By Jan Eijking
In 2017 a book with a well-timed title landed on bookseller’s shelves across the UK: “The Death of Expertise.” Written by US Naval War College professor Tom Nichols, and published only shortly after Michael Gove’s now-infamous declaration that “Britain’s had enough of experts,” this little manifesto bemoaned a growing threat to expertise in politics. The populist tide, Nichols worried, would undermine the importance of specialist knowledge in advising and improving politics. Post-truthers and alternative-facters were ready to unsettle what had been the unshakeable authority of scientific facts — a dangerous development. The end of Enlightenment was near, for this was nothing less than the death of expertise.
The COVID-19 crisis is proving Nichols (and Gove) wrong. Far from dead, expertise is alive and kicking. Experts are everywhere: we’re just selective about when we listen to them. From the WHO to the UK’s national scientific adviser to the media, experts are around every other corner. They’re ready and keen to give advice on what to do, what to think, how much to freak out, whether or not to buy more loo roll, whether or not to hide in a bunker, how many people are going to die if we pursue policy X rather than policy Y, whether it’s really all that bad, and so on. They all disagree — but they’re all experts. Right?
There is a real cottage industry of expertise right now — so was our problem ever the death of expertise, or is something else going on? Normally we dispute the power of experts and don’t like being told what to think by “clever people in suits,” but in moments of crisis we can’t get enough of them. There is a near-pandemic quality to the proliferation of experts (whether self-appointed or not), and politicians long for their favour. They want to be on the “right side of science.” How do we cope with that?
Expert voices competing to be heard
Throughout much of history, when expertise was at stake in politics, particularly with respect to international issues like telecommunication, industrial standards, or public health, the first step was competition: a plethora of expert voices would compete for recognition — each with their own data, graphs, tables, prognostics. This is exactly what’s been happening over the past few weeks: there are more experts, and more expert interpretations, than there is actual knowledge about coronavirus, its spread, and its containment.
Let me give three examples for this competition. First, the UK prime-minister’s initial coronavirus stance has stirred up controversy. Staking his reputation on the experts in Whitehall — not those in Geneva — Boris Johnson’s first recourse was to “herd immunity.” Herd immunity usually refers to measures like mass vaccination, say when large numbers of children get vaccinated against measles. Its use in the context of fighting a pandemic is new — and there is great disagreement among experts about its merit. Most think it is a terrible idea. The question at the heart of this controversy is, however, not scientific but ethical: whether or not we would allow for the possibility of around 398,000 people dyingso the overall population would reach herd immunity.
UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock clarified, a few days after the controversy had reached major news headlines, that this was all bad communication — the plan had never been to let the virus spread uncontrolled. Herd immunity was conceived as a side effect, not a policy, The Atlantic reported. But there is more to this than simply poor crisis communication. As Rory Stewart, former cabinet minister and candidate for London mayor, said in an interview with CNN: “Everybody in Britain is pretending there is only one scientific opinion. Other countries are trying to suppress it. Britain is following a theory of herd immunity. That is a very, very big choice. It is not a scientific choice. It’s a political choice.”
Second, US president Donald Trump’s initial response, largely based on advice from national security experts, particularly with regards to the Schengen-US travel ban, has faced criticism for different reasons. This time the other experts, epidemiologists rather than defence specialists, argued that Trump’s measure was ineffective largely because it targeted further contamination instead of focusing on containing the spread of the virus within the country. Trump, who had initially compared coronavirus to the flu, chose to listen to one group of experts while ignoring the other — against the advice of medical scientific advisors, he decided to downplay the likely extent of further contagion.
A third expert platform, and one with internationally recognised authority on the matter, is of course the World Health Organisation. The WHO’s director-general, Ethiopia’s former health minister Tedros Adhanom, has been vocal on governmental efforts to contain COVID-19 from the start. In an official statement on 13 March, Adhanom urged states to take “a comprehensive approach. Not testing alone. Not contact tracing alone. Not quarantine alone. Not social distancing alone. Do it all.” He also added: “Any country that looks at the experience of other countries with large epidemics and thinks ‘that won’t happen to us’ is making a deadly mistake. It can happen to any country.”
Previously, as the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak as a pandemic, Adhanom had criticised a widespread lack of resolve and said the organisation was “deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction.” Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies programme, added that he wouldn’t name member countries whose health response the WHO finds inadequate, but “you know who you are.”
Political limits to expertise
All of these voices make up the cacophony of expert judgement that currently resounds across news broadcasters, social media, and people’s 1.5-meter-distanced conversations. And these voices are far from unison. In a striking example, a Dutch GP who had been invited to a talkshow to speak as a health expert on the situation in The Netherlands admitted, half way through the show, that she herself had been tested positively for COVID-19. This expert’s assessment of the situation clearly contrasted that of many others — the baffled looks in her co-speakers’ faces spoke volumes about that. What we are witnessing is not a simple top-down application of expert advice — rather, dozens claim to be experts on coronavirus; yet their opinions differ. What does this tell us about expertise and the role it plays (and can play) in politics?
First, that experts disagree with each other, and people disagree with experts, doesn’t have anything to do with the “death of expertise” — it is part of the very nature of expertise. The fact that a large number of scientists in the UK have urged the government to enforce social distancing, contrary to Downing Street’s own expert judgement which it has now clearly changed its mind about, illustrates this. Expertise is a term with which we recognise someone’s knowledge authority (an authority that wouldn’t exist without that recognition), but expert input still, always, requires translation into concrete policies. This translation is now more urgent than usual — as one columnist put it in German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, experts “act under conditions of uncertainty,” but that “can’t excuse anyone from taking responsibility.” Some experts find COVID-19 extremely worrying and advise people to prepare for the worst and self-isolate no matter what — others may find the virus only fairly concerning and instead appease the public with the invisible hand of “herd immunity.” The difference is a matter not only of empirical evidence, but also of moral and political judgement.
What is more, contesting (in the sense of critically examining) expertise before applying it is something we normally value quite highly. That Boris Johnson didn’t agree with the scientists and went for herd immunity we may find wrong, but that shouldn’t lead us to disagreeing with the underlying principle that a politician may choose not to follow scientific advice — that would be indefensible because scientific assessments are input that is consulted, not representation that is elected. Of course we can (and in my opinion should) disagree with Johnson’s way of “handling” the crisis — but doing so purely on the basis of science, outside of politics as it were, is to fall for the seeming de-politicisation Johnson’s own reliance on experts aims for. Even worse, sacrificing in this way the principle of expert contestation might well throw oil into the fire of the next anti-expert backlash.
Second, the expertise contagion may be part of a typical response to crises: when things escalate and we suddenly are confronted with not knowing what’s going to happen next, we really want to know. Currently that’s impossible, given that our knowledge about the pandemic and how to contain it constantly changes. But this doesn’t mean that we don’t try to find out as much as we can anyway — hence the live updates, the endless Twitter feeds, and the rumours we all can’t help but turn to. In times of crisis, we suddenly love people in lab coats, armed with stats and plots and graphs and tables, who tell us what to think. Politicians know that: Trump’s politics of numbers, and his initial claim that WHO’s coronavirus death rate was “a false number,” are the perfect examples for how our thirst for expertise can be and is being used. Tensions can arise from this as well, though, and we need to be careful with potentially elitist-sounding language — one global health expert declared, for instance, that “significant disruptions need high population compliance. People already can’t be trusted to buy toilet roll properly.” Those who have “had enough of experts” might see their suspicions confirmed by statements like this.
Third, if we accept that getting the experts on board depends on political decisions (and, as the WHO has made clear, on political will in the first place), then we must also accept that which experts we do get on board is political in itself. Westminster, Washington, and the WHO all draw from and promote different sets of expert judgements. Which government picks whom to advise them, and who they ultimately listen to, depends on politics: whether they’re most concerned about healthcare capacities; or about those who lose the stockpiling struggle at the supermarket; or about long-term economic effects; or about the psychology of self-isolation. As University of Chicago economist Lars Peter Hansen has put it in a recent article, evidence doesn’t speak for itself. Models “might be guided by evidence, but policy conclusions can rarely be drawn directly from the evidence itself” — they “can be broadly accepted and still be wrong.”
The current mushrooming of experts tells us a good deal about the politics-expertise nexus. It tells us that in “disaster response mode” or states of emergency, we crave experts. This alone should give us pause, no matter where we are on the political spectrum. Yes, it has its time and place, and yes, it can gain problematic degrees of political power. But whether we like it or not, at certain points we all want to rely on expertise.
The proliferation of experts also tells us that, unsurprisingly, politicians want to be on the “right side of science.” No matter their policy, they are likely to defend it with reference to “the experts” — but whose expertise gets heard, and whose doesn’t, is a political decision. How do we cope with that? A first step, banal though it may sound, is to be more careful. Careful about what we mean by expertise. Careful about how much responsibility we displace onto “the experts.” And especially careful about the extent to which policies, whether “evidence-based” or not, are still politics.