Since the Brexit vote, and even more since the election of
Donald Trump, Michael Gove’s remark that ‘people in this country have had
enough of experts’ has become the new ‘There is no such thing as society’. I’ve already lost count of how many times it
has been trotted out as typifying everything that is wrong with those dreadful right-wingers. Mr Gove said it in the context of predictions
of doom following Brexit by a group of economists – a branch of experts who,
even leftists admit, frequently get things wrong. (Famously, the chief financial officer of
Goldman Sachs said of the 2007 financial crash, ‘We were seeing things that
were 25 standard deviation moves, several days in a row’, a basic statistical
howler: such an event would be so improbable that it would not be expected to
occur even once in the lifespan of the universe.) Nevertheless, the broadsheets were quick to interpret
Gove’s words as proof of a troubling anti-intellectualism, a wilfully
know-nothing thuggishness on the right that has a pedigree going back to
Hitler’s contempt for ‘gentlemen with diplomas’. Link ‘we have had enough of experts’ with the
notion of ‘post-truth politics’, et voilà,
a rightist conspiracy to drown out reason with emotion, facts with lies,
democracy with demagoguery. Ain’t it
awful. (See, for instance, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/21/in-defence-of-experts-whether-they-support-leave-or-remain/.)
But it’s funny, really, to see where these complaints are
coming from, because in the past century, in Britain, the left has easily led
the right when it comes to distrust of intellectuals and intellectual
‘elitism’. Has the left forgotten who
campaigned against grammar schools because social cohesion was more important
than academic achievement, and who has constantly put pressure on universities to
prioritize social engineering over scholarly excellence? Who has surrounded experts in public employ –
academics and doctors – with a proliferating managerial class that exists to interfere
with their work?
Who was it who discredited the idea of cultural expertise as
elitist? Who objected to children
(especially working-class children) being taught to appreciate classical music
and read big difficult Victorian novels?
Who systematically undermined the idea of deference to authority of any
kind, including intellectual authority?
Clue: it wasn’t the Right.
It would be wonderful to think that the soft Left has
undergone a road-to-Damascus conversion to the idea of impartial expertise and
objective truth. But haven’t these
new-born Mr Valiant-For-Truths been teaching for decades, in their academic
guise, that there is no such thing as truth?
That all is relative, that there is no one attainable reality but only a
maze of competing, subjective ‘narratives’?
Why, only a couple of years ago, they hounded Mr Gove himself out of the
job of Education Secretary for suggesting that children should be taught a series
of historical ‘facts’. There are no ideologically
innocent facts, they said: however you select and present them, you will be
pushing some sort of party line.
If that is the case, is it not just as true of the ‘facts’
presented by left-liberals as of anyone else’s?
If the Right is now peddling conspiracy theories and fantasy politics,
the Left is scarcely behindhand. From
‘Big Oil’ to the ‘Zionist lobby’ to the supposed ‘Tory plot’ to dismantle the
NHS, or the idea that Teresa May’s post-Brexit premiership is a ‘right-wing
coup’, the left-liberal intelligentsia’s version of events is far from being a balanced,
dispassionate exposition. Just as
tendentious is the idea that during the EU referendum campaign, one side
espoused ‘truth’ and the other ‘lies’.
Both sides created propaganda, only the Remain propaganda was a fair bit
subtler, as one might expect from ‘experts’ who have been telling the story
their way, and convincing the people who matter, for a long time. ‘The EU has kept the peace in Europe since
1945.’ ‘It is thanks to the EU that we
can enjoy European culture and travel.’
‘Only the EU guarantees workers’ rights, environmental protection,
consumer standards.’ Are these lies? Not exactly. Are they facts? Hardly.
They are assertions dressed up as facts and strengthened by repetition:
a perfect illustration of the subjectivity of expertise.
Leftist academics have not even pretended to believe in
truth for a long time. They regard the
scientific method, and Enlightenment rationality, as essentially imperialist
constructs, power-plays in disguise. To
believe in power rather than in truth becomes self-fulfilling: little by
little, fashion and consensus replaces free-thinking expertise, and a hive mind
develops. Trust experts by all means –
but when you find they are all saying the same thing, you know something is
wrong.
It gets worse. When
objectivity is discredited, the hive mind will tend to gravitate not towards
opinions that can be supported by evidence, but towards those that are upheld
with the greatest passion. There is a
direct line from this to the toxic fog that now swirls around the internet,
where the wildest fantasies gain traction if their proponents seem to believe
in them hard enough.
The leftists have created this situation. But it seems to have taken them by surprise
that the lunatic Right (the intelligent Right having been systematically purged
from positions of influence) is now learning to use their weapons of grievance,
passion and anti-objectivity against them.
So forgive us (though they won’t) if we see their sudden conversion to
the idea of truth in the same way they would themselves, if someone else was
using it: as an attempt by representatives of a prevailing ideology to counter
a threat to their power by seizing the moral high ground; even more cynically
hypocritical than most such attempts, because they know exactly how it
works. It’s not ‘truth’ they’re worried
about: it’s who gets to tell the story.
They can afford to relax a little bit, though, when it comes
to ‘hate’. I don’t think there is as
much of that around as there might seem to be.
The post-Brexit vandalism and shouted insults, the online trolling and
misogynist death threats: much of it is performance art. Again, there is a direct line back to the
1960s, when the Left decreed good manners to be bourgeois and transgressive
behaviour of all kinds to be laudably anti-Establishment. The direct victims of this behaviour were
just collateral damage: the real aim was the heady pleasure of being naughty,
of infringing social norms. It still
is. Only now, dear soft-leftists, they
are your social norms. Just as you
taught them, the disaffected are still ready to épater les bourgeois. But –
how to put this? – les bourgeois, c’est
vous.
