‘We’re following the science’ has been the constant chorus of the UK government. Unfettered by tired ideologies, their response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been determined by nothing but the very latest advances in public health and data-driven virus modelling. Or so if they are to be believed. This essay will contest the claim that the government’s Covid-19 response, and indeed any normative decision, can ever be apolitical and rest solely on ‘facts’. Rather, the government’s insistence that its response to Covid-19 has been ‘scientific’ and ‘common-sense’ is located in a growing trend of governments justifying policy decisions by appealing to sources of legitimacy independent of the political, such as social-scientific (and now natural-scientific) discourses and facts in order to postpone the moment of sovereignty and thereby avoid blame. But this thesis should not be understood as being anti-science: clearly scientific expertise has a crucial and central role to play in our pandemic response and this essay does not defend the patently implausible idea that normative claims do not supervene on the non-normative. Nor is our central target the content of the Government’s Covid-19 response, or even the principles guiding it. This essay only seeks to establish that whatever the justification for the policy response is, it must rest not only on scientific facts, but moral and political value judgments, and that any attempt to pretend otherwise amounts to ideological mystification.
‘It’s not me, I’m afraid. It’s the regulations’
The government’s strategy of deferring to other sources of authority to evade responsibility, in this case by insisting that they are just ‘following the science’, is not a new phenomenon. Rather, it is a general consequence of the structure of modern bureaucracies, whereby the patterns of domination are ‘enacted through the widely dispersed powers of many agents mediating the decisions of others.’[i] As organisational theorists March and Simon[ii] tell us, the efficient manager does not wait for conflict to arise; rather, he must ‘ensure that subordinates argue from premises which will produce agreement with his own prior conclusions’[iii]. This more sophisticated system of control which allows the manager to blur into the background allows workers to experience more autonomy in their work and more self-respect by extension, but does not necessarily represent an improvement in power relations. The absence of the manager does not entail the end of surveillance but its introjection, as shown by the proliferation of self-assessment under late capitalism.[iv]
Indeed, in some respect the disappearance of the manager worsens our predicament: as Foucault argues[v], the lack of a focal point at which to direct resistance, a role hitherto played by the manager, reduces the possibility of any systemic change. Part of what makes these more widely dispersed systems of control so challenging is what Fisher calls ‘bureaucratic libido’[vi]. This term refers to an all too familiar feature of our interactions with bureaucracies – the indefinite postponement of responsibility and a certain disavowal: ‘it’s not me, I’m afraid, it’s the regulations’[vii]. Such disavowal arises since authority is always derived from elsewhere, so we cannot hold anyone accountable. And it is precisely this form of disavowal that is at the heart of the present government’s reflexive response that there was no alternative: they were just ‘following the science’. Fisher argues that ‘the quest to reach the ultimate authority… can never end, because the big Other cannot be encountered in itself: there are only officials, more of less hostile, engaged in acts of interpretation about the big Other’s intentions’. I want to suggest that this big Other, at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy, is so elusive because it does not embody any person’s fallible perspective or subjectivity, but an objective source of authority, like ‘economics’ or ‘science’.
‘Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.’[viii]
Macintyre argues that the character of the bureaucrat embodies the sociology of emotivism.[ix] Very briefly, emotivism is the metaethical view, defended by the likes of Hare, that moral statements do not purport to represent moral facts, but are merely expressions of feeling, attitudes and prescriptions for action. So me telling you ‘Do not murder’ should be analysed as something along the lines of ‘I disapprove of murder. So should you!’ The issue here is that if your response is ‘OK, but why?’, I am stumped. I might first appeal to some more general moral principle, but again, this can be no more than an expression of feeling: according to emotivism ‘the utterance of any principle is in the end an expression of the preferences of an individual will’[x]. Crucially, forms of emotivism are not unique to the anglophone analytic tradition: in Nietzsche too we find the view that objective moral judgments are ‘the mask worn by the will-to-power of those too weak and slavish to assert themselves with archaic and aristocratic grandeur’[xi], who need the façade of objectivity to give epistemic authority to what are in fact mere expressions of preferences. Tracing the German tradition is especially important since if emotivism’s theoretical content is best articulated by Hare and Nietzsche, its concomitant sociology is found in Max Weber.
For Weber, each person’s ultimate choice of values is an expression of mere preference, not amenable to objective justification. In the same way, a manager’s authority cannot derive from the moral worth of their organisation’s goals since this choice is necessarily subjective and just as (non)-rational as any other. All that remains, then, is to justify their authority with reference to a sort of means-ends rationality; their choice of ends might be arbitrary, but they are experts in the field and can pursue them efficiently and effectively. So a good manager is not the one that questions the values of her organisation, but rather, the manager whose accumulation of facts makes them an expert in their specific field. This then is the phenomenon behind bureaucratic libido: all the manager can ultimately do is defer to the big Other or its stand-ins because that is the appropriate mode of justification for their activities. It is not within their remit to question the ends that the big Other lays down in advance, only to pursue them in the most economical and efficient way.
TINA (1980)
‘Why can’t government be more scientific?’ was the constant lament of 19th Century social reformers such as Jeremy Bentham.[xii] It seems that over time, government has listened to their pleas. And nowhere is this clearer than in the ascendancy of the ‘science of scarcity’: economics. ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ is more than a campaign strategy but now seems to be one of the pre-eminent forms of political justification. We see this in the proliferation of the ‘apolitical’ technocrat in institutions such as the IMF, WTO, World Bank and the European Union, who do not require a popular mandate because their legitimacy is derivative of their economic expertise and independent of the political. Jean-Claude Junker is unapologetic for this lack of democratic accountability: ‘I’m ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious … I am for secret, dark debates’[xiii]. But perhaps the most powerful weaponization of the discourse of economics was Margaret Thatcher’s famous pronouncement in 1980 that ‘There is no alternative’ (TINA) to unfettered market capitalism. If this were true, her government’s economic policies would no longer require any normative justification because they were not really political decisions at all, but metaphysical necessities due to the ‘laws’ of economics. No sooner could she stem the tide of capital from rushing into every nook and cranny of our civic lives than she could break the laws of physics. By framing the issue as unideological, her government could repeat the ritual of disavowal and deference to the big Other and the rules and regulation that it lays down in advance (it’s not me, it’s the economy) and disqualify competing forms of knowledge that did not pay lip service to this social objectivity. To critique her government’s agenda and suggest an alternative program would be incoherent and even nonsensical, since ought implies can. Thus the government could abdicate political responsibility, and ‘against this ascent to power that is tied to scientific knowledge, we find that there is no solid recourse available to us today’[xiv]. For ‘There is no Alternative’ (TINA).
Until there is one. The global economic response to the pandemic has revealed just how many tools governments have at their disposal to steer through a crisis, with policies such as paying 80% of the private sector wage bill, unthinkable just a few short months ago even for the most vocal critics of the neoliberal economic settlement[xv]. So there are alternatives after all. As economists such as Ha Joon-Chang tell us, even if we take a highly, highly idealised view of economics[xvi], it is only factual and apolitical in the sense that it can tell the range of options that governments have in policy making. The final decision that a government (or technocrats) make is necessarily a normative one, that depends on considerations such as the comparative value of the plurality of public goods, and questions of egalitarian justice. Contra the technocrat, the justification of a policy, and the legitimacy of a policy maker can never be independent of questions of the political. So it turns out that the justification of neoliberal economics as a necessary consequence of pre-ideological facts is really just the successful naturalisation of an ideological position: of a mere contingency being presented as universal and a fact of life. As Fisher argues, the ‘pre- or post-ideological… is positioned precisely in the place that ideology always does its work’.[xvii]
TINA (2020)
But in recent years the status of the technocrat has been in jeopardy. This narrative is all-too familiar: as Michael Gove told us, we ‘had enough of experts’[xviii] and populist democracy re-asserted itself against liberal technocracy. Of course, until the coronavirus pandemic arrived, and we were asked to start trusting experts gain. And for good reason: facts about epidemiology and public health have never been so important for public policy making. But consequently, we have faced a remarkably similar pattern of justification and disavowal as has been given above. Again, constant appeals have been made to the big Other and its stand-ins: when faced with criticism of the government’s handling of the crisis, Matt Hancock’s response has been that they were just following what experts told them (it’s not me, it’s the science). Again the source of justification is independent of the realm of values and the political, but a sort of unideological technocratic expertise: there can be no recourse to the government since they were simply responding to the facts given by experts, and had no alternative course of action (TINA). And again, we have seen the experts in this field disassociate themselves from the claims the government makes on their behalf, and acknowledge the limitations of their discipline. Science has a much better claim of being a largely factual, unideological field of knowledge than economics, but yet we have still heard people like Brain Cox maintain that ‘there is no such thing as ‘the science’… any politician who says this [we are following the science] doesn’t understand what science is’.[xix] For science can help us predict (to a far greater degree of accuracy than economics ever has) the likely consequences of any policy response, but it cannot answer the further question of which policy we should choose. It can inform our decisions but ultimately cannot determine whether or not to impose a lockdown, to re-open schools, or to pay people’s wages.
No matter what the likes of Michael Bloomberg or Jean-Claude Junker tell us, and what the UK government implies in their political messaging, the role of political leaders is not that of Weber’s managers. Their role and thus their legitimacy does not consist in the application of technocratic expertise, but in their handling of the ‘fact of pluralism’ and negotiation of the differences among ends and conceptions of the good in a democratic society. To take just one example, the question of whether to reopen schools is not centrally a factual one: it depends on the relative importance of considerations as diverse as the risk to pupils and teachers, the impact on long-term student development and thus inequalities and the need of parents for childcare if they are to work, all of which rest not on scientific facts but normative ones about the good, the worthwhile and the valuable. Therefore, the government’s response to Covid-19 could never be unideological, and we can unmask the government’s public disavowal and abdication of political responsibility for what it is: the weaponization of science as ideology to delegitimise and thus shut down dissent by presenting what is contingent and particular as necessary and universal.
The government’s response to Covid-19 disproportionately affecting BAME communities has also been instructive. Repeatedly, the government have emphasised the ‘universal’ nature of this problem, and have seized upon genetic differences as an explanation for the disproportionate death rate in BAME communities. More people of colour dying to coronavirus is just ‘how the world works’, and thus the government can shift blame (it’s not us, it’s the genetics). But this response too is unconvincing: sociologists such as Nishi Chaturvedi and public health experts like Guppi Bola have emphasised that ‘Ethnicity is a complex socio-cultural construct, it’s not a biology construct. There’s no gene for being Asian. There’s no gene for being black and that ‘the overwhelming determinants of health are socially created.’ In Chaturvedi’s words ‘It’s important to put a nail in that one because it feels as if we can abdicate any responsibility for sorting this out and this really isn’t the case.’ So we see that the government’s disavowal is again an attempt to make it a question of apolitical technocratic expertise and obfuscate from the political nature of structural inequality.
Ultimately, when considering the government’s coronavirus strategy or indeed anyone else who appeals to pre-ideological, factual sources of authority and legitimacy, we should heed Zupančič’s warning: what ‘presents itself as empirical fact (or biological, economic…) necessity (and that we tend to perceive as non-ideological). It is precisely here that we should be most alert to the functioning of ideology.’[xx] As we have seen, the government’s claims to be merely ‘following the science’ is better seen as a disingenuous attempt to abdicate political responsibility by appealing to technocratic, factual sources of authority that deny the contentious and normative aspects of the political.
Bibliography
[i] Young, Iris Marion, Five Faces of Oppression, in Justice and the Politics of Difference (2011), p. 56
[ii] See March, James G. and Simon, Herbert A., Organizations (1958)
[iii] MacIntyre, Alasdair C. After Virtue : A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth, (1981), p. 31
[iv] See Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism : Is There No Alternative? Ropley: O, (2009), p. 51-2
[v] See Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison, (1975)
[vi] Fisher (2009), p. 49
[vii] Fisher, (2009), p. 49
[viii] Dickens, C., (1854), Hard times
[ix] Macintyre (1981), p. 27
[x] Macintyre (1981), p. 23
[xi] Macintyre (1981), p. 25
[xii] See Macintyre (1981), p. 100
[xiii] See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10967168/Jean-Claude-Junckers-most-outrageous-political-quotations.html
[xiv] Foucault, Michel, ‘Two Lectures on Power’ in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon
(1980), p. 59-60
[xv] See Krugman, Paul R. End This Depression Now! New York, 2012; Varoufakis, Y., 2016. And the weak suffer what they must? : Europe, austerity and the threat to global stability, London.
[xvi] In fact that there is very good reason to believe that Economics is not even ‘factual’ in this very limited sense, but always relies on normative background assumptions: see Chang, Ha-Joon. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism. London: Penguin, 2011
[xvii] Fisher (2009), p. 66
[xviii] https://www.indy100.com/article/coronavirus-advice-experts-michael-gove-tories-boris-johnson-9390216, Accessed: 19/05/20
[xix] https://www.thenational.scot/news/18428654.tories-must-stop-hiding-behind-science-coronavirus/, Accessed 19/05/20
[xx] Zupančič, Alenka. The Shortest Shadow : Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. Cambridge, Mass. ; London: MIT, (2003), p. 77