Clerisy

Referring both to the current debate over how to deal with Covid-19 and to the American tradition of political accountability through education (outlined a century ago by the philosopher and social reformer John Dewey), Steve Randy Waldman wonders if our commitment to public understanding may no longer be fit for purpose: "It has become a bromide, among the educated classes, that if only the public were better educated, we could have an effective democracy. I am increasingly skeptical of this idea. I think it forgivable of Dewey writing in 1927, but the scope of expertise required to manage a modern society has expanded dramatically since then. Citizens generally would have to become freakish polymaths in order to be able to police the range of options offered by experts, to distinguish proposals that would serve the public interest from proposals that purport to serve the public interest but under cover of technical legerdemain are skewed to benefit parochial interests. It just isn’t plausible. Experts need to train, for years. We cannot all train in everything."

With its choreographed press conferences in which government ministers and public health experts dance a cautious minuet, Covid-19 has given visible form to the dichotomy between politics and expertise. In the UK, this became particularly salient in the aftermath of the 2016 EU referendum in which expertise and politics were deemed, largely by the liberal media, to be antagonistic. In the US, a similar conflict has been evident since the last presidential election. In reality, this is a false dichotomy. The UK government insists quite reasonably that it is following scientific advice, even if it is taking sides between competing scientific groups, while the practical measures in the US are similarly being driven by public health experts rather than the White House. But the belief that the two are currently in tension, and the correlative belief that a more technocratic government would resolve that tension, is typical of current liberal thinking. Waldman is sceptical of both the liberal assumption of disinterest in the pronouncements of experts and the ability of the public to properly interrogate those pronouncements and reveal those interests.

His suggestion is to boost community colleges (publicly-funded tertiary education) as an intellectual resource for their, well, communities: "The local community college should have an epidemiologist, and a financial economist, and representatives of many other disciplines, regardless of whether students fill out a full schedule of classes for them. They should be there, because the community and its citizens require the expertise of people trained in those professions in order to participate in our democracy, and it requires those people remain independent of the roles they might have if they were employed by other organizations in their communities". This has many merits, but it still assumes that the full participation of a community in a democracy is dependent on specialised knowledge, which ultimately doesn't free us from the limiting belief of liberalism in which ability - and credentialled ability at that - takes priority over equality. It also downplays the role of tacit knowledge (i.e. lived experience) as well as heterodox opinion within scientific disciplines.

Ever since Athens adopted sortition (the random selection of office-holders) and a general legislative assembly, democracy has always faced the criticism that it invests too much in the principle of equality at the expense of practical ability. Of course, you don't have to be an advocate of epistocracy, the rule of experts, to support a system in which decision-making is delegated to a minority of the informed. That, after all, is simply representative democracy. But it's worth noting that epistocracy today is not about setting knowledge or competency thresholds for elected representatives but applying these to the electorate. The interest in epistocracy in the aftermath of 2016's "populist shocks" was driven by an unapologetic belief that the people didn't know what was best for themselves. That points to the roots of the idea in Plato, who spoke of noocracy, the rule of the wise. Epistocracy is a moden coinage that replaces Plato's more contentious faith in philosophers with the image of a government of all the talents.

Epistocracy is not simply concerned with dividing society into the rulers and the ruled. The former depend not merely on the acquiescence of the latter but on the support of a powerful social class that can manufacture broad consent for a particular interpretation of learning and knowledge (an episteme, in Michel Foucault's terminology). In other words, a clerisy. In contemporary society that essentially means Waldman's "educated classes", and in particular its squadrons in the arenas of public affairs, the media, academia and those parts of commercial life that interesect with them. Of course, in such a large group with potentially conflicting interests there will be many shades of opinion, but there is also a common culture founded on values such as tolerance, free enquiry and evidence-based judgement. But as that clerisy has grown, both in absolute terms and as a relative (and increasingly dominant) component of the wider middle class, it has struggled to honour its own ideals. The result has been a growing intolerance of dissent manifested in hysteria and autos-da-fe, from #FBPE through "the resistance" to the blackballing of Jeremy Corbyn.

Antagonism and even civil war within the clerisy isn't new, but in the past this usually took place within the context of a broader division in society that fissured all classes - for example, the competing poles of attraction of communism and Fascism in the 1930s. Over the last half-century, the divide has increasingly been between the clerisy and the rest of society, reflecting both the social impacts of the "knowledge economy" and the hegemony of the clerisy as both organised labour and the aristocracy have been politically marginalised. This has been widely misrepresented as a division between graduates and non-graduates, or between the "new middle class" that accommodated itself to neoliberal reality and a reactionary alliance of the working class and an uneducated, older petit bourgeoisie. In fact, many recent graduates find themselves not merely marginal to the clerisy but even despised for their political "naivety", while the working class is even more politically multifarious and socially diverse than ever.

In truth, the clerisy has been increasingly conservative (as you would expect given its social dominance and demographic growth), while its "liberalism" is no more coherent than the caricature offered by its opponents in the media frame of the "culture wars". A recent example of this was Ayesha Hazarika's now-infamous "hipster analysis" crack on Twitter. This was widely condemned for belittling members of the public who questioned the wisdom of the British government's strategy for dealing with Covid-19 early last month. Subsequent events, notably the total eclipse of "herd immunity", proved that Joe Public had a point, but this vindication misses that Hazarika's comment was in response to Jennifer Williams of the Manchester Evening News dismissing the Labour party's call for greater transparency. The point is that Labour was then still led by Jeremy Corbyn, hence the sneering. Inevitably, Keir Starmer's more recent call for the government to publish its exit strategy has met with the approval of the clerisy, even if it requires imagining some three-dimensional chess moves.

Hazarika was also prominent among those media commentators who decided that the leaked report on the bad behaviour of Labour's HQ under Iain McNichol wasn't worth troubling with, beyond condemning the whistle-blowers for breaching data protection. If "hipster analysis" revealed a lack of tolerance as much as an over-confidence in expertise, the closing of the massed ranks of the clerisy over the leaked report - ignoring not only the evidence of undermining and casual bigotry, but the tolerance of antisemitism in the ranks as a way of embarrassing the leadership - reveals how much free enquiry and the value of evidence are deemed contingent. Right on cue, various political scientists and historians, such as Tim Bale and Steve Fielding, who have spent the last decade poring over the recomposition of the political right and issuing warnings about the electability of a Labour party tacking left, also decided that there was nothing to see here, but doesn't Keir Starmer look smart in a suit? As ever, Matthew Goodwin managed to beat the field by a neck in the WTF stakes, abandoning all pretense to objective analysis in a paean to the Prime Minister (a cynic might suggest he's manoeuvring for a new grift in case "be nice to migrants" gains traction).

I think Waldman is wrong to be be pessimistic about democratic participation. We don't need to understand all the technicalities, we need to understand the social consequences, whether that be the possibility of war with Sparta or the scale of a pandemic death toll. And in achieving that understanding we shouldn't be surprised if society produces individuals, outside of institutionalised education, who have either the tacit knowledge or smarts to question received wisdom. You don't need to be an epidemiologist to understand that the government's reluctance to move to a lockdown earlier has probably resulted in more deaths. What remains obscure is how much that was a case of political considerations over-riding scientific advice, or scientists soft-pedalling their advice in anticipation of that political calculation. Dismissing criticisms as "hipster analysis" cannot obscure the apparent evidence, such as the markedly different outcomes between England and Ireland due to the latter's willingness to shut down social interaction early. The final accounting may show a different picture, but the UK's narrow definition of Covid-19 fatalities, including only those who were tested and excluding care homes and hospices, suggests the variation in outcomes could be bigger rather than smaller.

I also think Waldman places too much faith in the idea that the clerisy could itself be democratised through agencies such as community colleges. The problem is not a lack of neighbourhood epidemiologists, but the sheer size of the clerisy and the inertial bias this produces towards an aggressive conformism that is now (ironically) tending towards the know-nothing. In particular, our problem is the increasingly clannish nature of the clerisy's central nervous system, which manifests in a contempt for the public and a reluctance to question itself. For example: the revolving door between party politics and the media (Hazarika was a Labour advisor through two election defeats and now has a column in the Evening Standard); the excessive focus of political scientists on parties (except when it doesn't suit the narrative) and the concomittant neglect of social movements; and the politicisation of institutions and their increasing drift towards partisanship in response (notably at the BBC). The problem is not that we're ruled on the sly by experts, but that our politics is corrupted in plain sight by idiots and chancers.