The Experts Meet Reality
There are many interpretations of the vote in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. It is undoubtedly a story of the rise of nationalism and even xenophobia and racism around the world. The campaign also was notable for the brazen dissemination of misinformation and outright lies. The “Leave” voters in England clearly deviated from the usual script of putting their pocket books first as they voted against their economic self interest. But most observers have by now understood that the Brexit vote is above all about the rise of populism and the distrust of elites and experts.
In the Financial Times, Philip Stephens argues that an anti-expert populism was the driving force for Brexit: “One of the more revealing moments of the Brexit campaign came when Michael Gove, a Conservative Outer once close to Prime Minister David Cameron, said: “People in this country have had enough of experts.” There it is: a celebration of ignorance that writes the opening line of the populists’ playbook. How long before Mr. Gove, a former education secretary, is piling books on to bonfires? Modern democracies operate within a framework of rationalism. Dismantle it and the space is filled by prejudice. Fear counts above reason; anger above evidence. Lies claim equal status with facts. Soon enough, migrants — and Muslims especially — replace heretics and witches as the targets of public rage.”
In the New York Times, Jim Yardley echoes Stephens, calling the British rebellion a “thumb-in-your-eye” poke at the elites, an attitude he argues is global. “The same yawning gap between the elite and mass opinion is fueling a populist backlash in Austria, France, Germany and elsewhere — as well as in the United States.” The willingness of everyday Britons to ignore the entreaties of nearly the entire establishment — on both left and right — mirrors the anti-establishment fervor that propelled both Bernie Sanders and especially Donald Trump.
When elites refer to the masses’ disdain for elites, they rarely make the effort to take seriously what it is that the masses find fault with in the elites. The assumption is that the elites may be shortsighted in not seeing clearly the bumbling ignorance of the masses. But rarely is the critique of elites taken seriously. Yes, the people are angry. Yes, there may be reasons to be angry. But to let anger overcome reason, to follow one’s anger and actually reject sound expert advice, that is mistaken if not just plain juvenile and stupid. Across the political spectrum, there is a widespread conviction that democratic citizens are voicing immature, hateful, and resentful politics. They may be angry at their elite betters, but they should learn to control their anger.
Given the anti-expert and anti-elite anger, however, it is worth stepping back and asking about the place of elites and experts in politics. Hannah Arendt is one political thinker who repeatedly warns of the shortsightedness, arrogance, and danger of elites and experts in government. Arendt was hardly anti-intellectual or opposed to expertise. She was not a populist. On the contrary, she valued thinking above all and believed deeply in experience and knowledge. But why then does she argue that it is dangerous when intellectuals enter into government?
In her essay “On Violence,” Arendt writes that at a time when the implements of violence are so destructive, “there are, indeed, few things that are more frightening than the steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government during the last decades.” Why, in other words, is she so bothered by the entry of elites, experts, and problem-solvers into leadership roles in government?
Arendt develops her critique of governmental problem-solvers in numerous writings in the 1960, especially her writings about the Pentagon Papers. Trying to understand the incredible deception perpetrated by the American war effort, Arendt lays the blame on elites, experts, and problem-solvers. President John F. Kennedy had publicly lured the best and the brightest to Washington to serve in his administration. But these problem solvers — educated at the best American universities — had little actual knowledge of Vietnam or Indochina. They were intelligent and confident, but their knowledge was centered around theories and calculations that had little to do with Vietnam itself. Thus, these confident and even arrogant experts fell prey to the fallacy of abstraction. These problem-solvers, Arendt writes, allowed their intelligence to separate them from the real world of facts. The experts, she writes,
“were not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being ‘rational,’ and they were indeed to a rather frightening degree above ‘sentimentality’ and in love with ‘theory,’ the world of sheer mental effort. They were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in pseudo-mathematical language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them.”
Arendt sees these “problem-solvers” as something like management consultants, people confident in their ability to come in to any and all scenarios, make a quick study of a situation, and then apply general principles and rules to offer a solution. These intellectuals and problem solvers were convinced that they could help guide the war effort based on their generalized expertise. They developed consistent and coherent theories of how to win, or if not how to win, at least how to look as if we were winning, to save face, and to prove our loyalty.
Why did the problem-solvers lie about the progress of the war? Arendt argues they did so because they had theories about how the war could be won; when the facts did not conform to the theories, the problem-solvers simply changed or ignored the facts. What are contingent facts in the face of theoretical knowledge, she asked?
“Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be the masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to… fit their reality — which, after all, was man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise — into their theory, thereby mentally getting rid of its disconcerting contingency.”
The problem solvers were so sure of themselves that when facts suggested their theories weren’t working, the ignored and suppressed the facts, confident that reality would soon come to reflect their brilliant analyses.
Arendt’s worry about the experts and elites has a long tradition on the left and the right. Arendt relied on Noam Chomsky’s argument that social scientists in the U.S. have become a new breed of Mandarins committed to an imperialist social order. She also relied on Chomsky and Friedrich Hayek, who argued that the welfare state was propped up by experts and bureaucrats who think they have solved the puzzle of human psychology and economics so that they can manage and perfect our increasingly prosperous and progressive societies. For Arendt, the intellectuals and experts who enter government and embrace theoretical models of progress are well-meaning, but deluded. They are also dangerous.
“The danger is that these theories are not only plausible, because they take their evidence from actually discernible present trends, but that, because of their inner consistency, they have a hypnotic effect; they put to sleep our common sense, which is nothing else but our mental organ for perceiving, understanding, and dealing with reality and factuality.”
What experts in the social sciences and Mandarins in government regularly forget is that human events are beyond our control. Arendt cites Pierre Joseph Proudhon to drive home her point: “The fecundity of the unexpected far exceeds the statesman’s prudence.”
I want to emphasize, again: Arendt is hardly a populist. She values expertise. But she is clear-headed enough to understand that when highly-educated and deeply-intelligent experts get together, they can be become so enamored with their brain power that they begin to imagine themselves all powerful. They can all-too-easily come to see themselves as people who can solve the world’s problems — if only people will get out of the way and listen to them.
The European Union was just such an elite-driven project. It was the dream of intellectuals and has been executed by experts. It was born of a beautiful dream of a common Europe with Beethoven as its anthem. Nations and nationalities would remain, but borders would melt away. A common market would be regulated by Mandarin experts, not elected leaders. War and conflict would come to an end. And the dream worked, somewhat, and for some people. For my friends, it was nirvana. For cosmopolitans, artists, bankers, and corporations, the European Union has been an enormous success. But for hundreds of millions of people across Europe — people who don’t dream of dashing between London, Paris, and Berlin — the European Union is seen as a disruptive, foreign, and inscrutable bureaucracy that they neither love nor understand.
None of this suggests the vote to leave the European Union was wise or necessary. Politics does not have truths and there is no right or wrong answer to whether Great Britain should remain in the European Union. We should listen to economists who tell us what the economic consequences may be, political scientists who offer hypotheses about the political fallout, and psychologists who inquire into our motives, hopes, and fears. Experts have a place, an important place, in our attempts to govern ourselves. We need expertise. But what our expert-driven politics too often forgets is that politics is not an activity governed by expertise.
But we should also listen to the people. The people are telling us that the dreams and theories of the experts are bringing pain, dissonance, and disruption to their lives. Across the world experts and elites are coming to see that their beautiful dreams of a cosmopolitan, post-industrial, and technological utopia is bumping into a resistant reality. The question is how loud these bumps will have to get before the experts actually begin to listen.
Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Bard College
