The failure of technocracy: why political rule by scientific decree doesn’t work

At a White House press briefing this week there was an exchange that tells us a lot about what is going on in this crisis. Asked whether Dr Robert Redfield, the head of the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was right to say that 90% of Americans are still vulnerable to coronavirus, Dr Scott Atlas, a member of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, fought science with science.

“When you look at the CDC data state-by-state, much of that data is old”, he explained. “And if you look at the research, there have been twenty-four papers at least on the immunity of T-cells… so the answer is no, it is not 90% that are susceptible to the infection.”

Faced with two competing opinions by two leading scientists of the pandemic, the journalist asking the question was justifiably confused. “I’m not a doctor, I defer to your expertise on this, and to his”, he said, “so Americans hear one thing from the CDC Director and another thing from you, who are we to believe?” Dr Atlas responded: “you’re supposed to believe the science and I’m telling you the science.”

It is often assumed that in times of crisis we look to authority. We were supposed to be reassured, in the early weeks of lockdown, by the sight of Boris Johnson flanked by his experts as he delivered hard truths to audiences at home from Downing Street’s press room. For a government which had flirted with populism in the past, this was a soothing confirmation that expertise – not political judgement – was in the front seat.

But it is now becoming clear that the dichotomy between science and politics is untenable. And four years of political turmoil should have made it clear – technocracy is an impoverished framework for making political decisions.

Government by experts has a 6,000-year pedigree beginning with Plato’s “guardians”. And though today we find many of Plato’s ideas disagreeable (many of them were an ancient Athenian precursor to the Soviet control-state), few of us in liberal society would support rule by the ill-informed. In the Atlantic tradition, the compromise created between popular and expert judgement was christened “constitutionalism”. It was popular sovereignty checked and balanced by a technocracy of legal, diplomatic and scientific experts.

That compromise has never been fully stable. In the post-war years, Labour and Conservative governments formed a consensus over the need to minimise unemployment and protect industry. Then, in the years after the Thatcher revolution, both parties again coalesced around free-market economics and the primacy of growth and low inflation, with slight variations on levels of public expenditure. Though offering a limited choice for the electorate, technocracy has been a recipe for stability and, usually, for good government.

In the past five years, however, the relationship between expertise and popular sovereignty has come unstuck. Our response to the coronavirus illustrates it.

The problem with technocratic governance, as Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel writes in his recent book, The Tyranny of Merit, is that it “drains public discourse of substantive moral argument and treats ideologically contestable questions as if they were… the province of experts.” For Sandel, the convulsions of 2016 were not simply the outcome of popular ignorance. Trump and Brexit resonated with a population for whom economic growth had denied opportunities for dignified work and corroded social solidarity. “Before they can hope to win back public support”, Sandel writes, “these parties need to reconsider the market-oriented, technocratic approach to governing.”

That expertise and politics are off-kilter was revealed in another political flashpoint – climate change. As developmental economist Bjorn Lomborg writes in False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions and Hurts the Poor, “conventional wisdom, repeated ad nauseam in the media, is that we have only until 2030 to solve the problem of climate change. This is what science tells us! But this is not what science tells us. It’s what politics tells us.”

Those on the left often interpret recent political history in a moral panic. The rise of “populism” – a useful albeit over-used term – has placed the agency in rogue actors such as Trump and Farage rather than in the failings of the status quo. The people, so the narrative goes, have abandoned expertise in favour of self-destructive prejudice.

That brings us to coronavirus. At its extreme, the rejection of expertise has resulted in some bizarre conspiracy theories and counter-productive posturing. But the technocratic narrative on coronavirus – “just follow the science” – has started to falter as moral and political reality comes crashing back into play.

In response to the new lockdown measures, thirty-two scientists have sent an open letter to the government demanding “a targeted and evidence-based approach to the Covid-19 policy response”. Its authors include Professors Sunetra Gupta and Karl Sikora at Oxford. Both have raised awareness of the prospect of population resilience acquired through T-cell immunity. Sir Patrick Vallance, by contrast, made no mention of T-cell immunity in his report this week, citing a sub-8% resilience rate due to antibodies.

So whether it is Atlas v. Redfield in the US, or Gupta v. Vallance in the UK, a fundamental problem is emerging – the technocratic claim to authority has collapsed.

It is worth stating that disagreement between scientists on urgent and complex problems is to be expected – indeed, it is healthy. We do not necessarily need to suspect untoward partisanship on the part of the scientists in- or out-side government.

The problem lies squarely with the government itself. For Boris, technocracy has become the guiding principle. The proper distinction between expert opinion and political judgement has been fudged. And in the process the experts – and the value of expertise – have suffered.

“Why would I trust this hack over the director of the CDC? Or Dr. Fauci?”, said one Twitter user about Dr Atlas’s comments on population resilience (Dr Atlas is a radiologist, not a virologist, but his claims are supported by scientists at Stanford, Harvard and Oxford). Or, to take an opposite example, the Daily Mail’s “Professor Lockdown” jibe aimed at Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College epidemiologist whose cautious 500,000-deaths model supposedly “sent the country into lockdown”.

Both examples suggest how a technocratic view of governance impoverishes expertise by searching for the merits of political decisions – fundamentally the realm of politicians – in the expertise itself. What emerges is, on the left, a petty credentialism (“you’re only a professor in virology, not immunology!”) and on the right a rejection of academic “scaremongering”.

It is a strategy that benefits the government to some extent. In last month’s exams fiasco, a reliance on “experts” left the Education Minister unscathed as heads rolled at Ofqual. Now, one suspects, by placing the government’s chief scientific and medical advisers in the media headlamps, the government can alleviate the full burden of accountability for pursuing draconian new interventions on civil liberty.

If technocracy is illegitimate, one may ask, is the idea of governmental expertise also illegitimate? Not necessarily. But the proper relationship between scientific and political judgement must be restored.

First, we need to abandon the pretence that scientists are politically neutral. “These are people who know the latest data on the immunology and the latest data, and I just recited it to you”, Dr Atlas told the White House press room. The idea that he could simply “recite” objective fact is unrealistic. Scientists need to temper their technocratic authority by acknowledging that their judgements will also, inevitably, be selective.

But most of all we need clarity about who is responsible for political decisions. Whether through the personal trauma of the virus or some other factor, Johnson’s responsibility seems to have collapsed. The country has been exposed, in his wake, to the raw power of the technocratic state – one which quantifies only what it is asked to quantify, and which reduces human experience to statistical aggregations. Intended as a consultation committee, SAGE has now become a war council, given emergency dictatorial power to eliminate a looming and impossible enemy.

Technocracy is proving to be an impoverished way of doing politics. Rather than let his scientist do the job for him, Boris must take his place back at the podium.