Mag - No Sh** Sherlock? Populism versus Technocracy

How often does this exclamation come to mind when hearing on the radio that, for example, psychologists have ‘discovered’ that depression can be correlated with such life-events as being blown up by an IED in Afghanistan (https://consumer.healthday.com/encyclopedia/depression-12/depression-news-176/depression-and-ptsd-in-veterans-645003.html), being concussed by being struck on the neck at 92 mph by a cricket ball or being raped (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/03/sexual-assault-victims-more-likely-to-have-anxiety-and-depression-study)? The plodding pedestrian process that ‘notices’ that these apparently random, contextless and meaningless (in the innards of a number-crunching computer) occurrences are correlated and then goes on to ‘prove’ a causal link compares poorly with the intuition, emotional intelligence and common sense of the ordinary citizen who already ‘knew’ these things having concluded them in an instinctual flash. We have here two ways of knowing alongside each other.

Some people would say, of course, that the attempt to apply the very proper (when applied to the material world) disciplines of scientific method to human motivation and the human interior is a mistake. It is wrong to ‘scientise’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism) thus, by reducing to mathematical data, human freedom and responsibility as though it is predictable and open to a lumbering determinist interpretation. It is to be literal-minded and reductionist or, to put it more simply, very stupid. In spite of this the enterprise proceeds. This is because, in some cases, an almost religious belief in the ability of science to ‘capture’ everything in heaven and earth in data and to ‘solve’ all problems using technology motivates some scientific zealots. However, there is a much stronger motivation, one which may operate in an unacknowledged and subconscious manner. It derives from the observation that if the obvious is mediated through and dignified by ‘studies’, ‘research and ‘trials’ this process has an almost alchemical ability to transmute cognitive dross into gold. Once lodged in a library a study is monetisable and attracts funding. Multiplied it can create whole university departments in Psychology and Social Sciences (in areas previously considered the preserve of the ‘Humanities’) and provide livelihoods.

The result of all of this was a gold rush for knowledge thus transmuted and given authority by apparently being subjected to scientific method. As a result, instead of our trade being in, and our enrichment being occasioned by wool, linen or steel, as in previous ages, we now deal in information. We live in the Information Age, the age of Intellectual ‘Property’ and we have Social ‘Scientists’, Market ‘Researchers’ and data-‘miners’ prospecting in the fields of things which are as plain as your nose.

Having, thus, hit pay-dirt with this commoditisation of knowledge, all the normal territorial jealousies and turf wars which might even, on occasion, remind us of the battles over pitches between rival factions of the Neapolitan Camorra, come into play. These jealousies extend to wishing to exclude any form of epistemological competition which means that the bog standard common sense and intuition of Joe Public has, as an imperative, to be dethroned with extreme prejudice. Anyone claiming that he already knew that being raped might lead to depression is viewed as a dangerous claim-jumper who must be discredited with the ultimate bad-mouthing of being labelled ‘unscientific.’

In recent times Boris Johnson gave permission to the Police to re-initiate the suspended practice of ‘Stop and Search’ (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-crime-stop-and-search-police-prison-sentences-places-a9051741.html) as a strategy against the epidemic of inner-city knife crime. Politically motivated enemies immediately came out of the woodwork to damn the practice with the ultimate malediction of there being no ‘evidence’ that Stop and Search reduces knife crime. By this, of course, they meant that there are no scientific studies. Joe Public, observing from the sidelines, is moved to opine that, in areas (many of them happening to be predominantly black areas) where young men (happening to be predominantly black) are regularly slaughtering each other with bladed weapons, the opinion that stopping and searching them randomly for the possession of such weapons might help is a no-brainer that does not need confirmation by fellows in white coats clutching clipboards. This is dangerously subversive to the Social Science model of finding out truth. It risks undermining the business model. As a result a hierarchy of knowledge which disenfranchises those billions of human beings, who, at any one time, are not professional scientists, must be established to underwrite the currency. It is on such hierarchies that technocracies are founded.

Not surprisingly the epistemologically disenfranchised who rely on gut instinct and emotional intelligence hit back. They know (and this has become a dangerous word now) a priori to this whole debate, that, in the human, political and societal realm, their instincts lead them more surely and rapidly to the truth than the, often politically and financially motivated, data-miners. Some of the better educated among them might even know that the word ‘science’ is simply based on the Latin word ‘scire’ – to know. They also resent the implication that their way of knowing is primitive while the social science model is pedalled as sophisticated. They suspect that this hierarchical ordering of sophistication might even be upside down.

Michael Gove’s famous comments about expertise (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGgiGtJk7MA) were much ridiculed because they challenged the hegemony of the social science that underpinned the punditry that has so signally failed in recent years to get politics and economics right. However, the disenfranchised suspect that he was right. The resulting cognitive rebellion against the technocratic masters that manipulate us into what they want us to believe (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41928747) based on their data-evidence drives the recent polarisation between populism and technocracy. 

Mussolini, the man whom modern-day populists are accused of aping, famously expressed his anti-intellectualism in his slogan ‘me ne frego’ and his artistic backer, the Futurist, Marinetti (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Tommaso_Marinetti), was similarly famous for encouraging people to burn libraries of old knowledge. However, what I am saying here is not anti-scientific or anti-intellectual. It is merely suggesting that human common sense based on the evidence of our own eyes and felt through our skins is a more intellectually  sophisticated way of grasping what is going on in the human sphere than the clunky and biassed deliberations of the scientific literalists.