The Revolt Against Knowledge

In so many ways, the current moment feels like a hallucination, a bad dream that will fade quickly when we open our eyes in the morning. The federal government is in the hands of a clique that rejects the institutions of organized knowledge that were literally centuries in the making. They reject scientific expertise, professional knowhow, the academic structures that credential and reward scholars, the experience accumulated by career civil service employees, and the work of trained journalists, statisticians and others whose role is to document and report the world we live in. There is an added dimension to this flight to darkness, the abandonment of norms of honesty that intersect with and exacerbate the anti-knowledge agenda, but it raises a different set of issues, so I’ll set it aside for now.*

For me, the screaming question is why? Why destroy the basis for so much wealth and well-being? Why tear down the institutions that, for most of us in one way or another, represent learning, skill and competence? How can any policies be carried out effectively without data and the intellectual tools to analyze them? And how does the attack on America’s educational and research institutions make this country great again or “first” in a competitive world?

One possibility is that we could take the justifications offered by the right at face value, but I doubt that will get us very far. No doubt there are ideologues who really think that most science is fake or compromised by liberal dogmatism and that the statistics churned out by official agencies are doctored as part of a hidden agenda of the Deep State, but the important operatives, the ones who provide the organizational, financial and propaganda infrastructure for Trumpism shouldn’t be assumed to be that ignorant. There are two reasons for not taking the public explanations seriously. First, they are stupid. The notion that the 2000+ employees of the Bureau of Labor Statistics are in a conspiracy to falsify employment and price data, for instance, is ludicrous. Second, they appear and disappear as needed for PR purposes, without long term continuity. For instance, a purported epidemic of antisemitism is invoked to justify a shakedown of prominent universities by a political cabal rife with antisemitism. If and when Israel finishes its destruction of Gaza, and the pro-Palestinian protests die out, the crusade against antisemitism will have served its purpose, so it can be put to rest in favor of some new pretext for attacking higher education.

The ideological justifications given for the attack on science, expertise and academic institutions are politically convenient for the right but unlikely to reveal their underlying strategy. Since none of us is privy to the private discussions in which long term objectives are hammered out, all we can do is speculate. So the rest of this post is hedged with a blizzard of maybe’s.

I suspect the underlying motive is simply power, understood as power for “us” and equivalently disempowerment of “them”. This brings us to the most cogent political thinker of fascism, Carl Schmitt, who told us that any political strategy that doesn’t rest on the bedrock distinction between friends and enemies is either a smokescreen or just confused. For several generations, movement conservatism in America (Newt Gingrich, for example) has followed a Schmittian path, aiming at the maximum empowerment of its own leaders and organizations and the corresponding dismantling of the liberal “elite”. Progressing in fits and starts, it has now arrived on the brink of absolute domination, in which it will wield unrestricted power over politics, economics and culture.

Power over others is accumulated and exercised mainly through the use of reprisals against those you want to defeat. Every weapon is mobilized: mass layoffs, grant cancellations, investigations and lawsuits, reprisals against students and professors, whatever is at hand. These measures are often directly anti-scientific and anti-expertise, and to some extent those effects are viewed as collateral damage, costs of extending dominance over the cultural and economic landscape. But they have an intentional side as well, since the professors, scientists, civil servants and others who are punished are regarded as willing collaborators with the liberal enemy. Once they are defeated, systems of research, learning and data dissemination could then be rebuilt to the liking of the winners.

But what about the immediate consequences? How can businesses and governments plan and function without reliable data? How can large management systems, public and private, operate without trained, competent managers? How can modern economies grow, develop and hold their own in the world without the innovative push of research? From the perspective of those on the verge of untrammeled power, I suppose the answer boils down to the expectation that absolute power, once conquered, can substitute for shortcomings elsewhere. You can make businesses hit the targets you set for them, universities train students the way you want them trained, and foreign companies and governments trade on the terms you set. This has been the trajectory for authoritarian regimes in decades past, and it may be that government-by-terror, the project of Hitler and Stalin alike, is a consequence of weakness, the destruction of society’s economic and cultural resources, as well as an overabundance of strength.

This is a way to think about the political project of the far right, but that leaves the acquiescence of capital unexplained. Note that, by capital, I’m referring in a general way to the stratum of society that owns or directly controls the bulk of its invested wealth. I realize this group is far from homogeneous, but there is enough cohesiveness and common interest to justify lumping them together under a single heading. The weirdest part is that capital, which has for centuries depended on science and related forms of expertise for its growth and routine operation, has either spearheaded this assault or stood on the sidelines, watching it happen. You would think the economic costs of dismantling research and data gathering would be so great the wealthy would be up in arms.

It’s not difficult to come up with what we might call small or partial reasons for their acquiescence. Climate change should be part of the story, since, if you accept the policy urgency that follows from mainstream climate science as reflected in the IPCC reports, a lot of the current capital stock will need to be repriced or even written off altogether. (I discussed this in some detail in my book Alligators in the Arctic and How to Avoid Them: Science, Economics and the Challenge of Catastrophic Climate Change.) Yet we also know alteration of the climate is itself generating massive costs, and surely there must be an economic constituency for averting them. Moreover, there are large swaths of capital, such as the health and technology sectors, that have prospered by commercializing basic research funded by the likes of the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and other mission-specific programs. Why aren’t we hearing from them?

Another part of the explanation may be the menu of rewards and punishments faced by firms. On the positive side, they and their owners are being gifted generous tax cuts, deregulation and apparently unlimited access to government at all levels. They are also invited to supply quid pro quo’s, contributions to Trump and his allies in return for further benefits, such as preferential tariff treatment. Obversely, if they develop a reputation as adversaries they can be harassed by a swarm of agencies that use real or imaginary infractions as a pretext for vindictive attacks. In the end, despite their more generous treatment, they are as subject to the power of a lawless state as the rest of us.

But one further point: if capital expected the far right to be defeated at the next election or at least very soon, it would be in a position to balance short term calculations against long term interests, which still, I believe, include a robust commitment to the institutions of knowledge, if not always broad access to or benefit from them. That would be the case if the Democrats presented a credible alternative. But the leadership of the Democratic Party has thus far hewn closely to its stable of fearful donors, limiting its ability to pull together a majority coalition, and translating ballots into political outcomes will require a further battle. Responding to Trump on the expectation of normal political alternation could be a big mistake. Finally, the prospect of collective action outside the usual political channels, a general strike, mass civil disobedience or even a coordinated response by non-coopted businesses, appears remote. Under these circumstances, it may make sense to submit to policy directives you know to be destructive of your business’ and society’s future.

Again, all of this is highly speculative. But far-fetched speculations, if that’s what they are, yield only to more plausible ones. If they exist, what are they? Why the assault on knowledge?

*By norms of honesty I don’t mean that those who adhere to it are generally honest, but that they take measures to conceal their lies and are embarrassed when caught out. In the current environment, a large cross-section of the population, ranging from political leaders to social media celebrities to, increasingly, ordinary people, lie casually and display little outrage when they find that others lie to them.