A dull post title, no? So let’s take it immediately into the realm of the concrete. Steve Benen @ Maddowblog provides the information on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) view of the operations of government:
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) delivered a speech last week at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s anniversary gala, and the Wisconsin Republican highlighted an interesting excerpt from the remarks on social media over the weekend:
“That is the key difference between ourselves and the progressives: We do not believe we should be governed by elites. We do not believe that there are experts or elites who should steer us in their preferred direction. We see that sense of organization as condescending, paternalistic, and downright arrogant. We know it’s wrong. […]
“Because we believe that all of us are equal, we believe there is no problem that all of us – working together – cannot solve. We believe every person has a piece of this puzzle, and only when we work together do we get the whole picture.”
The speech as delivered was slightly different from the speech as written, and some of the changes are notable.
Regardless, I found the speech interesting because it sheds light on Ryan’s broader worldview and what he sees as the major points of contention in these divisive political times. What was challenging, however, was understanding the meaning of some of the Speaker’s labels.
For example, what exactly is an “elite” and who believes we should be governed by them? Ryan didn’t specify, though he did note that he supports the idea of crafting a health care reform plan that’s guided by consumers guided by the free market, rather than relying on guidance from health policy experts at HHS.
In other words, Paul Ryan seems to have a problem with expertise. Indeed, he explicitly rejected the idea of “experts” helping guide policy debates.
This plays into the questions of truth, predictability, democracy, free markets, and science. How? Here’s a stimulating question:
Is science a democracy?
In one superfluous, even deceitful, sense, it is. The accepted results of science are accepted because the qualified practitioners in the field have come to a substantial agreement that a given result is a reflection of the reality in question.
But in a very fundamental sense, it is not. Regardless of what a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears Ph.D.s have to say, the reality they are studying, poorly or not, remains the same1. It takes just one insightful scientist to upset the status quo, and those so tumbled often tumble most willingly.
Here in the West we tend to make democracy a sanctified word and institution, and yet we don’t really apply it to science. What does this say about science, government, and perhaps even other institutions? To come to some sort of sensible answer, let’s employ a complete-knowledge metric, which means how complete is our knowledge in a given arena, with an additional facet of how important is it to society? Using this as a lens, let’s evaluate a few arenas and which mass-decision we employ for questions in that realm.
Criminal Justice. Defined as the application of criminal laws to the actions of individuals, we employ the police, a governmental entity, to apprehend suspects and collect evidence, prosecutors and defense attorneys to represent the two sides, and a jury to evaluate the case. In this last place comes something like democracy within criminal justice, but it is a very limited form of democracy: a small number of citizens are to direct their undivided attention upon the case at hand. They have a limited role (which varies from State to State) and are generally limited to determining whether the evidence is credible and meets some sort of standard for convicting the suspect of a crime. In terms of knowledge, we theoretically attempt to collect all the knowledge concerning an alleged crime, connect it to one or more suspects, and penalize those violating the laws. The results of not doing so could be drastic: a civil society disrupted by injustice in which doing anything constructive is endangered by those who do not believe the strictures of justice apply to them.
Readily available commodities. Shampoo, for instance. Defined as a substance used to cleanse hair, there is a basic formula and some outré approaches to producing shampoo, but it’s not a critical substance, nor is there an iconic formulation worthy of documentation. It’s supplied by a free market which works to increase profits by refining production and formulations; there is little danger in doing so since bad shampoo, unless poisonous, merely results in bad hair. In this regard, the free market bears a great resemblance to democracy as free choice is involved.
Emergency Action Teams. By which we mean organizations for controlling & extinguishing fires, rescue squads, and the like. These are managed by the government, if not actually supplied by the government. In terms of knowledge, we know the what and how of such things to some extent. More importantly, the proper handling of emergency situations is paramount to society. Since the free market is not known for its spread of knowledge (among other reasons), its employment in this field is limited; the government retains and distributes specific knowledge about the management and resolution of emergency situations, from house fires to hurricane relief.
Military Defense. In the realm of defense, the military is a directly controlled branch of the government. In terms of knowledge, again we run up against free market limitations, so management is part of the governmental portfolio, for otherwise the nation is up at undue risk. Of course, we must acknowledge that if Defense was largely a free market activity, the ambition of men might result in the upset of the country.
Government. Here we have democracy, as frustrating and dysfunctional as it is. Why? There are many factors, including the fact that a lack of representation leads to societal instability. But in terms of knowledge, despite millenia of study and example, government is hard. Our knowledge of how to run the affairs of any particular nation, especially this one which espouses so many ideals which run counter to our evolutionary history, is relatively scant when we consider that a proper decision is rarely made on the first cut at a new problem. So therefore we employ democracy, as, ideally, it gives those who vote some sense of a stake (in order to tolerate the failures of those they elect), and to bring many possible solutions to problems. We tolerate to perhaps too great a degree the follies of the amateurs who often occupy positions of power; we worry about those who might use those powers against us, unjustly or not; we even innovate governmental design to balance the powers among many men so that corruption may be detected and abolished. But democracy we use, because we just don’t know much.
Medicine. In the study and application of healing we see one of the most confused fields; it is instructive for its management errors, not for its achievements. An application of concrete methods and results from science to the health of the human (or animal) body, we might expect to see its management similarly managed. Instead, under the rubric of free speech, we have marketing of a wide variety of treatments to an audience nearly completely incapable of proper evaluation, and this has had concrete negative results, as antibiotic resistance climbs due to the demands of a clientele for treatments that are inappropriate – and doctors who tire of saying “No”, or who see it as a way to increase income. Medicines are developed by the free market, which means those diseases which are seen to bring the most profit if treated, rather than those which most rationally require medicines – new or old. Worse yet, conspiracy theories arise that companies develop treatments, not cures, as being more profitable; such conspiracies lead to resentments and lack of trust for such important health remedies as vaccines. Thus, mismanagement of the field leads to the confoundment of its goals.
Rep. Ryan’s statement “… Because we believe that all of us are equal, we believe there is no problem that all of us – working together – cannot solve,” is just so much nonsense. We are not equal in knowledge; even at a gross level, there’s inequalities between the experts and myself, and you, and you. The statement (which, God help me, sounds Marxist to me – all apologies to Rep. Ryan) is, along with being an affront to common sense, a contradiction to the above analytical suggestions – when we know something, and that knowledge suggests we should take action to protect our interests, then we bloody well should do so.
In practical terms, there will always be the experts and the rest of us. It’s not an ideal situation, as some experts really aren’t, some experts are experts at nothing in particular, even though they think their specialty matters, or even exists (consider various alternative medical therapies, such as therapeutic touch); some are simple frauds. Their collective frequency is so high that there’s no need to give references, we all know of them. The key is to design a system in which experts may be tested and removed from their positions when they are proven irremediably wrong. This is one of the goals of science: to self-correct to a more accurate view of reality through the testing of the predictions of experts.
But Rep. Ryan’s statement generates a more difficult problem. As his collective attacks some problem, it’s going to generate expertise as an inevitable by-product of the work. And he’s just denied the importance of expertise. Soon he’ll be awash in what he considers to be the irrelevant. What will he do? Discard the experts and continue on with the amateurs? The road he’s walking no longer has asphalt, but pebbles; if he continues, it’ll be dust, dirt, mud, quick-sand, and then a cliff – in that order.
Rep. Ryan’s statements are really that of a profoundly intellectually lazy person. He’s saying, “I’m not an expert, and I loathe the conclusions of the experts, so I can’t risk becoming one. Thus, I’ll discredit them as a group, and continue on with my supporters to our desired conclusion.” This is the message of many a failed revolutionary group.
1Even at the quantum level. Schrödinger’s cat’s quantum superposition is the reality being studied; its variability with regard to the observations of the observer are merely an artifact of that reality. Or at least that’s the best I can make of it.
