Mike Makin-Waite raises questions about antipathy to ‘expert authority’: a review of Cara Reed and Michael Reed, Enough of Experts, De Gruyter, Berlin, 2023.
At a right-wing conference earlier this year, the UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman railed against ‘experts and elites who think they know best what is in the public’s interests’. This has become a familiar theme for right-wing populists: interviewed in the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum, Michael Gove could not identify any reputable economists in favour of leaving the European Union, instead blithely asserting that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’. Such statements are aimed at discrediting and diverting attention from well-evidenced positions that do not suit these politicians’ interests and agendas.
But what are the wider factors which lie behind high levels of suspicion of and antipathy towards ‘expert authority’? And what do these trends mean for progressive politics?
A new book by Cara Reed and Mike Reed helps us think about these questions (and this is so in spite of its ‘academic’ language and off-putting price-tag). The authors point to ‘economic dislocation, ideological polarisation and political fragmentation’ to help explain the decline of ‘established expert authority … as an institutional articulation of disinterested objectivity in liberal democracies’.
This cultural shift has been shaped by individualism (‘I’ve got the right to think what I think’) and scepticism towards authority (‘who are you to tell me what to think?’). There are progressive elements in these stances, in which people assertively react against deference to the powerful and oppressive put-downs. But this is part of what has made these stances helpful to right-wingers: they’ve connected to positive impulses and have then distorted and (mis)directed them.
Wider neoliberal drives have hollowed out, undermined and attacked the collectivist organisations and cultures of the left, and this also generates suspicion of experts: the remnants of the benign paternalist authorities of the welfare state are now much less able to provide, and so people don’t have confidence in them. The blurred distinction between professional experts and politicians which was part of New Labour’s ‘third way’ managerialist approach to delivering social policy has also not enhanced the reputation of experts. Over the last four decades, broad political paradigms have changed: ‘while the social democratic state and its ruling elites broadly supported the growing power, authority and status of professionals, technocrats, experts and managers because of their functional indispensability, collective responsibility and technical reliability, neo-liberal state elites … [place] the latter in a much more “arms-length” relationship … subjecting them to a wide-range of intrusive and demeaning surveillance and control regimes having little or no time for “due process” or “professional autonomy”’.
Furthermore, ‘the recent ideological and political pivot towards an “authoritarian populist” strain of neoliberalism’ has proved ‘extremely bad news for all forms of “expert authority”; it polarises “the people” against “the experts” by rejecting the legitimacy of the latter as entailing false claims to superior intellectual and technical capabilities at the expense of making “ordinary people” seem incompetent and incapable of making decisions for themselves’.
Covid-19 was an important test case of how experts present themselves, are used politically, and are received: Reed and Reed use evidence from the pandemic to test ‘three narratives’ about the decline of expert authority. They look at situations where doctors and scientists were explicitly delegitimised (for example by Trump) or undermined by the behaviour of key government figures (remember Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle?); where experts’ advice was disregarded, including by Sunak (Reed and Reed see this as a form of demystification); and where decomposition occurred, partly as a result of the fragmentation of policy and the different emphases taken by different specialists.
The extent and form of these developments varied from place to place, and a comparative sociological approach to considering the reasons for this could generate interesting results. During the last year of preventive steps being promoted to reduce the transmission of Covid-19 (mask wearing, social distancing, regular testing), this reviewer’s work involved regular visits to Edinburgh and Glasgow, and to towns and cities in northern England: he observed much fuller and more widespread observance of public health advice by ordinary members of the public in Scotland than south of the border. What variables explain this? Sturgeon being then held in relatively high esteem as a trustworthy political leader? A more developed / less degraded pro-social culture, expressive of social-democratic and solidaristic values remaining, still, considerably stronger in Scotland than in many parts of England?
Another worthwhile exercise is to think about what constitutes a radical and progressive take on the issues covered in Enough of Experts. One starting point could be a distinction made by Herbert Marcuse back in the 1950s: he distinguished ‘domination’ from ‘authority’, describing the latter as ‘inherent in any societal division of labour, [and] derived from knowledge and confined to the administration of functions and arrangements necessary for the advancement of the whole. In contrast, domination is exercised by a particular group or individual in order to sustain and enhance itself in a privileged position’. Part of our problem today is that some politicians are whipping up sentiment against ‘authority’ in order to extend their domination – including through ‘culture wars’ and false panics about such ‘threats’ as university students closing down ‘free speech’.
Although the authors do relate their account to changing social settlements and economic developments, they sometimes abstract ‘expert authority’ from the continually contested social relationships and contexts in which ‘it’ is formed, and treat ‘it’ as something which self-evidently needs to be defended and promoted. This reviewer would suggest that, in contrast, we should recognise that some forms and deployments of expertise are problematic (and this is a more complex issue than is addressed by the old community development slogan that experts ‘should be on tap, but not on top’). Furthermore, ‘the science’ cannot ever simply ‘be implemented’. There are always different policy options and therefore there are real and contrasting political choices to make, even when they are properly informed by the robustly tested evidence of experts.
Reed and Reed make the case that those whose roles involve seeking to influence and guide people on the basis of their expert knowledge should shift to a different way of relating to their intended audience. Instead of a ‘rational / deferential conception’ of expertise (‘you should do this because I know things that you don’t know’), they argue that the times require a ‘reflexive / deliberative model’ (‘what are the things we are all worried and affected by, and how should we respond together?).
Their arguments draw on ‘reflexive modernisation’ theories first developed in the 1990s, when ‘optimism about the long-term trajectory and impact of globalisation was at its zenith’. Whilst recognising that they need updating to take account of today’s ‘dangerous and uncertain times’, Reed and Reed believe that such theories can help ‘expert authority … reset its legitimacy and status’ in a world where ‘many of the material and normative props which it traditionally relied upon to support its positioning have become badly corroded and decayed’.
Well, yes. But finding ways to engage people so as to develop evidence-based policies and apply scientific knowledge to the challenges that we face has to go along with effective action to address the social, political and economic drivers which are at the same time generating today’s major challenges and undermining the status of those with professional knowledge about how to address a range of issues. Perhaps we need ‘experts’ who can show us how to take such action (or to work with us to identify what is to be done)? If so, where are they?
Review published August 2023.