When Michael Gove said that the public “have had enough of experts” it was seized upon by anti-Brexiteers as proof that the leave campaign was an exercise in know-nothing populism. It was also a convenient way of linking Brexit to the Trump phenomenon in the US. On both sides of the pond, the idea is that we’re abandoning sweet reason for the politics of fake news and emotional manipulation.
Ironically, it was those attacking Gove who were embracing ignorance and/or mendacity, because they were quoting him out of context. What he actually said was that was “the people in the country have had enough of experts… from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong”.
I should say that’s a slightly edited version because as soon Gove as uttered the word “experts”, his interviewer indignantly interrupted him – as if any criticism of experts were an unthinkable outrage. (Here’s the clip so you can judge for yourself).
There are, of course, many examples of experts getting things catastrophically wrong. For instance, the planners and architects who made such a mess of our cities; the nutritional advisors who identified fat and not sugar as the big threat to public health; the educationalists who decided that phonics was an outdated way of learning to read; the advocates of various military interventions in the Middle East; the economists and bankers who didn’t see the global financial crash coming (or the Eurozone crisis).
But am I being over-selective, here? All human beings, no matter how knowledgeable, make some mistakes. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that expertise itself is the problem – or even any excess of deference to experts on the part of politicians and the media.
Except that there is evidence that in some circumstances, the accumulation of knowledge is at the heart of the matter. Last year, I wrote about the research showing that the most scientifically literate individuals had the most entrenched and inflexible positions on science-based issues such as climate change – and were least open to evidence contradicting their beliefs. In March, I featured a study showing that the most politically polarised Americans tended to be the most educated.
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