The West Wing featured a president who was previously an economics professor, while Madame Secretary features a president who was previously a CIA analyst/agent. That is, they’re both technocrats, thereby eliding over the tension.
Yet, recall the last time a Republican president was facing impeachment: Allegedly Nixon was drinking heavily and making wild threats. And allegedly, his staff agreed to keep the nuclear launch apparatus out of his hands. If true, then there really was a “deep state” coup. And should we be sorry about that? Or should we be comforted by the idea that the “grownups in the room” will override the decisions of elected officials when they get too crazy, at least by the judgment of the grownups?
Comments are closed.