The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

The focus of this book has been on politics, because I am personally concerned about the future of democracy, but also because I was an analyst of political events for most of my life. That was my own special domain. But I could just as well have made the precarious future of scientific institutions or the universities the overarching theme of my book. The battleground is everywhere. The assault on authority has expanded to virtually every point in the social landscape where an established hierarchy confronts a public in command of the new platforms of communication.

My intent in this chapter was to illustrate some aspects of this broader conflict, and to reflect on the consequences. A few domains of authority—science, the financial establishment, business—have been made to stand for the rest. Many other institutions could have been slotted for the same role in a similar tragicomedy of loss and confusion. Government was secondary here, but never wholly absent from the picture. It has funded science to the tune of billions and regulated banking and businesses to uncertain effect. Power and money can never be wholly dispensed with: a source of satisfaction to conspiracy theorists.

The truly interesting question, on the other hand, is how to explain the crisis of authority and the erratic behavior of the institutions, if there were no conspiracies to account for them.

IF SCIENCE IS THE MODERN DEITY, THEN THE PUBLIC IS ON THE VERGE OF DEICIDE

The epochal moment for the prestige of modern science among the public came on November 6, 1919, when the Royal Society, meeting in Piccadilly, London, announced the findings of Arthur Eddington’s expedition to the island of Principe and the city of Sobral in northern Brazil. At stake was the very shape of the universe.

Eddington, head of the Cambridge Observatory, had measured the gravitational curvature of light during the solar eclipse of May 29. The Newtonian universe, with its notions of absolute space, predicted a curvature of 0.87 arc-seconds. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, however, had done away with absolute space. It posited a self-folding universe, finite yet limitless, and predicted a gravitational curvature roughly double that of the old model. “Stars ought to appear to be displaced outwards from the sun by 1.7 seconds of arc,”

Einstein had written in 1916. ¹

The illustrious scientists gathered in Piccadilly knew they were witnesses to history. Eddington’s measurements placed the curvature of light at slightly over 1.7 arc-seconds. Sir Frank Dyson, Astronomer Royal, underscored the significance of the findings: “There can be little doubt that they confirm Einstein’s prediction.” With those words, the universe assumed a new form.

A media frenzy followed. “REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE,” headlined the Times of London. “NEWTONIAN IDEAS OVERTHROWN.” Einstein’s theory, the paper enthused, will “require a new philosophy of the universe, a philosophy that will sweep away all that has hitherto been accepted.” Not to be outdone, the New York Times called the confirmation of Einstein’s prediction “one of the greatest —perhaps the greatest—of achievements in the history of human thought.” Its headline the following day read: “LIGHTS ALL ASKEW IN THE HEAVENS.”

This reaction could only be understood in a historical context. Since the eighteenth century, when intellectuals like Voltaire felt obliged to dabble in chemical experiments, science had been considered the most rigorous domain of human knowledge. To be scientific meant to speak with great authority. Frederick Winslow Taylor, we have seen, labeled his system “scientific management.” A few decades earlier, Marx had called his political ideals “scientific socialism,” to differentiate them from utopian schemes.

In general, the prestige of the scientist derived from the belief that he journeyed to realms of mystery and brought back material benefits for the human race. But certain conditions particular to the event helped amplify the resonance of Einstein’s achievement.

It was the first major scientific breakthrough in the age of mass media—and it occurred in a field that was impenetrable to all but a handful of brilliant specialists. When told that people believed only three scientists in the world could understand general relativity, Eddington grew quiet. “I’m just wondering who the third might be,” he explained. The public was told by the news media that the structure of the universe had been changed in incomprehensible ways by men of superhuman intellect. Scientists were presented in the guise of Platonic guardians: as a class above and apart.

6.1 Albert Einstein (1920) ²

The episode took place in the immediate, and bitter, aftermath of World War I, yet transcended the petty rivalries of nationalism. A British-sponsored expedition had proven a German theorist right, at the expense of an English genius. The old idea that practitioners of science were disinterested pursuers of truth seemed validated.

This was strongly reinforced by Einstein’s public image. He became the first scientist media star, and he labored with care to fit into a stereotype once applied to the Christian saint and the philosopher of classical times: a person so devoted to truth and wisdom that he left every worldly desire far behind. With his sad eyes, big mustache, and crazy hair, Einstein embodied science for two generations of the public, projecting to the world a rumpled indifference to the normal human passion for wealth, power, and self-interest.

I find it instructive to compare that moment in November 1919 with our own time. Then, scientists spoke with unquestioned authority. The institutions to which they belonged—Britain’s Royal Society, the Prussian Academy of Sciences—served as guarantors for the quality of their work. The news media, in turn, found an eager audience when reporting on this esoteric subject.

The hierarchies of the industrial age stood unchallenged. Nobody doubted Eddington’s findings or demanded to see the raw data. Curiously, if anyone had done so, they would have discovered problems. Science work is messy. Eddington didn’t simply come up with a single measurement of 1.7 arc-seconds for the gravitational curvature of light. There were many measurements, some from Principe, some from Brazil, which needed to be assessed and averaged somehow.

The number announced to the Royal Society was arrived at by more or less arbitrarily throwing out the outlier. Eddington’s findings turned out to be valid, but they were based as much on his faith in Einstein’s calculations as on the data his expedition had gathered.

In the century or so since Einstein’s triumph, the practice of science has been transformed. Vast amounts of money have been poured into science and technology research and development: around \$400 billion in the US alone for

1. ³ The price of affluence has been the centralization and institutionalization of research. An iron triangle of government, the universities, and the corporate world controls the careers of individual scientists. Consequently, the ideal of the lonely and disinterested seeker after truth has been superseded by that of the scientist-bureaucrat. Though the various fields of science differ greatly, scientific success, in general, has been defined less by the quality of the findings than by the ability to bring in “research support”—funding for the institution.

Practitioners have risen to the top of the science establishment by serving, faithfully and with few qualms, their institutional masters. This was true in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia no less than in democratic countries. ⁴ The power of government over research has inevitably introduced political considerations. President Richard Nixon, for example, declared a “war on cancer.” Today research on HIV/AIDS and climate change take political pride of place. The pressure generated by public expectation of specific outcomes has complicated the conduct of honest science.

Much has been claimed for the scientific method, but the only method to which all scientists subscribe is the peer review process. It too has been under strain. Peer review presupposes the existence of independent-minded experts who evaluate manageable data sets. Often, in the age of the Fifth Wave, neither condition applies. Scientists today work in teams, and the subject matter can be so specialized that only a handful of individuals will be able to understand and review the literature. Authors and reviewers can trade places in a chummy circle of mutual admiration and protection. In extreme cases, this constriction of knowledge leads to what one analyst has called “research cartels,” which actively stifle minority or unorthodox views. ⁵

At the same time, as in every other domain, the volume of data which must be reviewed has proliferated beyond the capacity of the establishment to absorb. Complicated computer programs have become necessary to array and model the data, and high-level statistical skills are routinely required to assess the validity of any finding. Many scientists, including reviewers, have not been up to the job. The peer review process, relic of a simpler time, has thus become progressively less able to guarantee the integrity and legitimacy of research in many fields of science. ⁶

Since 1919, in sum, the practice of science migrated from the sectarian Border, where Einstein clearly originated, to a Center dominated by large, bureaucratic institutions. Practicing scientists were absorbed into hierarchies responsive to command from the top. The distance between professional and amateur— Einstein, let us recall, was one of the latter—grew immensely, and the usual barriers were erected to keep out trespassers from the inner temple of authority. The cost of scientific journals, for example, became prohibitive, so that only institutions could afford a subscription. Titles and tenure and awards proliferated. In this regard, the behavior of the scientific establishment paralleled that of government, the news industry, and the other institutions of the industrial age. All claimed monopolies over information to justify an assertion of unquestioned authority.

It might be expected that an unruly public would eventually take on such a pillar of the established order: and that has been the case. Amateurs have swarmed into the precincts of science along many fronts. For the purpose of this chapter, it should be enough for me to touch, however lightly, on two revealing incidents.

The first began with a familiar ritual: the public, in control of the information sphere, maneuvered in a fashion utterly surprising to authority. On November 19, 2009, someone who had hacked thousands of emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, Britain, released them to the public on an obscure Russian server. The names on the emails belonged to the most eminent climatologists involved in global warming research, and included many of the leading contributors to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The release had a pointedly political purpose. A gathering of world leaders to coordinate policy on climate change was scheduled for December in Copenhagen.

From the emails, an unflattering portrait emerged of the hierarchy of climatology, caught en famille. The scientists sounded vain, petty, intolerant, obsessed with media coverage, and abusive to outsiders. They often appeared clueless when it came to their own data sets and computer programs. In this, they faced the same problem as Eddington: the past temperature of the earth wasn’t a single number but an interpretation of very many temperature “proxies” such as tree rings and ice cores. The emails made it clear that the published assertions of the climatologists exceeded their confidence in this data—much of which, in any case, had been lost. And here they confronted a new, more serious problem, one unknown and probably inconceivable to Eddington: a stream of requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for the data sets cited in their papers. ⁷

The alpha bureaucrats, ensconced at the top of the pyramid, were Michael Mann of Penn State University for the US, and Phil Jones, head of the CRU, for Britain. The two men nominated each other to awards and pressured colleagues to sign petitions supporting the IPCC orthodoxy. Questions of loyalty and disloyalty, of sustaining the information monopoly of the group, absorbed their emails. The threat which enraged these institutional gatekeepers was the intruding outsider, the interested amateur, the “skeptics” and “contrarians” who filed all those FOIA requests.

Mann, Jones, and the circle of scientists around them wrapped themselves in the mantle of the peer review process, which the “skeptics” had avoided. They were accredited science professionals, published in legitimate journals. This was their creed, the source of their authority. But since the group largely controlled peer review for their field, and a consuming subject of the emails was how to keep dissenting voices out of the journals and the media, the claim rested on a circular logic. The supposedly anonymous review process, it was apparent, had become something of a cozy club in climatology. Here is Jones writing to Mann:

You may think Keith or I have reviewed some of your papers but we haven’t. I’ve reviewed Ray’s and Malcolm’s—constructively, I hope, where I thought something could have been done better. I also know you’ve reviewed my paper with Gabi Hegerl very constructively. ⁸

When dissident authors at last managed to publish a peer-reviewed paper in Climate Research, Mann’s reaction was to attack and delegitimize the publication.

So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. ⁹

Disgusted by the “crap science” in Climate Research, Tom Wigley, a senior figure at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, proposed going “direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is being perceived as a medium for disseminating disinformation under the guise of refereed work.” ¹⁰ Wigley had in mind a sort of exorcism of the journal, including a purge of the editor who had allowed the offending paper.

Mike’s approach to get the editorial board members to resign will probably not work—must get rid of von Storch too . . . I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too. ¹¹

Mann seemed particularly horrified by the fact that one of the authors of the contrarian paper had been a credentialed astrophysicist from Harvard.

This latest assault uses a compromised peer-review process as a vehicle for launching a scientific disinformation campaign (often vicious and personal) under the guise of apparently legitimately reviewed science, allowing them to make use of the “Harvard” moniker in the process. ¹²

The emails showed the world’s leading climatologists busily working to organize a research cartel. Peer review was a legitimate source of authority when the process supported their positions. It was compromised, if not malicious, when it offered critics of the orthodoxy a platform. The wish to crush dissenting views, in their minds, had become indistinguishable from the pursuit of truth. In this attempt they ultimately failed, but not, the emails revealed, for lack of trying.

Behind much of the bureaucratic hand-wringing loomed the shadowy figure of Steve McIntyre. We have heard his story before: the amateur who has crashed into the inner sanctum of authority. McIntyre, a Canadian with a talent for mathematics, had developed an interest in climate science around 2002. His blog, Climate Audit, became the central point of reference for a noisy vital community of climate data doubters. Almost all the FOIA requests for data bemoaned in the emails came from McIntyre and his supporters.

McIntyre stood in the same relation to climate science that Wael Ghonim did to the Mubarak regime. He was a man from nowhere, empowered by disruptive new technologies to conduct himself in ways that the bureaucrats from the Center found appalling.

“I must admit to having little regard for the web,” wrote Jones in one of the earlier emails. “. . . I would ignore the so-called skeptics until they get to the peer-review arena.” ¹³ “I know the world changes and the way we do things changes,” Jones reflected much later, with evident regret, “but these requests and the sorts of simple mistakes [sic], should not have an influence in the way things have been adequately dealt with for over a century.” ¹⁴ His was the voice of the great industrial institutions, watching their world dissolve into chaos.

Although the climatologists, in their internal emails, occasionally acknowledged that McIntyre’s calculations were correct, externally they felt compelled to denigrate and condemn him at every step, without compromise. “Personally, I don’t see why you should make any concessions for this moron,” Mann admonished a British colleague. ¹⁵ In an email to Jones, Mann took an ever harder line: “I would not give them anything. I would not respond or even acknowledge receipt of their emails. There is no reason to give them any data, in my opinion, and I think we do so at our own peril!” ¹⁶

Ben Santer, of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, best expressed the shared conviction that McIntyre represented the barbarian inside the gates:

I believe our community should no longer tolerate the behavior of Mr. McIntyre and his cronies. [ . . . ] In my opinion, Steve McIntyre is the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science. I am unwilling to submit to his McCarthy-style investigation of my scientific research . . . I will continue to refuse such data requests in the future. Nor will I provide McIntyre with computer programs, email correspondence, etc. I feel very strongly about these issues. We should not be coerced by the scientific equivalent of a playground bully. ¹⁷

The object of such fear and loathing, we should remind ourselves, wasn’t a US senator like Joseph McCarthy, or any kind of political force. McIntyre was an obscure blogger, with no other power than that of persuasion. It was the act of being questioned by a trespasser—a novelty since Einstein’s day—that the scientists found intolerable. In their communications, too, the leading practitioners of climatology came across as nothing like Einstein. They sounded self-interested and close-minded, the exact opposite of the public’s idea of what a scientist should be—and, after the release of the emails, they were exposed in this unflattering aspect for the world to see.

Coverage of the CRU emails played out in an erratic manner typical of the global information sphere. Mass media, uncertain what to make of the story, at first shied away from it, but the content of the emails exploded across the blogosphere, beginning with the vital community around Climate Audit. On November 20, The Telegraph published a tendentious column titled “Climategate: The final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Climate Change?’” ¹⁸ With that, the incident received its permanent, if unimaginative, name. The news media now rushed in, with the slant of coverage wholly dependent on the source’s editorial line on man-made climate change. CRU scientists, just as unimaginatively, insisted they had been taken out of context, and that the episode unmasked a campaign of “character assassination” conducted by “skeptics.” ¹⁹

The consequences were uncertain. Erosion of trust in climate science possibly played a part in the failure of the Copenhagen summit, but this would be difficult to prove—and, in any case, falls outside the scope of this chapter. Several of the climatologists involved in the emails, including Mann and Jones, were investigated by the institutions for which they worked. Though their careers as bureaucratic lords of science were over, all were exonerated. Given that it was the Center investigating the Center, this judgment was predictable. Of much greater interest was how the public judged the matter.

I believe the public judged science more severely than the scientific institutions judged themselves. I grant that this, too, is hard to prove: there are no measurements of public trust in science before and after Climategate that I am aware of. There is no data going back to 1919. Existing surveys show a significant decline in trust, ²⁰ yet I suspect they understate the case: many people, when asked about science, still think of Einstein rather than the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. They fondly recall the solitary seeker after truth and fail to see the master bureaucrat. Only when focused on specific issues does the public admit, even to itself, the full measure of its distrust.

People on the left believe that science is a tool of Big Business, that scientists are willing to poison us with genetically modified food and torture laboratory animals to earn a bigger profit for their paymasters. This may be an exaggeration, but, as a general proposition, it’s accurate enough. Corporations undeniably pay for and control a substantial percentage of all scientific research.